Kristin Graves has a neat post about Ocean Parkway: Ocean Parkway was built as one of five grand boulevards in NYC (along with Queens Boulevard, the Grand Concourse, Eastern Parkway, and Pelham Parkway. Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway were built as extensions of Prospect Park by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in the 1870s. The grand boulevards were planned as part of an extensive system of parkways that would extend the rural beauty of Prospect Park into Brooklyn’s residential neighborhoods, and would eventually connect to Manhattan’s Central Park.