Highland Park

Sunday afternoon at Highland Park, Brooklyn, N.Y., ca. 1900, V1973.4.1021; Postcard collection, v1973.004; Brooklyn Historical Society.

For whatever random reason, I thought about posting a picture about music this week.  I came across several pavilions dotting Brooklyn’s amusement areas, parks, and waterfronts.  Highland Park’s Music Pavilion was among them, but so was the confusion about in what neighborhood it’s located.  Some of our records indicate it’s located in East New York; others Bushwick; a few Cypress Hills; and a couple more just say Brooklyn as in the one above. Allow me to clarify with the help of the NYC Parks Department who declare, rightly I believe, that Highland Park is located on the border of Brooklyn and Queens and whose borders are Jackie Robinson Parkway, Vermont Avenue, and Highland Boulevard (of course) between Bulwer Place and Cypress Hills Street.  The park is surrounded by cemeteries with Bushwick to the West, Cypress Hills to the South, and Ridgewood to the North.  As you may recall from an earlier post, Ridgewood was once part of Brooklyn and in 1977 jumped ship to join Queens.  This park grew over time, gaining sections one by one, justifying another reason for its dual-borough adoption.

Not only was there music on Sundays, but it was a lively park at the turn of the last century with ice skating, football fields, and opportunities to meander.  It continues to be well traversed today by residents of both Brooklyn and Queens.  It’s also home to the now closed Ridgewood Reservoir that formerly provided water to both boroughs.  So in the name of inter-borough comraderie, this week’s photo of the week celebrates our interconnected geography and love of more obscure places.  If you haven’t been, hop on your bicycle and head over there before it gets too cold.  If you can’t make it, Forgotten New York gives a nice preview here.

On another note, this is from our Postcard collection and representative of one of our photographic postcards as opposed to an illustrative postcards.  There is nothing written on the back of the postcard according to our catalog record so it was probably collected for the image rather than sent to someone through the post.  Several deltiologists have donated their objects of obsession to us as our Postcard collection numbers in the thousands.  Read more about this practice at the Institute of American Deltiology and come visit our archives to see some in person.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here.  To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections visit BHS’s Othmer Library Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m. photos@brooklynhistory.org