Stay Connected:prospectpark.org/reimagine

Fun Facts About The Rose Garden

*Thank you to our friends at Turnstile Tours for providing us with fun historical facts about the Rose Garden. Check out their tours of New York City’s many diverse places at turnstiletours.com!

Prospect Park welcomes its first visitor.Chief Landscape Architects, Frederick Law Olmsted & Calvert Vaux wanted the Park to be a place where people of all backgrounds - rich and poor could come together.

The Rose Garden was originally designed as a children’s playground, with seesaws, a croquet lawn and maze. It was also home to the park’s first carousel, powered by a horse driven mechanism.

Unfortunately, the Garden’s location near Flatbush Avenue made it very hot and dusty, and it was never a popular destination, referred to as “the place where children never went to play.”

1867 1890’s-1920’s 1960’s-2000’s

The City Beautiful Movement takes over the Rose Garden! In the 19th century there was a fascination with importing exotic plants from other countries.

The Parks Department transformed the northeast corner of the park into a tropical garden, using the ponds to cultivate tropical species. The notable Victorian Lily (pictured above) was large enough to fit a small child. The garden also featured lights, to allow people to view plants that blossomed at night, making it look like a magical oasis. Despite the Rose Garden’s popularity, Olmsted and Vaux opposed this lavish redesign.

A continuous cycle of rehabilitation & decline: Due to its secluded location, and difficult to maintain exotic plants, the pools ran dry and were plagued with weeds.

In 1969, Mayor John V. Lindsay reopened the Rose Garden after installing fountains in the central pools. They were inaugurated for a meeting, but were promptly turned off when underground pipes began to leak and flooded the entire area.

This redesign needed constant care which the park administration couldn’t afford at the time. The fountains have remained dry ever since.

Prospect Park is located on the Atlantic Flyway (a bird migration route that generally follows the Atlantic Coast of North America and the Appalachian Mountains) and the Rose Garden and Vale of Cashmere serves as a key rest stop for many species of migrant birds and insects.

Over 200 species of birds can be found seasonally in this birder’s paradise.

Certain key features make the Rose Garden and Vale of Cashmere one of the best birding spots in Prospect Park:

Migration

Ecology

History

Species Why here?

Currently, there are no roses or water in the Rose Garden, but the skeleton of its previous uses remains in place. Although the Rose Garden doesn’t have a single defined use, its quiet features and tree cover make it one of few meditative spaces in the park.

In 2017, the Prospect Park Alliance decided to rehabilitate the area and make the community the driver of the redesign!

Today

• Topography with plenty of hilly slopes

• Dense ornamental shrubbery

• Vegetation that includes native species

• Water at the adjacent Vale of Cashmere

In the 1890’s there were three lily ponds in the Rose Garden. The middle one was uniquely equipped to cultivate the Victoria Regia Lily, a native plan t from the Amazon Rainforest. It required a hot climate to survive. To care for it, the park piped hot water heated by a steam boiler into the base of the pond where the Lily was displayed. This doubled the length of the blooming period for public viewing.

At the time, these lilies were only cultivated for public display in the Rose Garden, and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

Did you know...The Rose Garden was so romantic, that in 1923, the first wedding to ever take place in a park occurred in the Rose Garden!

At the time, marrying in the park was unheard of and so taboo, that the couple received permission to marry only if the minister’s name remained anonymous, and it occurred early in the morning before people entered the park.

Did you know...