The day before yesterday, August 27, was the 238th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, which raged right through Prospect Park. I've written about it here and here, but for a rich and thought-provoking account that asks a key question—"Why the hell is there almost no sign of such a historic battle right in the middle of Brooklyn?"—go here.
My easy answer is, because we got our butts kicked (although, as historians remind us, thanks to a magnificently executed retreat, the patriots "lived to fight another day." Well, some of them did, who weren't cut to pieces by the British and Hessians.) The piece, by Ben Nadler and Oksana Mironova of Urban Omnibus ("an online publication dedicated to defining and enriching the culture of citymaking") goes deeper, and examines why Prospect Park boasts just three obscure monuments to its blood-soaked Revolutionary past, all clustered in the leafy glade of Battle Pass (better known as "the East Drive sort of behind the Zoo"). The answers pull in a whole bunch of issues around how we memorialize violence and war, how we pay for parks, and what is demanded by human bones beneath our feet. They wrap it up beautifully, thus:
Olmsted and Vaux’s intention for Battle Pass — topographical preservation, without an ornate memorial — contrasts with commemorations of wars fought beyond the borders of Brooklyn, like the Civil War memorial arch in Grand Army Plaza or the WWI memorial at Lakeside. The Battle Pass approach allows for more open-ended interpretations of history than these nationalistic monuments, but the simplicity of Battle Pass dissatisfied future generations, and more visible memorials were added to supplement Olmsted and Vaux’s memorialization by preservation. Their intention, to imbue an active public space with historical memory, is perhaps too understated to confront our collective propensity to forget. Still, Battle Pass can serve as a prompt to consider how to keep sites of historical memory in the public sphere. If we seek to remember through monumentality, yet fear entrusting our monuments to the private or commercial sphere, we must consider what it means to preserve and act as stewards for our collective history.