Prospect Park, the 585-acre Brooklyn park designed by Central Park creators Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is my sanctuary. It’s one of my favorite places in New York.
“Prospect Park” – In A Bklyn Minute (Week 73) from Luci Westphal on Vimeo.
“Prospect Park” – In A Bklyn Minute (Week 73) from Luci Westphal on Vimeo.
I’ve been living in a multitude of apartments near it and have many fond memories of times spent in the park alone and with friends. Over the last dozen years, as NYC has become safer and more desirable, there have a been many wonderful improvements in the park. A few years ago I started running in the park. It’s become my regular place where I can take a deep breath, stretch my legs and let my thoughts wander.
While the park is a great place to visit year-round and is the place to be on weekends when it gets super crowded and whole families and big parties use it as their backyard (for big BBQs, sledding and ice skating, playing baseball, etc.), my favorite times are the more subdued off-season weekday late mornings – like when I was filming… when it’s the park of only a few runners, dog walkers, cyclists, filmmakers, hustlers, parents and the birds, bees and squirrels. No matter when you go though, you get the sense that these are the lungs of “the borough of neighbors”, a wonderfully diverse place where people from all cultural backgrounds live together.
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| Prospect Park Squirrel |
It’s been a very busy week – so it was a special treat to come to the park on Tuesday to shoot this video.
As so often there was so much more I’d like to show you that I filed but didn’t make the cut (Quaker / Friends Cemetery, Bachelorette film crew, etc.) or that didn’t get filmed this time (women strolercizing, chipmunks, hawks, Muslim women in full hijab playing Frisbee, Orthodox Jewish women jogging in long skirts, etc.).
Unfortunately on Tuesday the weather was weird – it was humid and hazy with the sky greyish but very bright, which led to less ideal shooting conditions and some strange colors and contrasts in the video.