James Forten Playground: Renamed in 2021, Still Waiting on the Renovation

Ask a parent who has lived in Prospect Heights for more than five years what they call the playground on Underhill Avenue between Prospect Place and Park Place, and the answer splits by tenure. The city calls it James Forten Playground. Plenty of longtime neighbors still call it Underhill. Only one of those names came with a check attached, and three years after the check was written, the money still hasn't shown up in any finished project.

That gap between the symbolic and the structural is the actual story of this corner of the neighborhood, and it says more about how Prospect Heights takes care of itself than any restaurant opening on Vanderbilt Avenue this summer.

A Playground With Two Names

The park was named Underhill Playground in 1985, after the avenue it sits on and after Captain John Underhill, a 17th-century settler whose own writing describes his role in the killing of most of the Pequot tribe. In 2021, as part of a citywide effort to expand recognition of Black New Yorkers in the park system, it was renamed for James Forten, an abolitionist born in Philadelphia in 1766 to free Black parents. Forten went to sea as a teenager, working as a powder boy aboard the Royal Louis, was captured by the British, and spent time as a prisoner aboard the Jersey, a prison ship anchored in Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay near what is now the Navy Yard. He returned to Philadelphia on foot, apprenticed again as a sailmaker, and went on to become a businessman, a founding member of the Free African Society, and vice president of the Anti-Slavery Society. The rename gave the park a name with a direct, if unexpected, Brooklyn connection.

The renaming itself cost the city nothing beyond a new sign. What came next was supposed to cost more.

The Renovation That Hasn't Landed

In the 2023 participatory budgeting cycle, Council Member Crystal Hudson's office proposed a half-million-dollar renovation of James Forten Playground, flagging its water features and play equipment as hazards that needed replacing. The pitch leaned on real numbers: 42 percent of Prospect Heights family households have children under 18, and nearly 4,000 residents in the area are under 14. The case for spending was that this is one of the most-used playgrounds by the families who actually live here, not a stop on anyone's weekend itinerary.

Three years later, the city's own park profile for the site tells a narrower story. Its capital projects page lists exactly one item attached to James Forten Playground: a public restroom building reconstruction. Under the fields for capital investment and upcoming events, the site's main page currently shows nothing logged in either category. Whatever became of the $500,000 renovation pitch, it hasn't yet translated into new equipment, new water features, or a new play surface that shows up on the city's own tracking.

None of that means the playground has gone quiet. As of this summer, kids are still running trikes and ride-on cars through the spray, still ducking between two water-spraying fish sculptures, still getting soaked by the six-foot fountain at the center of the water feature. Julie Peppito's 2007 mosaic and sculpture work is still there, whimsical duck and fish figures worked into concrete and tile. The 1996 safety surfacing is now thirty years old. None of it has been replaced, and none of it looks like it's scheduled to be.

Who Actually Keeps It Running

The reason the playground hasn't fallen apart in the gap between the pledge and the paperwork is that it isn't run by the city day to day. It's run by neighbors.

Friends of James Forten Playground grew out of the Park Place-Underhill Avenue Block Association's community initiative, and it has spent recent years doing the unglamorous maintenance the city's capital budget hasn't covered: weeding the tree and flower beds, clearing broken toys, planting ferns along Prospect Place to control erosion, replacing fence stakes after storms. Volunteer coordinator Den Gordon has organized family cleanup days that draw in whoever from the wider Prospect Heights community shows up that Saturday, not just families from the two blocks nearest the gate. The block association has kicked in grant money to help cover new shrubs, and in June 2021 the volunteer group ran its own stoop sale out front, selling items members had donated to raise additional funds.

The playground's unofficial toy trove, the tricycles, ride-on cars, and scooters that show up unattended for any kid to use, isn't stocked by the Parks Department. It's stocked by the families who use it, leaving behind what their own kids have outgrown for the next round of toddlers.

This is not a playground waiting passively for the city to notice it. It's a playground being kept presentable by the people who use it, while the capital renovation that was supposed to arrive in 2023 sits somewhere between a council press release and an unbuilt line item.

The Corridor Nobody's Writing About

This summer, every blog covering Prospect Heights wrote the same story about Vanderbilt Avenue: the Saturday-only Open Street coming back at full length after four years of cuts, Zig Zag Oyster Bar opening at the corner of Prospect Place and Grand, Grimm's tavern taking over part of the old Olmsted space. That corridor runs on a reservation calendar and a Saturday crowd.

Underhill and Washington Avenues run on a different schedule entirely, one built around school pickup, cake orders, and stroller traffic instead of walk-in seating. BCakeNY, a Black-owned custom cake studio on Washington Avenue, has become the default stop for a kid's birthday order. The Tiny Scientist on Underhill Avenue runs hands-on science sessions for kids from preschool through fifth grade, the kind of program where a family's own kid brings home a different experiment every week. Prospect Heights Academy, also on Washington Avenue, runs full-day enrichment with a dedicated baking room, a STEAM room, and an indoor playground built to look like a miniature town. A Chelsea Piers Gymnastics location, the newest in Brooklyn's mini-chain, gives the corridor a gymnastics and parkour option that didn't exist here a few years ago. The Washington Avenue-Prospect Heights Association, a merchants group along the strip, organizes the cleanups and small business advocacy that keep this stretch functioning without the marketing budget Vanderbilt's new arrivals bring with them.

None of this shows up on a restaurant roundup. All of it shows up on a Tuesday afternoon walk down Underhill Avenue, past the playground gate, past the cake shop window, past the science center with kids filing out clutching whatever they built that day.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The lesson from James Forten Playground isn't that the city forgot Prospect Heights. It's that a rename is easy to deliver and a renovation is not, and the distance between the two gets filled by whoever shows up with a rake and a trash bag. If the $500,000 renovation is ever going to move from council press release to finished project, the pressure point is almost certainly Community Board 8 and the block association, not a wait-and-see approach to the city's capital calendar.

If you're the kind of neighbor who already knows which fountain sprays the hardest on a July afternoon, you didn't need this piece to tell you the playground exists. What you might not have known is how far behind the renovation actually is, or how much of what still works there is running on volunteer hours instead of city funding.

The Valvo Team keeps an eye on details like this because they shape what it actually feels like to live on a given block, long before anyone starts thinking about buying or selling here. If you're weighing a move within Prospect Heights or anywhere else in South Brooklyn, or you just want a read on how a specific street is holding up, The Valvo Team is a good place to start that conversation.