Starlight Park

Starlight Park, an essential part of the slowly-but-surely developing Bronx River Greenway, officially opened in the spring of 2023 after 20-plus years of work. The result is a unique park of 13 acres hugging both sides of the Bronx River between Concrete Plant Park and the Bronx Zoo.

Starlight Park inherits its whimsical name from an early-20th-century amusement park that use to reside here. The Bowery Boys write that Starlight Amusement Park sounds like it was "a hyper, dizzying place" with "an enormous swimming pool with faux rock features, a nearby roller coaster" (where a terrible accident occurred in 1922), and "Coney Island-esque games and rides, boat rides, and outdoor performances by opera singers and greased up wrestlers."

Picture that. Opera singers and greased-up wrestlers. Now that's entertainment!

Today's park is a colorful mix, with river views, retired infrastructure, sports and boating facilities, and the Bronx River Alliance headquarters.

The site preserves relics of a time, decades ago, when the Bronx River was an active route for transporting goods. A disused railroad bridge still stands.

Traversing the park you cross the river more than once on well-preserved, cheery-blue bridges.

These bridges, according to a city press release, "help to link the park to surrounding communities, one going over the Bronx River itself just north of Westchester Avenue and one going over railroad tracks owned by Amtrak at E. 172 Street. New York State DOT built one new bridge spanning the river as part of the creation of Sheridan Boulevard, completed in 2019."

Sheridan Boulevard, incidentally, which runs alongside Starlight Park, is New York State Route 895 – "the highest-numbered signed state route in New York," per East Coast Roads. A few years ago this grade-level road replaced the elevated Sheridan Expressway, the onetime Interstate 895 – another boon to the people of the Bronx.

The Bronx Times report on the completion of the conversion, dated Dec. 20, 2019, noted: "Other improvements included in the project are transforming the currently overgrown Garrison Park and building a shared use path between Concrete Plant Park and Garrison Park."

Done and done.

In the (redundantly named) "Edible Food Garden" at Concrete Plant Park. This didn't exist on our first visit back in 2016.

Views of the river reveal both its prettied-up stretches and its grimy history. In some spots, you could really think you're in the wild.

In others, not so much.

The Bronx River Greenway is by no means a contiguous whole. Not yet.

The Greenway project has been a collaboration among city agencies: Parks, Transportation, and the Department of Design and Construction. Not to mention the aforementioned Bronx River Alliance. New York State's ongoing work on the roads and highways is playing a part too. And all this work is paying off. Starlight Park and the other completed sections are already a big positive for the surrounding Bronx neighborhoods.

To this point the parks include, according to the city press release, "140 new trees and close to 12,000 new shrubs to support the restoration of the Bronx River shoreline, including wetlands that improve water quality in the river and help to curtail erosion." We do love our wetlands here at Park Odyssey.

They've also installed new retaining walls and lighting, a dog run, "4,000 feet of new pathway" and "drainage and electrical upgrades." The press release notes that 50,000 tons of soil has been "removed and replaced to promote ecological health." That's a helluva lot of soil. I wonder where they put the old dirt.

A final note: There's another little park called West Farms Rapids Park at the north end of Starlight, completed in 2020. We somehow missed it on this walk, although we may have traversed this spot on a Bronx River walking and canoeing adventure back in 2019, which also took us on something called the Mitsubishi Riverwalk, which, if it still exists, is part of the Bronx Zoo.

The moral, as if it needed repeating: There's always something more to explore.

All photos © Oren Hope

Garrison Park

Never forgetting the quest that launched this blog project 13 years ago, I continue to seek to visit every park in New York City. And although there have been a few exceptions, each park gets its own blog post. In that spirit, I give you Garrison Park.

Part of the in-progress Bronx River Greenway, a ribbon of parkland that's slowly blossoming along the rejuvenated Bronx River, Garrison itself is little more than a stretch of bike and walking path dangling like a tail off the industrially picturesque Concrete Plant Park. But when I discovered the latter in 2016, it was something of an oasis.

Concrete Plant Park, 2023

Looking north from Concrete Plant Park

Today, Concrete Plant Park continues as Garrison Park to the south, and to the north links up with a tiny entity called West Farms Rapids (formerly Bronx River Park) and then the very substantial new Starlight Park.

Alongside these parks runs a train track. Following it south on the map, it curves away from the river and appears to end up at Hunts Point. The fact that you can just walk across it here suggests that it's no longer in use, but I don't know that for sure.

The park also passes under the Bruckner Expressway.

Though it's mostly a pathway, Garrison Park does offer benches for enjoying riparian breezes and inner-city quiet.

Next up: Starlight Park

All photos © Oren Hope

Mitsubishi Riverwalk and Bronx River Canoeing

In early November the Bronx River Alliance sponsored one of its Bronx River canoeing events in tandem with a riverside celebration of Native American Heritage Month, co-sponsored by Moskehtu Consulting. This beautiful partly-sunny day was a perfect time to make a connection with the Native American spirit of the region – and for fall foliage, Bronx style.

