Vaux & Olmsted: Public Spaces, Private Lives | Episode 79

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PAST PROGRAM | Virtual Programs

Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted are best known for designing landmark landscapes in New York City and across the country, most notably Prospect Park and Central Park. Both men had wildly different lives and careers before their collaboration began, and yet they found incredible chemistry and creative energy together, though later their lives again diverged. This program will look closely at the biographies of both men and how their life experiences and outlooks are reflected in the spaces they created together.

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Earth Day: Ecology of Prospect Park | Episode 38

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PAST PROGRAM | Virtual Programs

Celebrate Earth Day by virtually exploring Brooklyn’s largest forest with us and Prospect Park Alliance forest ecologist Howard Goldstein. We will learn about some of the park’s 30,000 trees, ongoing forest maintenance and restoration projects, and how the the Alliance is adapting to challenges like climate change, invasive species, pests, and extreme weather events.

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Exploring the Naval Cemetery Landscape | Episode 6

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landscape with wood board and grass

PAST PROGRAM | Virtual Programs

Join us for a conversation with the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which has transformed a 1.7-acre former Naval Cemetery into a public green space and an oasis for plants, animals, and humans alike on the eastern edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We will discuss the history of this burial ground, the innovative design of the landscaping, and BGI’s programming and efforts to complete a continuous 26-mile bicycle and pedestrian pathway along Brooklyn’s waterfront.

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Naval Cemetery Landscape Opens to Public at Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Our friends at the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) achieved a great milestone Friday when they officially opened the Naval Cemetery Landscape at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The beautifully designed 1.7-acre green space is publicly accessible along the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a landscaped bicycle and pedestrian path that, when completed, will run 27 miles from Greenpoint to Jamaica Bay. One of 130 green spaces funded by TKF Foundation’s Open Spaces Sacred Places program, the Naval Cemetery Landscape serves as a remembrance of the site’s rich and poignant history as a once-forgotten military cemetery, while creating a new and vibrant ecological sanctuary where we can all take a moment to escape urban clutter and reflect in nature.>> Continue reading

Brooklyn Greenway Initiative’s Naval Cemetery Landscape

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With all the major development projects underway at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (the Green Manufacturing Center, Wegman’s, Building 77, Steiner Studios expansion – the list goes on …), it is easy to forget a very exciting, if comparatively modest, project in a quiet corner of the Yard.

For the last several years, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative has been working to transform a portion of the Yard into a publicly-accessible greenspace. After years of planning, construction is now well underway of the Naval Cemetery Landscape, built on the site of the former Brooklyn Naval Hospital Cemetery. Located at the corner of Williamsburg St West and Kent Ave, this park will be a beautiful pocket of nature and civic history along the planned Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a 14-mile bicycle and pedestrian path which will run from Greenpoint all the way to Bay Ridge.>> Continue reading