Why Highland Park matters.
Highland Park is a commanding hilltop park where Cypress Hills' elevated terrain meets historic waterworks, wooded slopes and expansive landscapes straddling Brooklyn and Queens.
Set along Highland Boulevard near Vermont Place and just steps from Cypress Hills National Cemetery, the park occupies a high plateau above East New York with distant views toward Woodhaven, the Rockaways and the Atlantic Ocean. The 141-acre landscape divides naturally between broad upper ground surrounding the former Ridgewood Reservoir and steeper terrain descending toward the park's southern recreational areas. Roads and footpaths thread through wooded patches, lawns and early twentieth-century parkland, with the plateau's glacial topography producing pronounced changes in elevation across the property. Lower sections concentrate athletic fields and courts beneath the wooded heights, giving the southern landscape a more intensively shaped character than the former waterworks terrain above. The result is a substantial borderland park whose plateau, slopes, mature woodland and layered elevations create a physical landscape distinct from the surrounding street grids of Brooklyn and Queens.
What defines Highland Park.
Highland Park is best known for growing around Ridgewood Reservoir, the nineteenth-century waterworks created to supply the rapidly expanding independent City of Brooklyn. Brooklyn acquired the reservoir property in 1856 as population growth placed increasing pressure on its water supply, and the completed system began operating during the following decade. The reservoir eventually comprised three basins connected to a much larger network of wells, streams, conduits and pumping facilities extending eastward across Queens and Long Island. Brooklyn purchased surrounding acreage for park purposes in 1891 under the Highland Park Society, creating the foundation for a public landscape initially called Ridgewood Park. Between 1901 and 1905, the Brooklyn Department of Parks constructed a combined music stand and tool house, shelter house, rustic bridge and two rustic arbors, laid out roads and paths, created a lake with a fountain and converted a swamp into a flower garden. The Schenck estate expanded the park southward in 1905, followed by another western parcel that brought the property close to its present form by 1908. An aquatic garden planted with water lilies appeared in 1907, and children's farm gardens followed in 1915 as horticulture joined organized recreation within the developing park. Sculptor Pietro Montana added another enduring historical layer through Dawn of Glory, his World War I memorial dedicated during the 1920s; Montana, an Italian-born Cooper Union graduate, produced several public war memorials across Brooklyn during the same period.
The reservoir's withdrawal from the municipal water system initiated a separate transformation driven by ecological succession inside the enclosed basins. Two basins were decommissioned and drained in 1989 after New York's larger upstate water system had displaced the old Brooklyn network, allowing woodland, marsh and other freshwater habitats to develop across terrain engineered for water storage. New York City transferred responsibility for the reservoir to NYC Parks in 2004, bringing more than 50 acres of former water infrastructure directly into Highland Park's future. Plans announced in 2007 proposed clearing substantial basin acreage for athletic fields, but opposition from residents and environmental advocates redirected attention toward the ecological value that had developed after decommissioning. New York State designated the reservoir a Class I freshwater wetland on December 23, 2018, extending the highest state wetland protection to all three basins after threatened and endangered species had been observed at the site. The National Register of Historic Places had added Ridgewood Reservoir earlier that year, recognizing the surviving nineteenth-century waterworks as a historic site as its ecological importance gained formal protection. Woodlands, swamp, standing-water wetlands, coastal swamp forest and open grassy areas now occupy the former engineered basins, making the reservoir simultaneously a remnant of Brooklyn's independent water system and a substantial freshwater habitat within New York City.
How Highland Park fits.
Highland Park works as the anchor for a Brooklyn outing connecting nineteenth-century rural cemetery design, Civil War military burial and the survival of one of colonial New York's earliest domestic structures.
Begin at The Evergreens Cemetery, incorporated in 1849 as New York's rural cemetery movement moved burial grounds beyond crowded churchyards and into expansive landscaped properties. The 225-acre cemetery developed across the Brooklyn-Queens border with Andrew Jackson Downing contributing to its landscape and Alexander Jackson Davis designing its Victorian Gothic chapel in 1849-1850; later work associated with Calvert Vaux added another major designer to the property's architectural history. More than 538,000 people have been buried across its hills, including tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, jazz saxophonist Lester Young and painter Martin Johnson Heade, and the National Register of Historic Places added the cemetery in 2007 for significance spanning art, architecture, landscape architecture and social history. Continue to Cypress Hills National Cemetery, whose origins lie in the Civil War hospitals established around New York for Union soldiers wounded or sick far from the principal battlefields. The first federal section occupied almost three acres inside private Cypress Hills Cemetery, and by September 1870 it contained 3,170 Union soldiers and 461 Confederate prisoners of war, including men transferred from military hospitals and other burial grounds. The federal government acquired the parcel that year for $9,600, expanded the cemetery by more than 15 acres in 1884 and later received the Mount of Victory Plot from New York State in 1941. Soldiers from the American Revolution, Spanish-American War, Korean War and Vietnam War joined the Civil War dead across its three parcels, and the National Register of Historic Places added Cypress Hills National Cemetery in 1997. Conclude at Wyckoff House Museum, where the original portion of the farmhouse dates to 1652 and survives as New York State's oldest structure and New York City's first officially designated historic building. Pieter Claesen Wyckoff arrived in New Netherland in 1637 as a teenage farm laborer under the van Rensselaer family before settling with Grietje van Nes in Nieuw Amersfoort, where he became a farmer and magistrate. Successive Wyckoff generations enlarged the Dutch-American farmhouse and worked the surrounding agricultural land until 1901, leaving architectural fabric shaped across centuries of family occupation. Descendants organized to preserve the threatened house in 1937; the Wyckoff House Foundation later transferred it to NYC Parks, municipal designation followed in 1965 and restoration after a late-1970s fire returned the property to public use. The progression moves from the landscaped rural cemetery movement through a federal burial ground shaped by the Civil War and culminates at a seventeenth-century farmhouse whose survival preserves the agricultural world that preceded urban Brooklyn.
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