A Grand Arch [Grand Army Plaza]

Note: Previously published in The L Mag's Brooklyn Edition, 2006

In 1865, two men stood on a hill’s crest in the City of Brooklyn and said: “Here. This is the spot.” The men were architects. Landscape architects, a new term that combined botanical arts with structural design into creating vast natural landscapes in the middle of bustling cities.
They were Calvert Vaux, a British architect and Frederic Law Olmstead, an American journalist & amateur botanist. In 1857, against all odds, they won the contract to design a park in the center of New York City. They had never designed a park before, but Andrew Jackson Downing who originally won the contract died saving his mother-in-law’s life during a ferry accident.
After a challenging thirteen years and over $5 million dollars spent, Central Park was hailed as an urban miracle. Vaux and Olmstead were given free reign to design a park of their own, without pressure or demands from officials and outside parties. A vanity piece.
They chose Brooklyn as their canvas.
The nation had just been torn apart from the strife of the Civil War (which Olmstead reported in his journals as a Northerner reporting from the South.) and here in New York’s prominent sister city, they wanted a grand sweeping entrance to a pristine urban retreat that would commemorate the fallen soldiers.
Check out Grand Army Plaza any day of the week to experience that sweeping entrance with it’s magnificent arch, inspired by the one and only Arc de Triomphe a la Paris. The bronze sculptures known as Spirits of The Army and Navy, and Lady Columbia up top were added in 1896.
The legendary Saturday green-markets arrived nearly forty years later.