Civic · named 1923
Bartel-Pritchard Square
The park gate named for two Brooklyn best friends who enlisted together and died three weeks apart in France. It's a circle, not a square.
Two friends, one war
Emil J. Bartel Jr. and William Pritchard were Brooklyn boys born the same year, 1895, and close friends. In November 1917 they enlisted together in Brooklyn's own 13th Regiment of the National Guard, and shipped to France with the 59th Regiment, Coast Artillery Corps. Bartel died of his wounds on September 23, 1918. Pritchard was killed in action five weeks later, on October 28 — just two weeks before the Armistice. Two friends who left together and didn't come back.
A boy from 251 Windsor Place
This is the part that brings it home: the Bartel family lived at 251 Windsor Place — on this very block. The traffic circle was named in 1923 in part because it sat a short walk from the Bartel front door. The memorial that thousands of people pass on their way into Prospect Park every day is, at its root, a monument to a kid from Windsor Place and his best friend. A photograph of Emil Bartel Jr. survives in the Brooklyn Historical Society's collection, now held at NYU — a young man's face behind the name on the bronze.
A gate named for both
On April 10, 1923, New York's Board of Aldermen named the southwest entrance of Prospect Park — at the meeting of Prospect Park West, Prospect Park Southwest, and 15th Street — for the two friends together: Bartel-Pritchard Square. It is, famously, not a square at all but a traffic circle, a fact the neighborhood has never let go of.
The columns
Two monumental granite columns topped with bronze tripods mark the entrance, designed in the early 1920s and attributed to the office of Stanford White's firm, McKim, Mead & White. They're modeled on ancient classical lighthouse-and-lamp forms. In 1965 a polished black granite tablet reading “For Valor and Sacrifice” was set into the center island to honor all the local residents who died in service. One column was struck and damaged by a car in 2022 and later restored — the war memorial outlasting yet another century's traffic.
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