Trash is an enduring problem in Prospect Park, in and around its lake. The water quality of the lake, which is brimming with blue-green algae, has also caused officials concern. There have been battles over barbecuing and the discarding of charcoal near trees. Recently, the park has dedicated resources to creating a new road-sharing plan for cyclists, runners and vehicles, which has drawn complaints from motorists. Community boards are anxious about new traffic patterns.
As a reduced staff scrambles alongside volunteers to maintain the park, Lakeside’s gleaming promise offers a striking contrast to the cracked paths, puddles and careworn sections in the eastern part of the park, like the Vale of Cashmere.
“People will say, ‘Why are you building this thing, when you don’t have money to maintain the park?’ ” Adrian Benepe, the city’s commissioner of parks and recreation, said in a recent interview. “As if somehow, the money is fungible. Capital money and operating money are not fungible. You don’t stop building just because it is difficult to maintain the park. You have this opportunity to replace a 50-year-old building.”
Ms. Lloyd said that replacing the rink that Robert Moses built in 1960 would be the linchpin to other restoration projects. But financing is always an issue.
Prospect Park has never enjoyed the same rich resources afforded by its Manhattan cousin, the 843-acre Central Park. The Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages the Manhattan park for the city, has a $42.4 million budget; 15 percent of that total comes from the city, while the rest is raised privately.
Prospect Park has a $12.3 million budget, including $8.3 million from the alliance and $4 million from the city. Since 2007, the alliance’s budget has been trimmed by $1.1 million.
Lakeside’s financing, relying on generous allocations from the state and city, is separate — and the project’s price tag has increased $25 million since the first design in 2007. “My major concern is the cost,” said Dany Cunningham, the chairman of the park’s Community Committee, whose 80 organizations worked with the alliance to shape the project. “It’s always amazing, the longer things take, the more it doubles and quadruples. But the old rink had more than outlived its useful life — it had to be done.”
The old rink was in use during just the winter season. Now, in the summer, the new larger rink will be for roller skating and the smaller will be a water playground.
Opening the rinks separate from the new public spaces would have cost over $450,000, officials said, because it would have required building a temporary access road for emergency vehicles and other structures. Lakeside secured enough financing so that workers could finish everything at once.
Amy Musick, a teacher living on Ocean Avenue in the small neighborhood of Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, recounted the eager buzz among fellow mothers at the Lincoln Road playground last week.
“Everybody was saying, ‘We can’t wait, it’s about time this side of the park will get some attention,’ ” Ms. Musick said.
Lakeside has been buoyed by a $10 million donation, from Shelby White, 73, a Manhattan philanthropist who grew up skating on the lake. Her Leon Levy Foundation contributed to the restoration of five acres of lake shore. Park officials said they have raised about $65.5 million thus far and still hoped to sell naming rights to the rinks.
The project is rich in details. Last week, Christian Zimmerman, Prospect Park’s vice president for design and construction since 1990, proudly displayed 20,000 square feet of bluestone for the walkway beneath a majestic semicircle of London plane trees. He said workers found original granite and sandstone when they dug up the old rink, and will incorporate those materials with the new.
But the pièces de résistance are locked in a trailer by the site. “These are my babies,” Mr. Zimmerman said, showing off six new cast bronze urns, based on the original Olmsted and Vaux design. The urns account for $270,000, part of Ms. White’s grant.
“We are really layering modern design with historic preservation,” said Mr. Zimmerman, who is working with the architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, whose works include the new Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia and the building that once housed the American Folk Art Museum in Midtown.
The Moses rink, surrounded by a chain-link fence, destroyed vistas of the lake and paved over Music Island. Last week officials drained a section of the lake to recreate the island, and a “fish rescue” operation returned turtles and fish to other parts of the lake.
Balancing nature and modern recreation is a delicate proposition in a park where the number of visitors has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Glenn Phillips, executive director of New York City Audubon and a former official of the alliance, praised the restoration of the park’s natural landscapes, starting in the 1990s with the Ravine and progressing to the Lakeside shoreline.
“For the total restoration of the park, there’s a long way to go,” Mr. Phillips said. “But this is a big, symbolic piece."
And yet there are still those skeptical of the changes. Dobriana Gheneva, a 37-year-old mother of two from Park Slope, who has had to take her 5-year-old son, Filip, to Manhattan to skate, is worried about what will happen when the new park finally does open.
“I really liked it the way it was,” Ms. Gheneva said last week in the park. “I’m afraid it’s going to be too fancy and will get crowds of people.”
Lisa W. Foderaro contributed reporting
