Prospect Park

This guide to Prospect Park in Brooklyn starts on the morning of August 27, 1776, when roughly four hundred Maryland soldiers held a defensive line here against British and Hessian forces during the Battle of Brooklyn. You'll hear George Washington's reported words watching the fight, later carved into the park's Maryland Monument, and how designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux arrived nearly a century later to reshape the old battle ridgeline. It traces their work turning the terrain into the Long Meadow and the wooded ravine that still holds Brooklyn's last old-growth forest.