The Vale of Cashmere—a secluded, 8-acre section of Prospect Park named after a Thomas Moore poem—has for decades been a haven for bird watchers and a well-known cruising spot for Brooklyn’s LGBTQIA+ community.
Documentary photographer Thomas Roma, in 2015, released an exhibition and accompanying book, In the Vale of Cashmere, which emphasized the remote milieu’s place in queer history.
The New York City Parks Department, NYCEDC, and Prospect Park Alliance broke ground yesterday on a $37.5 million overhaul of the Vale. The restoration project is led by the Prospect Park Alliance’s in-house team of architects and landscape architects.
The initiative focuses on historic areas within the Vale: the Children’s Pool, a former rose garden, and 3-acres of woodland; the latter’s restoration will stitch together a pollinator corridor that runs through Prospect Park.
The Children’s Pool dates back to the 19th century and was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. McKim, Mead and White later added formal elements such as a marble balustrade to the pool.
More changes were made to the Children’s Pool in the 1930s by the WPA. By the 1970s the Vale had become “an important cruising recreational area and social gathering space for the LGBTQ community, particularly the Black queer community,” according to Amanda Davis of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
Over time the Vale fell into a state of disrepair, but was nevertheless charming. Many parkgoers came to enjoy the remote area’s wilting, fin de siècle masonry features peppered throughout the grass, reminiscent of Paris’s Parc Monceau.
Proposals to overhaul the Vale were floated in 2017, when Prospect Park Alliance launched its Reimagine Prospect Park initiative, which simultaneously led to the restoration of the Grand Army Plaza Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in 2025.
Plans for the Vale of Cashmere’s restoration were rolled out in 2021. Preservation activist Theodore Grunewald, the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, and others mounted criticisms of the project, citing concerns related to the erasure of a historic queer space.
“It is imperative that the Prospect Park Alliance conduct immediate outreach with [communities], so a socially significant LGBTQ landscape is preserved and interpreted, rather than erased from history,” Davis told AN in 2023.
Construction was stalled by the pandemic. Moving forward, a nature exploration area in the center of the Vale will be composed of “tree stumps, logs, and boulders configured for walking, jumping, balancing, sitting and playing,” Prospect Park Alliance stated.
Prospect Park Alliance will restore the Children’s Pool’s shoreline and historic architectural elements, replace invasive plant species with native plants, make pathways ADA accessible, and install new bubblers for water circulation and stagnation prevention.
There will also be new bird-friendly features like bird paths, aquatic plantings, and mudflats.
The new pollinator meadow to the Vale’s southeast quadrant will feature wild bergamot, yarrow, coral honeysuckle, and pale purple coneflower—all bird- and insect-friendly species.
The picnic lawn to the Vale’s northeast will have a new, LEED-certified pavilion made of stone and wood finishes and bird-friendly fritted windows. There will be eight all-gender composting restroom stalls inside the pavilion’s ground floor.
The project denotes “the single largest capital allocation in the history of Prospect Park Alliance,” the nonprofit affirmed, and the first renovation of the Vale in five decades.
Prospect Park Alliance noted that trees, many of which are diseased and invasive, will need to be taken down to make way for the restoration. In their place, 918 new trees will be planted.
Construction should conclude in 2027.
