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called for the annexation of western Westchester; “unity of plan for improvements on both sides of the river is essential,” he said. This was soon arranged. In 1873 voters were asked to authorize the incorporation of the area, including Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania, into New York City. Then-Mayor Havemeyer opposed the plan, which he attributed to “speculators on both sides of the Harlem River.” Where would it all end, he asked: “Once entered on the mainland, where can we stop?” He was voted down, however, as Westchesterites opted overwhelmingly for access to the city’s police, fire, water, sewage, and street-building services, while Manhattanites agreed with one newspaper editor who declared it “the manifest destiny of this great commercial emporium to spread in ever-widening circles over adjacent counties.” And many voiced hopes of moving the “laboring classes” to “neat and comfortable cottages,” accessable via “cheap workmen’s trains.” With the formal acquisition in 1874 of what would long be known as the “Annexed District,” New York entered on the first phase of its imperial expansion.

With the Central Park Commission established as the nation’s first de facto planning agency, the Prospect Park Commission emerged as a close runner-up. In Brooklyn, Andrew Haswell Green’s counterpart was James Samuel Thomas Stranahan. An upstate New Yorker who settled in Brooklyn in 1844, Stranahan had made a fortune as a railroad contractor, become a principal investor in the Atlantic Docks and the Union Ferry, and served as a trustee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Long Island Historical Society.

In 1859 the Eagle had argued that if Brooklyn were “no longer to be a suburb of New York” it needed to develop “extensive and well cultivated Public Parks.” Mayor Powell agreed the following year, noting that “to attract a large population, it is indispensable that something else should be provided than interminable rows of brick houses along long lines of dusty streets, for these alone can never constitute a great city.” Stranahan, public-minded capitalist, took up the challenge. He gathered other prominent citizens into a South Brooklyn Association and argued strongly for a mammoth three-hundred-acre park, one grand enough to entice Manhattan taxpayers to Brooklyn. The group proposed to locate it on Prospect Hill, an elevated area already a favorite with “pic-nic parties” and easily accessible via Flatbush Avenue, Kings County’s major thoroughfare.

In 1860 the state legislature, following its Central Park procedure, created a Board of Commissioners (headed by Stranahan), which in January 1865, again following in Manhattan’s footsteps, invited Calvert Vaux to prepare a plan of development. Vaux, soon accompanied by Olmsted, produced a design the commissioners believed would “hold out strong inducements to the affluent to remain in our city” rather than be drawn away by the “seductive influences of the New York park.” In May 1866 the two, now the landscape architects and superintendents of the park, began directing the labor of hundreds of stonecarvers, masons, earth movers, and tree planters. Work proceeded rapidly during the late 1860s. Portions were opened in 1867 and 1868, and the work was essentially completed by the early 1870s, when even George Templeton Strong was forced to admit that Prospect Park was “a most lovely pleasure” and that in trees and views it “beats Central Park ten to one.” The Brooklyn populace was equally pleased: in 1873 the park received 6,700,000 visits.

Stranahan, now known as the Haussmann of Brooklyn, followed Green’s lead by extruding his commission’s power beyond the park’s boundaries, moving steadily from park design to urban planning. In 1868 Olmsted and Vaux proposed creating a “parkway neighborhood” surrounding Prospect Park that would offer “more wealthy and influential citizens” the rural satisfactions of air, space, and abundant vegetation. The commission was given extraordinary powers to open and improve streets, take property, and restrict land use. Though most of the costly project