Coffey Park

Red Hook's famous food trucks frame Red Hook Recreation Area, but for an actual park, Coffey is your destination in this legendary neighborhood.

Coffey Park, named for an Irish-born local politician, is 8-plus acres of passive and active recreation in the middle of Red Hook, the formerly scary-dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood that, in spite of a lack of subway service, has undergone a cultural renaissance in recent years – as well as a commercial one with the arrival of a Fairway supermarket, an Ikea, and a cruise ship dock.

The park's flat lawns welcome small fry and their dads.

Shapely evergreens line up proudly… and April flowers are a colorful sight.

The park provides a good view of Visitation Church and the (sort of) famous "R" sign. And this last shot…well, it's just a nice picture. So check out Coffey Park when you're in Red Hook. And there are plenty of good reasons to visit Red Hook. Bars. Waterfront. Fairway. (And Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies – way better than what Ikea has the nerve to serve as "Swedish meatballs." Just sayin'.)

McKinley Park

There's nothing special about this small park in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Then I reviewed my photos and noticed the decided leftward tilt of much of the landscape of modest McKinley Park.

I'd noticed these curiously angled tree stumps but pegged them as nothing more than a curious anomaly, and nothing else had particularly caught my eye:



Springtime made these blossoming trees a pleasant sight, so I snapped this photo, not noticing the leftward bend of the tree at the right of the stand.



The following photo seemed like a pretty standard shot, the kind I like to take to give a sense of perspective and the size of the park. Sure, there's a kid running to the left, and a couple of the trees are leaning a little bit that way, but these didn't seem remarkable in themselves.



But take a look at the image that struck me when I first entered the park. Leaving aside the question of what kind of animal this is – an otter? a beaver? a fanciful seal with a land-animal tail? something else? – I'm wondering why the garbage pail was knocked over in this otherwise fairly well maintained six-acre park, with its playground, ball courts, trees, pathways, and modest hill.



An answer to the mystery suggested itself only after I exited the park and spotted this shrine, with the inscription: "No Farewell Words Were Spoken, No Time To Say Goodbye, You Were Gone Before We Knew It, And Only God Knows Why." It hangs across the street from the park, on the fence that keeps you from tumbling down into the Gowanus Expressway gully.

Had someone fallen onto the highway somehow, in spite of the high fence? Or was the memorial to a victim of an auto accident? No way of knowing, but one thing was for sure: the juxtaposition of high McKinley Park with the Expressway-in-a-Ditch had created a tachyonic dimensional vortex that was pulling the trees, the trash cans, the nameless memorialized person, probably even the children towards the highway. That explained why the fence had to be so high. It explained the two stumps, the remains of trees that had bent over so far they had started to freak out the park-going populace and had to be cut. It explained the toppled trash can, and the leaning trees. It certainly explained the fact that whichever direction I faced, things were leaning to the left.

It's Occam's razor, see. The simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Honestly, I don't know how I didn't see it right away.

Owl's Head Park

Nestled along the western Brooklyn coast, Owl's Head Park is 24 acres of rolling hills, grassland, trees, and paths that take you far enough away from the neighborhood of Bay Ridge – quiet enough in the first place – that it can be hard to believe you're still in the city.



In the photo above you can glimpse the bay on the left. A path will take you almost to the water, in fact. It was awfully quiet in Owl's Head Park on the unseasonably warm and beautiful early March day of my visit, a perfect day for an escape from city life. A few people idling on benches, a few children playing, but very easy to wander into the middle of a seeming nowhere.



What can I say? I'm a sucker for gnarly roots.



A couple of moms pushed strollers in the distance:



Turning back towards the entrance, the vista of houses and apartment buildings does remind us that we are, in fact, still in New York City. But Owl's Head Park, the origin of whose name is unknown, provides ample opportunity for an extended break from a busy life.

Canal Park

Two of my main interests converged, not for the first time, when I went to the new Canal Park Playhouse theater to see a play (the very good Inadmissible). I hadn't thought twice about the name of the venue, but the program mentioned something called Canal Park nearby, so naturally I had to return in the daytime to check it out, as I had never heard of Canal Park.

