The Brooklyn Bridge Park is not only important as one of the largest new urban parks being built in North America, but as the epitome of the evolution of landscape architecture practice over the course of the last 100 years. As Van Valkenburgh described it in his opening lecture, the Brooklyn Bridge Park is neither one of the large-scale romantic garden and parks of the 19th century, later accused by some as being “anti-urban,” nor one of the self-contained art-pieces and urban baubles that resulted from the 70’s and 80’s era of public space-making.