The Willink Plaza entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn is on the eastern side, on the edge of Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Built in 1890, it is one of six grand entrances created as part of an overhaul of the park at the end of the 19th century. It was designed by McKim, Mead & White.
It is named after Johan (John) Willink, a Dutch immigrant who worked as a broker in Manhattan. In the 1850s, he purchased the land here and built a mansion on the hill, which he called Bloemen Heuvel - or Flower Hill - and moved in with his wife, Cornelia, her sister Elizabeth Ludlow, and the sisters' elderly mother.
The Willinks barricaded themselves within Flower Hill. The mansion was enclosed by an iron fence, its windows never opened, and the grounds were guarded by bulldogs that were kept in the basement and fed raw meat. After some years, the old woman passed away, and then John Willink died after being thrown from his horse-drawn carriage. The sisters became even more eccentric and reclusive, emerging only to attend Trinity Church or meddle with their employees and managers. Cornelia died, and years later Elizabeth, residing in a hotel they'd built on the land, gave up the ghost.
There were no heirs, and so the mansion was opened to the public to be liquidated to settle the estate. Swarms of people flocked to the mansion, and discovered the Willinks had been hoarders. The mansion was covered in cobwebs, filled with trunks of clothing, closets full of unused brooms, still-crated furniture, collections of fine silver and piles of cheap junk. Everything was sold, down to the brooms, and eventually the hill was levelled and the land purchased to be incorporated into the park.
Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt, an acid-tongued neighbor and local historian, described the scene: "Perhaps no gates were ever kept more sedulously locked against the public, and no lawn had ever been more strictly kept free from trespassing feet than the beautiful lawn about this house, and never has one been more entirely free to the public than that spot is now." Ironically, this once-restricted area is not the second-busiest entrance to the park.
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