Prospect Expressway Parks

Prospect Expressway Parks are a series of landscaped strips and green margins along the Prospect Expressway, the highway that connects the Gowanus Expressway to Ocean Parkway through the Windsor Terrace and Kensington neighborhoods. These green spaces soften the impact of the expressway on the surrounding residential areas.

The Prospect Expressway was built in the 1950s and 1960s as part of Robert Moses' network of highways that reshaped Brooklyn's landscape. Like many Moses-era highways, the expressway cut through existing neighborhoods, displacing residents and creating a physical barrier between communities.

The landscaped margins and medians provide tree canopy, plantings, and in some sections, pathways that create usable green space along the highway corridor. While the parks cannot fully mitigate the noise and air quality impacts of the expressway, they provide visual and environmental buffers.

Windsor Terrace and Kensington, the neighborhoods flanking the expressway, are residential communities that have benefited from the greening of the highway margins. The planting and maintenance of these strips reflects a broader city effort to improve conditions along highway corridors.

Prospect Expressway Parks represent a pragmatic approach to urban greening: transforming the unused margins of highway infrastructure into functional green space. While no substitute for true parkland, these linear plantings measurably improve the quality of life for residents living alongside the expressway.