Sure enough, there's a small, swooping triangular space at the far western end of Canal Street, just across the West Side Highway from the Hudson River, and that's Canal Park.



The building that houses the brand-new theater dates from 1826, which seems old enough, but according to signage the park is in some sense 140 years older than that, set aside as a public space by the 1686 Dongan Charter – though the Parks Department web page gives 1833 as the date the site was established. It's unclear to me what the Dongan Charter, which established Albany as a city in 1686, has to do with this site, though the Charter is interesting enough, being, according to the Albany Times Union, "[t]he oldest city charter in force in the United States [and] arguably the longest-running instrument of municipal government in the Western Hemisphere."



Whatever its true age, Canal Park has an interesting history: originally a marketplace, then a park, later redesigned by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons, Jr., then decommissioned, then used as a Sanitation Department parking lot, then researched and restored as a park in 2005 with inspiration from the Vaux design. Deserted (except for pigeons) on a chilly, sunny February day, it speaks its chapter of history to anyone who takes the trouble to listen. And, yes, I can envision the Canal Park Playhouse folks sitting out here with lunch and a cigarette during a long day of rehearsal as soon as springtime comes around.

Ilka Tanya Payán Park

I often come upon unexpected parks while heading for known ones. That was how I happened upon Ilka Tanya Payán Park in Washington Heights, a triangle at the intersection of Broadway and Morgan Place between 156th and 157th Streets.

Its trees, benches, and sculptures are what make it more than just a place to walk through to get to the 1 Train. The two chickens below – no, wait, it's a chicken and a rooster, I think – are called "Bantam Pair" and are by sculptor Peter Woytuk, who's also responsible for the huge elephants in Columbus Circle and a whole string of other sculptures along the length of upper Broadway in Manhattan.



Payán was a Dominican actress (Angelica, Mi Vida), lawyer, and AIDS activist who died of AIDS in 1996. Six years later, the park was named for her. I imagine she would have been pleased.

Orchard Alley Community Garden

Here's another exception to my rule about skipping community gardens. Do I need to change the rule? Self-imposed rules are always mutable I guess.

Like the nearby Parque de Tranquilidad, the Orchard Alley Community Garden is worth a stop when on a wander through the East Village.

The name isn't fanciful – the piece of fruit lovingly pictured below (it looks like an actual apple) actually suggests actual orchard action.



The Internet doesn't have a lot of information about this place, but here's a little background from New York Cares. The Garden has been discovered by the folks at Make Music New York among others. But it's nice to stumble in when there's no one else around. This path looks inviting:



And while there's nothing especially remarkable about this tree, sometimes it's nice to just appreciate the appearance of trees and plants against the geometry of a building. To a parks blogger like yours truly, nothing says "New York City" quite like a view like this:

St. Nicholas Park and Hamilton Grange

St. Nicholas Park is notable for among other things its steep terrain, but since Alexander Hamilton's 210-year-old house moved in, there's more reason to visit. Though perhaps that's not entirely fair to the park, which does have its own society and website describing it as "[f]orged by nature in rugged masses of rock."

Those masses of good old New York City rock are on extravagant display in the park's north end:





St. Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of the original Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, gift-bringer, and inspiration for Santa Claus, lent his name to several streets in this part of Harlem as well as to the park. In an interesting twist for the Great Recession era, he's also the patron saint of pawnbrokers and repentant thieves, as well as – according to the Parks Department website – bankers.

If that's true, how appropriate that the house Alexander Hamilton built for his family in 1800-1802 has ended up here (after not one but two local moves). As President George Washington's Treasury Secretary, Hamilton established the system of national credit under which the U.S. has operated since the post-Revolutionary period.



The city originally acquired some of the land that's now St. Nicholas Park for the Croton Aqueduct. That land ended up part of a long 23-acre "ribbon park" that also features a dog run, a playground, sports facilities, and some Revolutionary War history. These photos are from the park's quiet north end.





The National Park Service moved, partially restored, re-opened to the public, and runs Hamilton Grange, giving tours of the house's interior. Among the period furnishings are some of Hamilton's own items. He and his family had a few happy years here at the beginning of the 19th century, before he was killed in the famous duel with Aaron Burr, across the river in New Jersey. This is Alexander Hamilton's desk.