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Start: Grand Army Plaza, at the north entrance to Prospect Park

Length: 5.6-mile loop

Approximate riding time: 1.5 hours

Best bike: Hybrid, road, or mountain bike

Terrain and trail surface: The trail is paved throughout. It goes slightly downhill as you head south toward the lake along the park’s western edge. There’s a short uphill climb as you return toward Grand Army Plaza along the park’s eastern edge.

Traffic and hazards: This route is entirely car-free during most hours. Check the park’s website for up-to-date information on car-free hours (www.prospectpark.org). Cyclists must ride counterclockwise around the park, but stay alert for the occasional biker going in the wrong direction. The inner (or left-hand) edge of the drive is reserved for runners and rollerbladers. Slow cyclists hug the right edge of this runners’ route. Fast cyclists use the outer (right-hand) side of the road. Don’t swerve back and forth across the drive without looking behind you for oncoming traffic.

Things to see: Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, Bandshell, Concert Grove, Drummer’s Grove, Audubon Center, Prospect Lake, Long Meadow, The Ravine, Prospect Park Zoo, Prospect Park Carousel, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

Maps: New York City Bike Map, Prospect Park Map available for download at www.prospectpark.org/visit/plan/map

Getting there: By public transportation: Take the 2 or 3 subway to the Grand Army Plaza subway station. Cross to the south end of Grand Army Plaza, where you can enter Prospect Park via its main entrance. By car: From Manhattan take the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn and proceed along Flatbush Avenue at the end of the bridge. Stay on Flatbush Avenue until you reach Grand Army Plaza. Cross Grand Army Plaza to exit to the right onto Prospect Park West. Try to park along the park’s edge along Prospect Park West. GPS coordinates: N40 40.337’ / W73 58.187’

THE RIDE

Grand Army Plaza, your starting point for this journey, was designed by the leading nineteenth-century landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. They intended the plaza to serve as buffer between the bustling streets of Brooklyn and the serenity of Prospect Park. At the plaza’s center stands the grand Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, erected around 1890 to memorialize fallen Civil War Union soldiers. Olmsted and Vaux also designed Prospect Park itself. They conceived of it in 1866, just one decade after they’d implemented plans for Central Park.

Enter Prospect Park from the southern end of Grand Army Plaza to go counterclockwise around the park on West Drive. If you’re going at a leisurely pace, take the innermost cyclists’ lane as you circumnavigate the park. If going at a quicker tempo, take the outermost lane. Stretching southward on your left is the 90-acre Long Meadow. Calvert and Vaux designed this rolling meadow with soft edges and trees scattered along the borders to resemble a natural environment as closely as possible. On fair-weather weekends, Brooklynites flock to the meadow from near and far for picnics, soccer, cricket, kite flying, and more.

After passing the 3rd Street entrance, the park’s picnic house, with picnic tables and barbecue stations, is accessible on your left. Just beyond, on your right, sits the Bandshell, a popular site for concerts and performances during the summer. Follow West Drive as it bends left, hugging the edge of the Long Meadow ball fields. From here, the drive heads downhill toward the park’s 60-acre lake, the outlet of an intricate network of waterfalls, pools, and streams that makes its way through the park.

At the southern edge of the lake, West Drive becomes East Drive and begins to head north again along the park’s eastern edge. Leaving the lakeshore behind you, you’ll come upon the Drummer’s Grove on your right. The circular grove surrounded by wood benches has attracted drummers from across the borough for impromptu drum sessions on Sunday afternoons for more than three decades. On summer Sundays, innumerable food and craft sellers set up along the road, too, further enticing passersby to stop, listen, and watch.

Continuing onward, you’ll pass the Concert Grove with its Ornate Oriental Pavilion on your left. It was built in the late nineteenth century to host open-air concerts. When you spot the Audubon Center on your left up ahead, veer right, off East Drive, toward the Prospect Park Zoo, the Carousel, and the park exit from where you can access the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. To reach the Botanic Gardens from the park’s exit, dismount your bike and walk it about 100 feet along the sidewalk to your right. Then cross the road (Flatbush Avenue) at the pedestrian crosswalk and lock up your bike at the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens on the other side. Explore the gardens at your leisure and then return to the park. Alternately, stop off at the Zoo or the Carousel on your left before you reach the park’s exit. Then return to East Drive when you’re ready.

