Joan of Arc Park

Big parks can hide many surprises, and sometimes those surprises are other parks. Riverside Park stretches for miles along the Hudson River, and while I've visited it for this project more than once (here and here), somehow I was sure it had secrets I hadn't discovered. Sure enough, a look at Google Maps turned up Joan of Arc Park, a tree-cloaked Riverside Drive median between 91st and 95th Streets.

Beginning near the northern tip is a dirt path. Finding a dirt path in the city is always a cause for celebration.

A kind of annex to Riverside Park, Joan of Arc Park is named for its equestrian statue of the martyred saint.

You need binoculars or a zoom lens to get a good look at Joan's face, which is beautiful and reflects her extreme youth as well as her idealism.

Sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973) put a lot of thought and work into the sculpture. She had her niece pose on a barrel for the figure, researched the armor at the Metropolitan Museum, modeled the horse after a real one, and so forth. The base, designed by John van Pelt, includes "a few limestone blocks from the tower in Rouen where Joan of Arc had been imprisoned," according to the Parks Department web page about the monument, which has much more information about the artist and the work.

South of the statue, the park's widening space offers still more relief for pavement-sore feet.

This sliver of green may have been "secret" from me, but of course it isn't from the locals. A number of people were sitting around the statue on the weekday afternoon when I walked through. Others came in as I neared the southern exit. This man and his dog seemed very happy to be here, and why not?

Straus Park and the Broadway Malls

On the tony Upper West side, where Broadway makes a little westward swoop before running into West End Avenue and continuing in a dead straight line to the far northern reaches of Manhattan, lies a lush little triangle called Straus Park.

The onetime Schuyler Square was renamed in 1912 in honor of Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, who died together on the Titanic. There's more on the Strauses' story here. Isidor Straus was a department store magnate, an owner of Macy's and a founder of Abraham & Straus. It was to a Long Island branch of the now-discontinued A&S that my mother dragged my brother and me every year for new clothes.

The centerpiece of Straus Park is the Straus Memorial fountain with its figure of Mercury reclining in contemplation. The fountain was dedicated April 15, 1915, and the Friends of Straus Park are celebrating the centennial later this year.

Mercury does look pretty sad to me.

But springtime flowers and greenery make the park itself pretty cheery. And cheerily pretty.

The park runs from 106th Street (otherwise known as Duke Ellington Boulevard) to 107th Street. The Strauses lived at 2747 Broadway, near 105th Street, according to the Parks Department.

Creating all the iron fencing must have kept quite a few blacksmiths busy.

A visit to Straus Park is a good opportunity to give a blogger's nod to the Broadway Malls, carefully tended medians between the northbound and southbound lanes of the former Bloomingdale Road. The Malls extend for miles, from 60th to 122nd Streets and 135th to 168th Streets. They're not parks, and generally you can't walk into them, but people do love sitting on the benches at the intersections, right in the middle of Broadway.

Here's one with a sculpture rusted to the exact same hue as the signpost. Nature is often a good art director.

Finally, a look at the same spot seen from the east side of Broadway shows how the Malls erupt in explosions of green from the bare pavement.

There's much more about the Broadway Malls at the Broadway Mall Association website, including how you can "adopt a bench" – that is, hand over some cash and get your name on one. There are an awful lot of medians to maintain. The Association raised and spent over half a million dollars in 2013.

Idlewild Park

Idlewild Airport was renamed for John F. Kennedy way back in 1963, but the name lives on in Idlewild Park, a big marshy area between the airport and the Queens neighborhoods of Rosedale and Springfield Gardens. Finding Springfield Park and Brookville Park were no-brainers – they're real parks, with signs, paths, bodies of water, and sports facilities.

Idlewild Park is another thing entirely.

After driving back and forth along wild, winding Brookville Boulevard and realizing there was no entry point to Idlewild Park to be found there, we decided to try our luck at the soccer field at 149th Avenue, where there was parking and a game going on.

Looping around to the far side of the pitch, we pushed our way through the reeds and found a crude trail of sorts.

A minute or two of walking, and voilà: the marsh.

From another little trail atop a ridge along the east side of the soccer pitch, we could see a creek wending its way east towards the wider stretches and tributaries of Hook Creek.

For most of us New Yorkers, these are extremely outlying areas that we're unlikely ever to come to by chance. So I should mention that our excursion was actually motivated (and specifically by this Curbed article) by a desire to visit the edge-of-Queens communities of Warnerville and Meadowmere Park, and naturally we tracked down the obvious place to eat. In Warnerville (or Rosedale – it's confusing, so never mind), through a twisting warren of roads with some houses still showing Superstorm Sandy damage, you can find the Bay House, a nice place to eat in a very out-of-the-way location. At high tide you could even take a boat up to the head of Jamaica Bay and dock a boat right there.

The sign in the water, much too small to read in this photo, warns boats to go no further – you'd be entering airport territory.

From the vantage point of Rockaway Boulevard, across the road from the Five Towns Shopping Center, the footbridge to Meadowmere Park looks like a rickety old thing. In fact it's a perfectly serviceable route to the tiny "forgotten" island community of Meadowmere Park, which is so not forgotten it has its own fire department.

