Milestone Park

Milestone Park in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn is the site of New York City's oldest surviving milestone, a relic from 1741 now at the Brooklyn Historical Society for safekeeping. A marker explains that the post "stood at the juncture of two colonial roads[,] Kings Highway and Old New Utrecht-Flatbush Road (now 18th Avenue). It also served as a gauge to determine postal rates."

The milestone indicated distances to "N York Ferry" (8 1/4 or 10 1/2 miles depending on which road you took), "Deny's Ferry" (2 1/2 miles), and Jamaica (15 miles). Today it's all one big fat city, of course. But it's easy to imagine the time when today's Queens neighborhood of Jamaica was a village hours away through farms and forests, and it was a long hike to get a ferry to Manhattan.

Near the marker an old water fountain caught my eye. I thought it might be some kind of historic post as well – it looks like it could have been here since 1741 too – until I saw a man bend over it and take a drink.

The Chinese immigrants gathered around a gaming table reminded me of Columbus Park in Manhattan, where you can find similar scenes.

Hexagons, cobblestones. Hexagons, cobblestones.

On the next block: the New Utrecht Reformed Church.

In front of the church, the New Utrecht Liberty Pole "marks the spot over which the American flag first waved in the town of New Utrecht. The original pole was erected by our forefathers at the Evacuation of the British, November 1783, amid the firing of cannons and demonstration of joy."

I only learned why 84th Street also carries the name Liberty Pole Boulevard while doing research after my visit to Milestone Park. While there I failed to notice the tall flagpole topped with an American flag and with the original eagle and weathervane from the 1783 pole. The Friends of Historic New Utrecht website has plenty of photos.

Another historical note: the park is also the site of the 17th century Van Pelt Manor House, which lasted the better part of three centuries before succumbing to history's onward rush. Wikipedia has a capsule history.

Musicians of Washington Square Park

I walk down to Washington Square Park frequently and often hear very good music there in the open air, especially jazz. Sadly, sometimes a loud drummer accompanying a dance or acrobatic act ruins the whole park's aural atmosphere for everyone else. It was not so late yesterday afternoon, when I heard an unusual variety of music.

This act included a bass banjo, or banjo bass (take your pick). Outdoors and with no amplification, the instrument was barely audible, but it sure made a visual statement as Coyote and Crow played "House of the Rising Son." Here they are doing an original.

There are a few different pianists who wheel full-sized pianos, even grand pianos, out to the park to entertain the crowds on nice days. There's also the Sing for Hope piano project, which sets out "brightly colored" pianos at outdoor locales around the city. This piano isn't "brightly colored." But people were taking turns playing it, and I got to hear this gentleman playing Schubert's Impromptu in A-flat minor, one of my all-time favorite pieces to play when I was a piano student (and still today, once in a great while).

There's a long tradition of guitar "circles" in the park where ad hoc groups of players and singers gather to play favorite songs, usually classic rock and folk. I've taken part myself now and then. This gang was pushing out Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing" as I swung by.

So it was a good day for music in Washington Square Park. As the sound of a lone sax player piping under the arch caught my ear, the visual music of a tableau of flowers with one of NYC's iconic brass water fountains caught my eye. The water of life.

Come to think of it, that's almost a Dire Straits song too: "Water of Love," one of my favorites, from their first album.

Finally, this seems a good spot for one of the best Washington Square Park images I ever captured, from September 2013.

Talk about serendipity.

I mean, talk about consummate skill and artistic vision.

Green Central Knoll

The quaint word "knoll" isn't one you hear too often around New York City. Aside from Greywacke Knoll, the site of Cleopatra's Needle, the Central Park obelisk – and be honest, did you know that was called "Greywacke Knoll"? – Green Central Knoll in Bushwick seems to stand pretty much alone.

Specifically, it stands alone on the site of an old Rheingold Brewery, according to the Parks Department – though recent real estate news identifies a different Bushwick location for the historic suds factory. Maybe there were multiple Rheingold buildings or sites. Anyway, the park is called Green Central Knoll because it's bordered by Evergreen Avenue, Central Avenue, and Noll Street. (As to the derivation of the name Noll Street, your guess as is good as mine. Maybe a neighborhood historian can clue us in.)

