Editorial Review
This attraction is now closed.
The Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment is dedicated to shaping positive and protective attitudes towards our urban environments, both built and natural. The Center's programs envision the cityscape as vital and dynamic, requiring responsibility, foresight and imagination to preserve its future viability. The environments that evolved over time in Brooklyn's urban setting provide a rich and rewarding laboratory for understanding the intricate interdependence of living things and their environment.
The only agency of its kind in New York City, the Center was founded in 1978 by urban scholar John C. Muir. John Muir realized that taking city children in buses to the suburbs' greener surroundings to study the "real environment" reinforced their negative attitudes toward the jumble of social history, architecture and nature that constituted their familiar urban surroundings. Environmental education needed to be urbanized.
The Center developed programs specifically to involve participants in the dynamics of the cityscape and to familiarize them with day-to-day urban environment issues. Children take buses not to the suburbs, but to experience such essentially urban sites as the busy riverfront, a landscaped park, or the Brooklyn Bridge. The necessity for their involvement in preserving the quality of life in their own environment comes into sharp focus.
The Center, now in its twenty-fourth year, is attended annually by 28,000 children in its programs for school classes. In addition, thousands more youth participate in after-school and summer programs, over 2,000 teachers participate in professional workshops and school programs and 5,000 adults are served by public programs and seminars. The Center provides services to this vast audience at schools and community offices, on city streets, in parks, at landmarks, on rivers and bays and even underground within sewage treatment plants and railroad tunnels. In 1997 the Center began an initiative directed at less affluent neighborhoods that suffer from environmental injustice and degradation.
The distinguished Tennis House, a priceless landmark in Prospect Park, now serves as the Center's headquarters and provides a perfect setting for the Center's park-based programs. An architecturally significant building and a registered landmark, the Tennis House was built in 1910 on a site chosen by park designer Frederick Law Olmsted as a service facility for the then popular sport of lawn tennis. A $660,000 capital renovation provided the Center two additional classrooms, a teaching lab and an exhibition gallery equipped as a state-of-the-art facility for environmental education.
