Brooklawn Park
“The American holly is quite common here,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “I heard a lark sing, sweet and strong, and heard robins.” Thoreau, a naturalist and philosopher and author of Walden, was describing the rural North End estate of his friend Daniel Ricketson, which eventually became Brooklawn Park.
Born in 1813 to Quaker parents, Ricketson was seriously injured in two accidents involving horses, leading to lifelong hip pain and severe headaches. Although he practiced as a lawyer, he dedicated himself to the study of nature and literature. Ricketson purchased the estate in 1851 as a retreat from his main residence, Woodlee, about a mile south on Acushnet Avenue. He named his refuge Brooklawn and surrounded himself with apple orchards, gardens, and grazing cows, and eventually built a farmhouse with wide porches for his family.
Ricketson’s first building at Brooklawn was a rustic 12 x 14 foot shack with gingerbread trim, exposed beams on the inside and a small stove for heat. Ricketson called it the “Shanty.” He covered two interior walls with slips of paper on which he wrote ideas and sentences from his favorite authors, some of them his friends, like Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing, who all visited him at the Shanty.
Two years prior to Ricketson’s death in 1896, the city of New Bedford acquired Brooklawn intending to use it as a public park. In 1892, the landscape design firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliott had submitted a plan to construct a chain of public parks in the city linked by a promenade and wide parkway, reasoning that “nothing is so refreshing to the tired townspeople as pure rural landscape.” The parkway would loop around Rodney French Boulevard to Rockdale Avenue, Hathaway Road, and Ashley Boulevard (then called Bowditch Street), ending at Brooklawn. The plan received approval but stalled due to changes in political leadership and a national depression. The city eventually built some of the parks independent of the proposal, including Hazelwood Park, Buttonwood Park, and Brooklawn Park.
The city’s mill workers enjoyed Brooklawn Park’s duck pond, sledding hill, and ice skating rink with a warming house designed by New Bedford architect Louis E. Destremps. In 1958, Storyland opened at the park, featuring climbable nursery rhyme scenes, a spouting Moby Dick, and a real F-94 Starfighter jet plane.
The city tore down Ricketson’s farmhouse in 1971, and ten years later, it declared the Shanty, which had fallen into disrepair, a nuisance and dismantled it. Persistent rumors claim the Shanty was stored at the city yard, but it has yet to be rediscovered.
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