Bushwick, the name given to the area by Peter Stuyvesant in 1661, comes from Boswijck, meaning "little town in the woods," "refuge in the woods," or "heavy woods" (depending on whom you ask) in 17th-century Dutch.

For modern times, I'd pick the "refuge" sense, since that's what city parks are. Most of Green Central Knoll is occupied by a large ball field.

At a lower level there's a sitting area, complete with cuddle benches.

The park's striking feature is an artificial rocky stream bed, complete with artificial (brass) fish and a painted landscape with white birds (ducks?) flapping by.

Because of a disabled L train, I was running late for the show I was reviewing that night, so I didn't have time to go down to the park's lower corner where, according to the Parks Department website, "the water pours into a catch basin adjacent to an area adorned with spray showers."

I did have time to observe, though, that there wasn't any water in the stream bed, leaving the metal fish just as dry as the artificial frog up at Highbridge Park in The Bronx. So I guess it would have been moot.

Keltch Park, Subway Stained Glass, and the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse

If the Parks Department bestows a name upon a tree-lined sitting area by a subway station, it's a park.

Keltch Park along Jerome Avenue in The Bronx is a narrow, oddly shaped triangle with the elevated 4 Train above. It's been Parks Department property since 1899, but in 1944 it got the unusual distinction (unusual among NYC parks) of a name honoring a hero of World War Two rather than of World War One. Robert Keltch was serving aboard a navy ship in 1943 when a German U-boat torpedoed it "just 90 miles east of Elizabeth City, New Jersey," as the Parks Department website details. The war did get closer to our shores than most of us who weren't alive then usually imagine.

Upstairs at the 170 St. station, there's more than the 4 Train. These striking stained glass windows are well worth a visit. They're by Dina Bursztyn, as the invaluable blog Scouting New York helpfully informs me.

Coincidentally, it was an art exhibition that led us to happen upon Keltch Park in the first place. We'd come to The Bronx to see the crumbling Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, open until July 19 for an art show presented by No Longer Empty.

It's a double whammy: a rare look inside a fine building left to decay for decades, and a superb show, some of whose art incorporates the debris from the building itself.

"Alien Souvenir Stand" is by Ellen Harvey:

And this installation, which includes sound, is by Daniel Neumann and Juan Betancurth:

Beth Campbell and Adam Helms were among the other artists whose work impressed us. I know, I've strayed pretty far from the park theme – this isn't an arts blog. But this exhibition, in this building, is so extraordinary I had to cover it.

The High Bridge, Newly Reopened, and The Bronx's High Bridge Park

Despite its large size, dramatic terrain, and numerous facilities, Manhattan's High Bridge Park (which we last visited in 2013) has for a long time been a dead end in one important sense: the High Bridge itself was closed. " Ever since 1960, the historic tall arched bridge over the Harlem River, built in the 1830s and '40s to host the aqueduct that carried upstate water across to Manhattan from The Bronx, has been sealed off.

Finally, two years later than originally planned, and with Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver in attendance but spoilsport Mayor de Blasio conspicuously absent, the High Bridge reopened to pedestrians and bicycles.

See the High Bridge Park Development Association website for a great 1879 drawing of the bridge from the Bronx side. It shows how the bridge looked before the middle section was replaced with a steel arch in 1927-28 so wider ships could get through. For a view from 2013 from Manhattan, showing the Bronx end of the bridge, with the original Roman-style stone arches, see the next photo:

And in June 2015: now, with people!

The Highbridge water tower on the Manhattan side is still inaccessible. The Urban Park Rangers at one time led occasional tours of the tower, but I can't find a current listing for any such.

For a bridge that's so high its very name attests to the fact, you have to descend a lot of stairs to get to the Manhattan-side entrance.

At this lower level a pleasant greenway runs parallel to the river below and offers a nice jungly view of the tower.

And there it is up ahead: the red-tiled walkway across the Harlem River.

The High Bridge may not span the most picturesque stretch of New York City's vast system of waterways, but it still provides some nice views. Wise planners even picked out fencing with a pleasing geometric pattern.

