Parade Ground

The Parade Ground is a 40-acre athletic complex adjacent to the southern edge of Prospect Park, bounded by Caton Avenue, Parade Place, and Coney Island Avenue. Originally created as a military drill ground in 1867, designed by Olmsted and Vaux as part of the Prospect Park plan, it has evolved into one of the most intensively used athletic facilities in Brooklyn.

The Parade Ground hosts dozens of baseball diamonds, soccer and football fields, basketball and tennis courts, and a running track. The complex serves an enormous number of organized leagues, including youth baseball, adult softball, soccer leagues representing communities from across the Caribbean and Latin America, and cricket teams from the neighborhood's West Indian population.

The athletic fields are in near-constant use from spring through fall, with overlapping leagues and informal games filling every available hour of daylight. The Parade Ground's scale allows it to accommodate multiple simultaneous games, creating a vibrant, sometimes chaotic atmosphere of competition and community.

The surrounding neighborhoods of Kensington and Flatbush are among the most ethnically diverse in the world, and the Parade Ground reflects this diversity. On any given weekend, one might see Trinidadian cricket matches adjacent to Mexican soccer leagues adjacent to youth baseball games, a sporting United Nations on Brooklyn soil.

The Parade Ground is Brooklyn's democratic playing field: a place where the borough's extraordinary diversity comes together through the universal language of sport. Its 40 acres of athletic space make it one of the most important recreation facilities in the entire city.