The Fate of Prospect Park’s Five Arches

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HOT enough for you? Head for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Not the rich, intoxicating greenery of its 585 acres, but the shady coolness of any of Olmsted & Vaux’s five unique arches designed not as passageways, but as rooms. Taken together they show the sensitive, humanistic possibilities of the city — which its citizens have betrayed.

A tour of Prospect Park’s five arches should begin at Endale Arch, perhaps 200 feet inside the park coming from Grand Army Plaza. Many way signs are missing in the park, so it’s best to first bring up the interactive map at prospectpark.org and check “show map overlay.”

Most people walk without stopping through the cool darkness of the Endale Arch to one of the most magnificent vistas in New York, the half-mile Long Meadow, an undulating green carpet that, on misty days, disappears into time. Central Park has nothing like this.

But once upon a time, it was worth lingering inside the arch. Unlike Central Park, where the arches are brick-lined, in Prospect Park the designers thought to line the Endale Arch with zebralike alternating stripes of black walnut and yellow pine, “to avoid the drip which would occur from the condensation of moisture,” according to the 1870 Annual Report of the Brooklyn Park Commissioners.

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And why would anyone care? Because the arches were conceived as rooms, and had seats, out of the sun, “where weariness may be lounged off,” as The New York Times put it in 1869.

A writer in The Brooklyn Eagle in the same year wasn’t sure about wooden fittings in a park, worrying that they were “a little out of place,” but was happily surprised not to find them “worm-eaten or rotten.”

Now there is little left to rot. The few surviving fragments of wooden casing are covered with paint and pulling away from the brick walls. The seats are long gone, their place taken by a line of dirt and debris. Close inspection will reveal the difference between the wide-grained pine and the close-grained oak — these were furniture-grade works, not raw carpentry.

The striking, doubled Meadowport Arch is just off to the right, but save the triumph and tragedy of its interior for last. Instead, go south. Just short of the boathouse is East Wood Arch, running under the East Drive. Not a scrap of paneling is left there, just bare brick, a sort of mercy killing instead of the mutilated corpse of Endale.

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On the other side of the boathouse is the unusual Cleft Ridge Span. Instead of wood, here the designers used Béton Coignet, a cast stone, and it has worn very well. The Parks Department has been meticulous about keeping after graffiti. Delicate floral panels are framed by plum-colored straps, an offbeat touch.

Take the Lullwater Bridge across the lake to get to the most complicated and expensive of the arches, Nethermead, built for $95,000. Three arches pass over a bridle path, a stream and a footpath, separated by an intricate, twisted iron railing, now with a healthy, even picturesque growth of corrosion.

It appears that Nethermead did not have any interior wood, and its fiery, incandescent red brick, so characteristic of Victorian Gothic, has been cleaned in recent years. However, ¡SAUSE! and other spray-paint Leonardos have made it into their own personal museum, admission free.

A little depressed? Double back north through the rich, moist Ravine to lift your spirits — because you will need a lot of altitude when you get to Meadowport Arch. This is the one with the double opening, like an 18th-century garden folly.

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Do not enter unless you are prepared to weep for our city, for all cities, because here are both the beauty and bestiality of the human condition.

At first glance it appears that the 19th-century paneling of its long, cedar-sheathed tunnel is, by some miracle, almost intact, although damaged. But a stone plaque in the ground makes it clear: This marvelous, inspiring work, a 100-foot-long Grand Central Terminal waiting room of polished cedar, with rounded benches and a cross-vaulted pavilion, was lovingly recreated in 1988, barely a generation ago.

Now, after all that intention, money and effort, Meadowport Arch is a madeleine for New York of the 1960s and 1970s. The graffiti vandals have sprayed their way through the interior, and the city has seen little choice but to paint over four long runs of the casing. Only the topmost ones, out of reach, are intact, almost perfectly so — reminders of the humane sensitivity of the original design. The paint job is slapdash, with drips on the benches, but that only reflects the native tragedy — that we had this beautiful, democratic thing, freely given to all, and yet destroyed it.

The arch’s fragmentary survival recalls Charlton Heston’s encounter with the postapocalyptic remains of the Statue of Liberty on the beach in “Planet of the Apes” — “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you!” There’s no point asking the Department of Parks to fix it if the civil order is such that civic beauty cannot survive the barbarians.

Christopher Gray will conduct a requiem march for Olmsted & Vaux’s arches on Wednesday, June 29, leaving from Endale Arch at 6 p.m., rain or shine.