A series of plaques outline the High Bridge's long history…

…in contrast to this vintage manhole cover. Does it go down to the aqueduct beneath? I'd sure like to know.

I especially like the depiction of these workers. The guy inside the pipe looks Chinese. Is the guy on the ladder from Mexico? Whatever the case, the illustrations on these plaques deserve praise.

It's a pretty long walk in the hot sun, but at last: the Bronx side. And a lot fewer stairs at this end.

I'd be very interested to learn traffic numbers through the summer. Residents of the Highbridge neighborhood of The Bronx will be crossing to use Manhattan's big Highbridge Park. Going the opposite way will be Harlem residents who see the bridge as an extension of their park, as well as tourists from near and far who want to traverse the historic span and will mostly arrive from the Manhattan side. I hope someone's counting.

We've arrived at Highbridge Park, Bronx version. But there isn't much to this little park.

The handsome building on the left is the old Carmelite Monastery, now housing a Samaritan Village drug rehab center.

This frog is equipped to spit water from his mouth. Nothing was flowing at the moment. But he sits in a little channel that runs toward the aqueduct and suggests the original purpose of the magnificent High Bridge, now at last open again to the public.

Stuyvesant Oval and a Cormorant at Stuyvesant Cove

With apologies to the good people of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village on Manhattan's East Side, I here present to all and sundry your great pastoral oval. Your historic apartment complexes are on private grounds, I know. But since anyone can walk through any day, Stuyvesant Oval is fair game.

It would hardly be fair to keep one of New York City's finest fountains behind locked gates, anyway.

Seems whenever I get a good action shot in a city park, there's always a trash can photobombing me. The old lady in the first photo above, sitting peacefully reading a magazine, is undisturbed. But the guy below – well, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it. Good catch.

You call it an Oval. I call it a Park.

On the same walk we visited Stuyvesant Cove along the East River. I covered the Cove here back in 2010. How the years fly! But so do the birds. Ever since I saw a cormorant fishing that day off Stuyvesant Cove I always associate the Cove with those graceful black hunters. And on this day we had the extra treat of seeing one drying his or her wings.

There was plenty of East River seaplane activity too. Here's one just come in for a landing.

And then, I presume, back to the Hamptons with a new load of weekenders.

James J. Walker Park

I've passed by James J. Walker Park in the West Village many times, but never thought it of interest because it looked like little more than a big ballfield.

However, there's more to this unprepossessing one-and-two-thirds acres. And I'm not referring to the colorful life of the famous NYC mayor after whom it's named.

Jimmy Walker, Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 (and at one time an aspiring songwriter), led a flamboyant and controversial public life. But "Beau James" was but a teenager when the city acquired Trinity Church's St. John's Burying Ground in 1895, intended to convert the cemetery into a park.

In fact, the plan originated with the future mayor's father, Assemblyman William H. Walker.

More than 10,000 bodies had been interred here since 1812. Their fate would be much discussed 80 years later, as an article called "A Great Opening of Tombs" in The World from December 4, 1892 explained.

As transcribed here on the NYCNuts website, the paper reported that the elder Walker "said that the city would remove the bodies now in the cemetery and would do it very carefully and in a manner that could not offend and of the relatives of the dead."

But it seems it was not to be. As I understand it, the vast majority of the bodies – those that did not have families to claim them and arrange for reburial – are still there, beneath the ballfield, the pavement, the handball courts, the playground, and the sitting area, which I discovered sandwiched between the fields.

When I slipped in early on a recent Sunday afternoon, there were people using the handball courts, and kids in the playground.

No one was using the bocce court, though. It's one of only two Manhattan bocce ball locations listed by the Parks Department. It's also one of the locations listed and presumably used by the good people at NYC Bocce.

Whatever you do, don't confuse bocce with pétanque, which you can find at Bryant Park. Bocce is Italian; pétanque is French. (Although the word, Wikipedia informs me, is actually Occitan. Didn't know that was a language? You learn all kinds of stuff researching New York City's parks.)

Anyway, next time you're in the southern reaches of the West Village, stop by James J. Walker Park and give a thought to the memory of one of Gotham's most memorable mayors. Then give a thought to the memories of the thousands of people in the ground beneath your feet.