Classic Cases

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Olmsted’s Brooklyn Comes to Life

In spring, especially, the boundary between Prospect Park and the gloomy, earth-colored blocks of Park Slope is fluid. It is one of the most perfect intersections of 19th-century Romantic landscape architecture and late Victorian common-law urbanism. Viewed on a map, a monotony of gridded blocks makes the boundary between urbs and gardens look like a hard line, defined by the long razor of Prospect Park West. But a few images from a recent visit prove that it is, in fact, a more subtle transition.

Situated within the park, near Prospect Park West, the Litchfield Mansion (1855) predates both the park and the subdivision of urban building lots for Park Slope. A placard teaches that it was once the private home of a Brooklyn industrial magnate. Today it serves as administrative offices for the Parks Department.

The trees of Prospect Park were in full bloom when I visited. The Long Meadow, beyond the mansion, was busy with people, some playing games, others having picnics, a few reading beneath trees.

At the edge of the park, one can see that its influence does not merely end at its surveyed boundary. Instead, the density of trees and plant life, and the colors of nature, extend across Prospect Park West and echo through the cool, shady blocks of the old Victorian neighborhood.

Here is the park block of First Street, afternoon light filtering through the leaves:

And some wavering cornices on the same block:

In early spring, the old trees had already formed canopies more reminiscent of Oglethorpe’s Savannah or of New Orleans’ Garden District than of New York City:

Here are some facades on Third Street, between Eighth and Seventh Avenues:

Massive, hundred-year-old sycamores make parts of the Central Slope feel like a quiet, settled place in the woods — rather than a major city. The cool, enchanting gloom is hard to capture inside the four corners of a picture.

In some blocks, these ancient trees not only line the curbstones — but a second row also occupies a position closer to the building line:

Park Slope is a richly tactile place, with block curbstones, wrought iron gates, gnarly tree trunks, and (in some places) traditional slate sidewalks.

The topography — including the namesake slope — can be seen in the terraced rooflines of the area’s east-west blocks.

In parts of the Central Slope, the street trees are truly massive:

Back in the park at twilight, the buildings of Prospect Park West form a street wall that helps to define the green space.

Four-story buildings front the park on Prospect Park West.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s perspective), zoning and historic preservation have, at the southern end of the park, frozen a relatively low density of development in place.

The continuous street walls that were built early, further north, become shorter as one approaches Bartel Pritchard Square, and as one moves southward along Prospect Park Southwest they begin to show gaps. The lower-rise buildings in these blocks may have merit, but they are not the unbroken cascades of perfect brownstones that served as the basis for the historic district, nor are they the highest and best use of prime park-front building lots. The persistence of gaps in the street wall here, and the sense it projects of incomplete urbanization, illustrates how a traditional urban process was interrupted by 20th-century regulation.

Prospect Park Southwest has not developed a continuous street wall. Image: Google.

Be that as it may, the transition between the western edge of Prospect Park and the Victorian urban fabric of Park Slope — especially in the North and Central Slope — is one of New York’s treasures of the built environment. It bears noting that this gem of urbanism is an artifact of the mix of private, common-law urban growth processes and municipal planning initiatives that drove the growth of American cities in the 19th century — a development context that has now, mostly, regrettably, been forgotten.

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The Story Behind Erie RR Co. v. Tompkins

This 2019 law review article by Brian L. Frye, “The Ballad of Harry James Tompkins,” is more than an excellent piece of legal history scholarship. It is also a riveting tale of ambitious lawyers, the dangers of freight trains, hoboes during the Great Depression, life in Pennsylvania’s coal country, and a how a host of terrible American class attitudes crossed paths in the aftermath of one poor man’s grievous injuries.

To be honest, I couldn’t stop reading. A taste:

At about 2:30 a.m. on Friday, July 27, 1934, William Colwell of Hughestown, Pennsylvania was awakened by two young men banging on his front door. When he went downstairs, they told him that someone had been run over by a train. Colwell looked out his side window. In the moonlight, he saw someone lying on the ground near the railroad tracks. He went back upstairs and told his wife that there had been an accident. She told him “not to go out, that them fellows was crazy,” but he dressed and went out to help anyway.

Colwell’s house was at the stub-end of Hughes Street, where it ran into the railroad tracks. When he reached the tracks, he discovered his neighbor Harry James Tompkins, about 6 or 10 feet south of Hughes Street. Tompkins had a deep gash on his right temple, and his severed right arm was in between the tracks. Colwell told the young men to go to Mrs. Rentford’s house down the street and call an ambulance. After calling the ambulance, they disappeared.

Here is a direct link to the whole article, “The Ballad of Harry James Tompkins,” at the Akron Law Review.

Elsewhere, Frye gives fascinating accounts of the legal theories, interests, and found-facts that helped shape the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case that resulted, Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938) (“There is no federal general common law.”), raising the strong possibility that there was a bit more to the story than what made it into Justice Brandeis’s written opinion.

My own small contribution to preserving the history of the Erie case: I added a marker to Google Maps near the abandoned railroad crossing where Mr. Tompkins was hurt in 1934.

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Grand Central at 100

Leonard Lopate interviewed Sam Roberts, author of Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, for the Terminal‘s 100th anniversary. In addition to the station’s architectural significance, its role as catalyst for the covering over of Park Avenue (between East 45th and 97th Streets) created some of the city’s best residential blocks, and it is no coincidence that the boundary between the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem has long been 97th Street. The placement of the terminal itself also helped turn Midtown into the commercial center of the city, and in the 1970s the property would play a pretty important role in the development of U.S. historic preservation and land use law.

In some ways, the city changes so often it’s like a kaleidoscope. But that smell of oil and brake dust that permeates the tunnels of the lower concourse, along with the sounds of hissing air brakes and countless ventilation fans, is almost timeless.