Nice article in the Times’ New York today about Ocean Parkway. I’m not sure I knew that Olmstead and Vaux designed that, too. Wow. Those guys were awesome.

I love that stretch of Brooklyn from Kensington to Brighton Beach. I go that way often on my way to Coney Island. Here’s an excerpt.

Elegant and sketchy, welcoming and insular, the striated band of
roadway, trees and people called Ocean Parkway both reflects Brooklyn
and divides it with a thick green line. It was designed about a century
and a half ago as a place to promenade, to socialize, to pleasure-drive
or to settle, on a street that looks like a park. The architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were inspired by the grand tree-lined boulevards of Europe, like Avenue Foch in Paris and Unter den Linden in Berlin.

In
an 1867 report to the Brooklyn Parks Commission, the architects talked
about the kind of person who might live on the parkway, a country boy
of “superior caliber” drawn to the city by an “irresistible magnetic
force.” But the metropolis and success would not be enough for such a
man. “Day by day,” they wrote, “his life needs a suggestion of the old
country flavor to make it palatable as well as profitable.”