And of course, you don't need to be in a park or a wildlife sanctuary to see wildlife. Cranes, for example, make their home around the old docks. Sure, the jellyfish may soon inherit the Earth, but for now, New York City and its 578 miles of coastline still have natural wonders aplenty.

Brookville Park

As we drove along 147th Avenue from Springfield Park to Brookville Park, an eagle-eyed member of our party spotted something remarkable and completely unexpected on the south side of the street, in the wild trees over Simonson's Creek, which runs through Brookville Park and under the road.

That's right – herons.

Yellow-crowned night herons, to be exact.

And we weren't even in the park yet. So, leaving the car at a small dirt parking area off 147th Avenue at the southern edge of the park proper, we ambled north along Conselyea's Pond, a large widening of Simonson's Creek and the centerpiece of 90-acre Brookville Park.

Lots of birds find this peaceful pond a comfortable place to be birds. It was a long way away, but I think this one's an egret:

Red-winged blackbirds darted around the pond, mostly too quick to capture on camera, so all I have is this blurry shot.

I also got a shot of an interesting bird from a distance. The blurry photo (below left) makes it a little hard to identify, at least for an avian ignoramus such as yours truly. Flipping through Stokes gives me one suggestion: could it be an American redstart?

It's a good thing Brookville Park presents pretty vistas and so much wildlife, because in terms of historical interest, or even information, there's precious little. Forgotten-NY notes that a trail that goes diagonally through the park marks "the path of the Cedarhurst Cutoff, a short-lived railroad spur that was abandoned in 1934."

Also, these creeks and ponds once helped supply Brooklyn with drinking water.

The area figures in the history of the "forgotten community" of Foster's Meadow. While I haven't tracked down the origin of the name "Conselyea's Pond," I did discover in the Foster's Meadow Chronicles that in 1858 "William Conselyea, 8 years old, while playing around his Foster's Meadow home, fell and was pierced six inches into the abdomen by a fence picket. After several days, lockjaw set in and he died on June 28th."

Killed by a picket fence, symbol of the American Dream. How ironic.

Below: some geese, ducks, a swan.

And again: yellow-crowned night herons. More and more of them. Herons in the scrubby trees over the water. Herons in the tall trees by the edge of the water. Herons. And more herons.

Lest you think these herons are just migrating through, here's one that's pretty clearly nesting.

A rare New York City sight: a raccoon hanging out in a tree in broad daylight. Brian took this great shot through his telephoto lens.

Photo by Brian Luster. All rights reserved.

The pond is clear and peaceful at its south end.

Further north, tough-looking tangles line its edge.

From a little bridge over the pond, I watched a turtle do some flips.

Tennis courts mark the midpoint of the park. Further north, the creek opens up into another pond, which I hope to get to on another excursion. I have many parks yet to visit in Queens.

Springfield Park

If you've ever flown into or out of JFK International, you may have noticed green and watery areas right by the airport. I sure have. But I never knew what they were.

Our recent excursion to the eastern edge of southern Queens turned up not only a number of parks and natural areas but a really surprising variety of wildlife. Springfield Park was the first one we visited.

Along with play areas and sports facilities, the park has a big area surrounding a large pond, called, as I learned from Forgotten-NY, Cornell's Pond.

Cormorants are fairly common in New York City waters, but I still get a kick out of the way they dive underneath, swim a considerable way hunting prey, and resurface some distance away.

A different kind of bird flew overhead, one every few minutes, taking off from Kennedy Airport.

Back in the pond, a turtle perched. Or a tortoise. Anyway, somebody with a hard shell on his or her back.

Off the pond runs the only remaining surface stretch of Thurston Creek, where a man who was walking his dog told us he sometimes sees crabs.

Crabs we didn't see. Fish, yes. Is this prey too small to interest the cormorant?

After circumnavigating the pond we took one more look around and then headed for nearby Brookville Park – and some much more unexpected wildlife sightings. But we, along with probably many of locals, were glad to read that a 1970 proposal to convert Springfield Park into an industrial complex was nixed.

Petrosino Square

Petrosino Square is a small street-intersection park in Soho. It's a prime exhibit for the proposition that even inherently uninteresting parks are always worth checking out, for the history if not the hibiscus.

The former Kenmare Square, actually a triangle (as are so many New York City "squares"), is named for the colorful and truly heroic Police Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino.

Born in 1860 in Salerno, Italy, Giuseppe Michele Pasquale Petrosino worked undercover in Little Italy to undermine the Black Hand and Mafia gangs. He also investigated anarchists and founded the bomb squad and the canine squad, the first of their kinds in the U.S., according to the Parks Department website (though Wikipedia's writer doesn't mention them).

In 1895 Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the Police Commission board (precursor to today's sole "Commissioner"), promoted Petrosino to sergeant of detectives.

In 1909 Petrosino went to Sicily on a supposedly secret mission to collect the penal certificates of a number of U.S.-resident Italian criminals to help extradite them from the United States. There, in Palermo, he became the only New York police officer ever to die in the line of duty in a foreign country. Yes, the Black Hand had got him. Gangrule.com has lots more information and some great photos.

Seventy-eight springtimes later, this little park was renamed for him.

The plaza is about as boring as can be.

But the flowers and the Citibikes bloom together on a sunny April afternoon.