It’s All in the Name: Ocean Parkway

By Y.M. Lowy

We pass these names every day, see them on street signs, buildings and businesses, and often never stop to think about where they came from. But behind many of the names we know is an interesting story. In this weekly series, we take a closer look at familiar names around Boro Park and beyond and uncover the people, places and stories that gave them their names.

Ocean Parkway is a name that explains itself, at least at first glance. The road runs south toward the ocean, connecting the area around Prospect Park with the beaches of Coney Island. But Ocean Parkway was not simply built as another street leading toward the shore. It was designed as something entirely different from the ordinary roads of its time.

The story begins in 1866, when landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had designed Prospect Park, proposed a network of wide, tree-lined routes that would connect Brooklyn’s parks and open spaces. One of the planned routes would extend from Prospect Park all the way to the ocean.

The City of Brooklyn acquired the land for Ocean Parkway in 1868, and construction took place between 1874 and 1876. The finished roadway stretched about five and a half miles, from the southern entrance of Prospect Park to the beaches of Coney Island.

The name was straightforward: it was the parkway leading to the ocean. Early references called it the “Grand Ocean Boulevard,” but the name Ocean Parkway ultimately stuck.

Rather than building a single roadway surrounded by ordinary city blocks, Olmsted and Vaux envisioned a broad, landscaped route with a central drive for carriages, grassy malls lined with trees, walking paths and separate service roads for local traffic. The idea was to make the journey itself enjoyable, not merely to provide a way to get from one place to another.

The design drew inspiration from grand European boulevards, including Paris’s Avenue Foch and Berlin’s Unter den Linden. But Olmsted and Vaux took the idea further by creating a long, landscaped route that connected major open spaces across Brooklyn.

In 1894, it became home to the first dedicated bicycle path in the United States. At a time when cycling was becoming increasingly popular, the separate path gave riders a place to travel without competing directly with other traffic.

More than a century later, Ocean Parkway remains recognizable for its trees and distinctive layout, even as cars have replaced carriages and the neighborhoods along the route have grown around it.

And that brings us to another familiar Brooklyn roadway, the Belt Parkway. Why is it called the Belt, and what was the plan behind this roadway? That’s the story we’ll explore next week.