The site was at the end of the Mitsubishi Riverwalk, an 0.4-mile trail that begins just outside the Bronx Zoo's Boston Road entrance. The path runs through verdant forest along a short stretch of the Bronx River, passing an 1840s dam, and ends at a small clearing and boat launch. There, representatives of Native American culture awaited in a gathering called Moskehtu Village, ready to share objects and knowledge about herbology, cooking, clothing, music, and other aspects of indigenous culture.

It's easy to get here by subway. It's just a short walk from the Pelham Parkway station on the 2 or 5 train. (There are even stained glass panels at the above-ground stations along the line to get you in the mood for nature.)

The Riverwalk affords a wonderful mini-escape from the urban landscape.

The dam provides a window into the long history of human use and manipulation of the Bronx River.

At the "Village" the river beckoned irresistibly. Canoeing on the Bronx River is something Mrs. Odyssey, in particular, has been wanting to do for years.

We signed up to canoe and visited the displays while waiting our turn.

The term "moskhetu" refers to medicinal herbs, from a root meaning "pasture," "grass," or "green," according to the Smithsonian Institution's 1903 Natick Dictionary. ("Natick," I've just learned, is not only a pretty suburb of Boston, it's another word for the Algonkian language more often today known as Wampanoag.) This historic lexicon, complete with an introduction by none other than Edward Everett Hale, is available via a Google search.

We got our canoe, and after a quick mini-lesson in steering from a friendly Bronx River Alliance staffer, we set off. "Don't go past the second bridge," we were told, so as not to get swept over a waterfall. Oh, the hazards of big-city living.

For more on the Mitsubishi Riverwalk, which has been welcoming visitors since 2004, see the Hidden Waters Blog. But don't just read about it. Come and walk it for yourself. And for the optimum experience, pick a canoeing day!

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Soundview Park

The South Bronx has made great strides since its 1970s nadir. Approaching Soundview Park from Colgate Avenue, though, a little-used sidewalk shows enough lingering urban decay to trip you up if you tried to make any literal "great strides."

Soundview Park's 205 acres run along the east bank of the Bronx River where it opens out into the East River. The East River was once called the Long Island Sound, hence the name of the Soundview neighborhood.

Once open water and tidal marsh, the area was acquired by the Parks Department in 1937, built into a park (by Robert Moses, of course), and expanded in the '50s and '60s.

Today, Soundview Park is one of those green spaces where you can wander and feel like you've left the city completely behind.

Weird purple mushrooms? Alien invasion pods? No – someone had discarded a bunch of eggplants at the base of a large tree by the river. Go figure.

It's a big park, and we'd already done a lot of walking and exploring that day, so we elected to stick to the path that hugged the river, where some very old trees stand guard.

A drummer (far right) sets up to provide a soundtrack to a baseball game in Soundview Park

Strangely – and at times, a little spookily – the baseball crowd was the only large group of people we'd encounter in the park on this beautiful late-summer weekend day.

It's easy to picture the park's marshy origin.

The waterfront offers some really nice views.

A feeling of isolation enshrouded us during much of our walk. We were glad to reach the pleasant sitting area at a spot called Soundview Point.

Towards the far southeast tip of the park, you can get a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline.

The river views are nice, but the payoff for us came at the park's southernmost reaches, where a completely different environment, one of sand, beachgrass, and flowers, suddenly takes over.

Across a tract of salt march recently restored at a cost of over $9 million, a row of houses lines the waterfront in the little neighborhood of Harding Park, which is "dominated," says Wikipedia, "by detached bungalows very closely set, many of them built off the grid." Forgotten NY has some good photos in this decade-old post: The neighborhood, it says, "seems independent from the rest of the Bronx, since its street pattern is different and it's cut off by water from the rest of the borough. It's very, very odd."

Well, here at Park Odyssey we're always in search of the "very, very odd." Especially if it's "off the grid."

There's more to Soundview Park than one lonely walk along its waterfront. There's a soccer field, a track and field area, a brand new dog run, and a Facebook-only group called Friends of Soundview Park that sponsors events. There's a "massive boulder" called Black Rock that, according the Parks Department, "may have been a glacial erratic transported to the South Bronx by a glacier about 10,000 years ago. Mistaken for a meteorite by early settlers, the boulder was moved to Soundview Park, where it can be seen today."

We half-heartedly looked for the notable stone, but were too hot and hungry to scour the park's entire acreage and found neither the boulder nor the other sports facilities. In fact, our excursion was one of weird isolation. After passing the baseball game, we ran into only a handful of people the rest of the way. And on a hot summer's day, the way seemed long.

Speaking of odd, we did come across a little two-dimensional amphitheater. According to Broadway World – a website I'm pretty sure I've never before cited on this blog – there was a free screening of Yogi Bear at the ribbon-cutting in August 2015. And a free yoga lesson for children. Yogi and yoga: coincidence? I think not. The mysteries multiply at Soundview Park.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media