Doughboy Park

There are lots of “doughboy parks” in New York City – parks with memorials to the young Americans who fought in World War I. Nine of them, according to the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, including those at DeWitt Clinton Park and Abingdon Square. But only one is actually called Doughboy Park (the name Doughboy Plaza is also used), and if any place deserves the name, it’s this former WWI mustering ground in Woodside, Queens.

The monument itself features Burt W. Johnson’s sculpture of a soldier standing in a peaceful, almost devotional pose that’s unusual for this sort of statue. In my opinion it’s more affecting than the more active poses of other doughboy memorials.

Dedicated in 1923, the memorial has since acquired a very specific character, with a list (added in 2006) of the soldiers from the neighborhood who died in the Great War. According to the Parks Department, the American Federation of Arts named the Woodside Doughboy (originally called the Returning Soldier) the century’s best war memorial of its kind, and community members still gather here every Memorial Day.

Doughboy Park is adjacent to P.S. 11 and was originally a play area for the school, but after being judged too steep it became a city park. That doesn’t keep kids out, though, especially for an Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday.

Aside from the somber doughboy himself, the park’s most striking feature is a large brick compass rose annotated with the names of the ancient Greek wind gods (the Anemoi), including my favorite, Zephyrus. Which Greek wind god is your favorite?

I love the design impulse behind features like that. It’s rare today. A Google Maps image shows that the points of the compass in fact do indicate north, south, east and west.

Getting a different kind of direction was a group of costumed young people rehearsing or videoing a performance of some kind.

One corner of the park hints at natural landscape and even wilderness. Cutting through this undeveloped area is a dirt trail that drew me inexorably along it as if I were hiking through the woods, even though it doesn’t really go anywhere at all.

Triangle Parks of Woodside

The Queens neighborhood of Woodside makes good use of its traffic triangles where streets cross at oblique angles. Several of these contain small memorial parks. Woodside Memorial Park and John Vincent Daniels Jr. Square honor war dead, and John Downing Park memorializes a firefighter.

Woodside Memorial Park, also called Woodside Plaza, is a general war memorial honoring local residents who died in World Wars I and II, Korea, and Viet Nam. Its notable features are its blocks of schist which, unlike most such rocky New York City outcrops, are trimmed like hedges to fit in the sculptured landscaping. It’s a weird effect.

I don’t imagine the water fountain gets much use. I always take note of these, though, because I’m glad they still exist amid the enormous bottled water scam that’s bamboozled our whole misguided nation.

One stop away on the #7 train you’ll find John Vincent Daniels Jr. Square and John Downing Park. Daniels was a Woodside resident who died near the end of World War I. His triangle is a relatively large one, large enough for its own page on the Parks Department website, and his memorial is a relatively new one, which is clear from its mention of “World War I.” Most such memorials around the city refer to the Great War. Who in the 1920s imagined that after the horrors of the “war to end all wars” another such conflict could ever happen?

The Board of Alderman named the site in 1933, “to pay tribute to a son of Queens County who made the supreme sacrifice in the World War.”

We have Maurice E. Connolly, Queens Borough President from 1911 to 1928, to thank for the parcel’s initial development as a park. Connolly was later convicted for his part in a sewer graft scandal, despite being represented by Max Steuer of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire fame. Do ill-begotten sewers run underneath John Vincent Daniels Jr. Square (which is, in fact, a triangle)? Maybe. But the upshot, a nice little park, is nicer to think about.

The much smaller triangle of John Downing Park honors Firefighter John Downing, who died in the line of duty on June 17, 2001.

This park is so small the benches are on the outside. But no park is too small to show signs of spring.