Inwood Hill Park

Inwood Hill Park, at the very northern tip of Manhattan, is a park like no other on the island, with the only remaining natural forest and a real salt marsh. The forest claws up the steep hill abruptly from the flat lower section with its benches and athletic fields. This pair of birds darted across the salt marsh below. I'm not sure what they are – they look a bit like ducklings but ducklings wouldn't be running around by themselves. Immature coots? If anyone knows, please leave a comment! I've seen more exotic-looking birds than that in Inwood Hill Park on past trips, but on this early June jaunt the songbirds made their presence known through sound more than sight. It had rained heavily the previous day, and the air in the woods smelled heavy, rich, and loamy, as if the Hudson River had lofted itself into the atmosphere. The many unmarked trails with their straightaways, curves, and steps allow one to get some actual exercise while feeling more and more lost. Fortunately you can't go too far without catching a view of some waterway or other, and if you have a general sense of what's where surrounding Manhattan things tend to become clear. Inwood Hill Park puts one in touch with the distant past in a way very few spots in the city do. The old growth and unleveled terrain hide signs of ancient habitation by the Lenape Indians, and the famous transaction at which Peter Minuit "bought" Manhattan from them in 1606 is said to have occurred here. It is said to have occurred in a number of other locations as well; we'll probably never know for sure. Whatever the case, these mounted authority figures are making sure the Indians don't try to take it back. Not too many years ago the park and environs didn't feel all that safe, and you could wander the crumbling paths of Inwood Hill all afternoon and meet hardly anyone, with only a creeping anxiety for company. Nowadays, though, on a warm weekend day the park sees plenty of action. It's even safe for games of ultimate frisbee: At the north end you can walk under the Henry Hudson Bridge, which leads to the Bronx… …catch a view of some boats in the far distance… …and on the way down, get a look at that impressive salt marsh. It's impossible to get a true experience of the wild on the island of Manhattan, but in Inwood Hill Park's nearly 200 acres you can get closer than anywhere else to the natural elements that Henry Hudson saw when he first sailed up that wide, breathing estuary that bears his name.

Grover Cleveland Park

My trip to Cleveland Park was an addendum to a visit to the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House (inset photo), a 1709 Dutch farmhouse in Ridgewood, Queens that's well worth a trip (and worth your support, especially if you're a Ridgewood-area resident). With several restored rooms in two sections, the older section of fieldstone (shown in photo) and the newer of wood, and an acre and a half of grass behind (with chickens!), this historic house is one of those hidden New York City treasures everyone should know about.

But this being a parks blog, a stopover at a nearby park was de rigeur, and Cleveland Park presented itself as the most obvious choice. The sign at the entrance says "Grover Cleveland Playground" but the park is much bigger than a playground – over five acres – with green stretches and space for passive enjoyment. It's named for the President who, though born in New Jersey, made his career in New York State, becoming governor in 1883 and winning the presidency for the first time the following year. The park adjoins Linden Hill Cemetery and dates from the 1920s. It includes a variety of playgrounds and facilities; originally, it even had tennis courts, according to the Parks Department.

The comfort station was a not insignificant part of my appreciation of Cleveland Park:

And in fact, there isn't very much else picturesque about the park. It took me a while to find this splash of flowery color: And, uh…well, here's that handsome comfort station again. The black figures on the right are not shades drifted over from the cemetery next door but Muslim mothers taking their children on a perfectly normal trip to the playground. And the most memorable aspect of my visit wasn't anything visible, but the smell of the skewered meat being enthusiastically cooked at a vendor cart just outside the entrance. However, until they invent Smell-o-Rama for blogs, you'll just have to take my word for that.

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.