A brief spurt northward on East Drive next to the Audubon Center soon brings you to a fork in the road. You’ll here veer left off East Drive to take the park’s Center Drive westward. The rugged ravine that rises high on your right formed the heart of Olmsted and Vaux’s grand park design. On your left, the Nethermead, a rolling meadowland, is surrounded by woodland, hills, and water on all sides, giving it a tucked away feel and usually making it less crowded than the Long Meadow farther north. After passing Lookout Hill on your left, veer left to reconnect with West Drive for a short jaunt before making a sharp left-hand turn just as you reach the lake again. This will put you on Wellhouse Drive, which cuts back northeastward through the park, with the lake on your right. Cross one of the park’s innumerable waterways—the Lullwater of Prospect Lake—on the quaint Terrace Bridge before emerging on East Drive once more. Up ahead you can access the Audubon Center and Boathouse via a narrow footpath on your left. Biking is prohibited on the path, so walk your bike. The center contains an environmental education center with child-friendly exhibits, a cafe, and charming views of Lullwater Bridge.

To continue, return to East Drive, which climbs uphill toward Grand Army Plaza. As you reach the top of the hill, you’ll emerge next to a clearing on your right, Nellie’s Lawn. Legend has it that the clearing is named for a young girl who would read books under an elm here for hours in the nineteenth century. When she died at a young age, her friends memorialized her by hanging a sign with her name on a tree. Relax on Nellie’s Lawn or the Long Meadow on your left and then return to Grand Army Plaza.

MILES AND DIRECTIONS

0.0Enter Prospect Park along the main drive to veer right and head south along West Drive.

1.0Follow West Drive as it veers left, hugging the ball fields.

1.9Follow the drive as it rounds the southern tip of Prospect Lake and becomes East Drive and heads northward.

2.7 To visit the Prospect Park Zoo, the Carousel, or the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, veer right.

2.9Dismount your bike to enter the Zoo and Carousel area on your left. To reach the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, continue a few dozen feet onward to the park exit. Dismount and walk your bike along the sidewalk to your right and then cross Flatbush Avenue to get to the entrance of the botanical garden. To continue, retrace your route to East Drive.

3.0Turn right onto East Drive.

3.1Turn left onto Center Drive, heading west and then southwest through the park.

3.7Veer left to re-access West Drive, heading south.

4.0Make a sharp left onto Wellhouse Drive to head northeastward with the lake on your right.

4.6Continue onto East Drive, going north.

4.7The footpath to the Audubon Center and boathouse is on your left. Dismount and walk your bike down the path if you wish to explore. Then return to East Drive, continuing north.

5.6Arrive at your starting point at Grand Army Plaza.

RIDE INFORMATION

Local Event/Attraction

Prospect Park: Brooklyn’s preeminent park space—almost 600 acres of rolling meadows, dense woodlands, steep ravines, historic buildings, waterways, and more, designed by the famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. www.prospectpark.org

Restrooms

Mile 0.5: There are restrooms and water fountains at the picnic house.

Mile 2.6: There are restrooms in the park building on your right.

Mile 4.7: There are restrooms at the Audubon Center.

In the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the nation was becoming increasingly urbanized, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux helped pioneer a national movement advocating public parks. The two men were at the helm of the nation’s first landscape architecture firm and were intricately involved in the creation of innumerable public parks throughout New York City. Some of the park spaces they laid out include Brooklyn’s Ocean and Eastern Parkways, Fort Greene Park, and Prospect Park. In Manhattan, they envisioned Central Park and Riverside Park, and in Queens, they had a hand in Forest Park. Although today the two men are often spoken of in a single breath—and usually in connection with their best-known creation, Central Park—their paths to fame were strikingly distinct.

Olmsted (1822–1903) was the son of a prosperous Connecticut family. He spent much of his youth on a farm and received little formal schooling. As a young man, he worked a series of odd jobs—farmer, news reporter, and clerk, among others—and became appointed superintendent of a planned park at the center of New York City in the 1850s through private connections. Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), by contrast, grew up in London, undertook a formal apprenticeship with a British architectural firm as a young man, and moved to New York in 1850 explicitly to work with some of the early advocates for public parks in New York City. The two men’s paths crossed around 1857, when the board of New York City park commissioners launched a competition to design a central park. Vaux’s former collaborator, Andrew Jackson Downing, had recently died, so Vaux and Olmsted joined as a team and designed their winning Central Park plan.

Soon thereafter a movement for a similarly expansive public park began in Brooklyn. Olmsted and Vaux submitted their winning proposal for Brooklyn’s major park in 1866. One of their aims, greatly influenced by Olmsted’s childhood on a farm, was to provide the borough’s poor with a tranquil, rural escape in the middle of the city. Additionally, they designed the park’s features—from the Long Meadow, to the Ravine, to the woodlands, to the water system—to mirror natural environments as closely as possible. Prospect Park was to become a more “natural” park than Central Park.