Nearly a year after a brush fire damaged parts of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, workers and volunteers have been restoring the charred hillside.

Their dedication planted the seeds for recovery and renewal.

"It's like giving a life back to this part of the park"

You can still see the charred remains of last year's brush fire, if you know where to look.

"The fire got very high. You'll see up kind of high in the tree," said Leila Mougoui Bakhtiari, the director of landscape management at the Prospect Park Alliance. 

Bakhtiari pointed to scars left on the affected two acres of forest from the Nov. 8, 2024, blaze, which was exacerbated by historic drought conditions.

"The forest has three layers," she said. "It has the herbaceous, the ground layer, the midstory and then the canopy trees, and to see all three layers being damaged was really difficult."

Now, nearly a year later, volunteers with the Prospect Park Alliance are helping to restore the hillside by planting young ferns and bushes to prevent erosion. 

"It's like giving a life back to this part of the park," said Marco Bartalini, Windsor Terrace resident and dedicated volunteer.

Morgan Monaco, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, remembers the night of the fire vividly.

"It was really traumatic," Monaco said. "This precious woodlands, you know, we feared would be gone forever."

"It's a piece of Brooklyn that nobody can touch"

Park leaders say restoration is happening in three phases, the last of which will include replanting the trees that were lost. Still, it will take years for them to reach maturity.

"In the winter of this past year, we installed a big soil fabric and reseeded the entire area to really rebuild that groundcover," Monaco said.

Much of that progress has been fueled by volunteers.

"It's like my garden," Bartalini said. "As a local, we're here every day, so it's real important. It's a piece of Brooklyn that nobody can touch."

The recovery effort has also drawn support from park lovers who donated money and left dozens of handwritten letters on the fence after the fire.

"There were little signs that people wrote, love notes that people wrote and posted on the fence," Bakhtiari said. "And we got a lot of support through our social media and through interest in volunteering."

Together, park workers and volunteers are ensuring that Brooklyn's backyard forest gets restored to its former glory.

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