Summer approximately 1933: Plans for the greatest municipal recreation and sports center of the world, the proposed Marine Park of Brooklyn are now on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the Print Gallery.
Designed as a recreational center capable of entertaining 2,000,000 people at one time, the new park will include a long central canal for boating and shell-racing, golf courses, picknicing grounds~ sea-bathing, and a list of games that would seem to completely cover the field. There will also be a huge stadium seating 100,000 people for foot-ball and other spectacular sports. Marine Park will be 1,840 acres in extent, three miles long and will have 454 acres of water within the park.
The plans are the work of Charles D. Lay, famous landscape architect and backed by the interest of a number of prominent Brooklynites was presented last year to the City Board of Estimate. Mr. Lay in his work has endeavored to supply an answer for the many desires of a metropolis in its spare time. He has thought of those desiring the quieter forms of recreation as well as the hardy seekers of strenuous sports. He plans a seaside park with two miles of water frontage, a large circular pond and canal for aquatic sports, a yacht basin, a harbor for outboard motorboats, golf courses, swimming pools, athletic fields, parking spaces, a music grove, a zoo, an open air theatre and a casino.
The Marine Park site is at present a large tract of sand, mud and water between Sheepshead Bay and Rockaway Inlet within sixteen miles of six million people. This territory is largely already owned by the City of New York and set aside for park development. It is a splendid example of the same foresight that secured for the city the creation of Central Park as an oasis for the city-bound.
Besides a large-scale projection map of the plans, the exhibition includes a number of details of special units of buildings indicating the general idea followed, which will be modern in fact and construction, if not too dangerously modernistic in style.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1916 - 1930. 07-09_1933, 059.
