A rich man built this hilltop dream mansion in 1850s Brooklyn, then had it confiscated to create Prospect Park

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Edwin C. Litchfield the father of Park Slope. Born in 1815, Litchfield became a prominent lawyer who resided in Greenwich Village and made big money investing in railways. In 1852, he saw the potential of a new kind of investment: in land on the sleepy outskirts of Brooklyn. Litchfield (second image) cobbled together a $250,000 deal for a square mile of former Cortelyou pasture and swampy meadows between Gowanus Creek and Mount Prospect. His vision was a bustling new neighborhood with commercial and residential properties. He also planned a magnificent mansion for himself and his family on the high ground overlooking his investment. The mansion was the most personal of his projects. Litchfield hired architect Alexander Jackson Davis, whose romantic Italianate residences were fashionable in antebellum New York. Davis oversaw the creation of an Italianate hilltop mansion featuring a stucco exterior (painted to look like stone), slender windows, a square…