The Music Pagoda is an octagonal-shaped structure, with columns in groups of two and three, built in 1887 just west of the Nethermead, Prospect Park’s wide central lawn. Its base consists of rocks and boulders that were removed from Sullivan Hill, which lies east of the Ravine along Long Meadow. Until the 1960s, the Pagoda was a major concert and theatre venue, but the park’s concert organizers now use the Bandshell, built by Robert Moses in 1939, near Prospect Park West and 10th Street. The Pagoda burned down in 1968, but was rebuilt as a nearly exact replica in 1971.
I wonder what can be found behind the door on the bottom…
1/30/15
3 comments
Local folklore has it that this is the (not so) secret tomb of James Stranahan, the Park’s founding father.
Originally interred in Evergreen Cemetery, as the story goes, his remains were secreted away no too long after original burial. No one seemed to know where, exactly, they went at the time.
It wasn’t until the aforementioned rebuilding that the discovery was supposedly made, as well as the decision to keep him there unmarked. The Park’s Department budget at the time couldn’t cover a new monument, or even plaque.
Lefferts Fennimore Hawthorne XII: Really? I mean, this name gives you gravitas but so did the name Thurston Howell III but I’m forever marooned on “Gilligan’s Island”. What’s your excuse? Please let the rest of us in on the source of your little “in joke”. For the sake of the integrity of the site & the webmaster’s reputation please explain yourself. I use a screen name that can’t be mistaken for anything else as do most others.
Lefferts Blvd, James Fennoimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Common thread? Pardon me, but I don’t get it. But what do I know? I live in flyover country.
“burned down in 1968…”
Gee,I cant imagine how that happened