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.

Bush Terminal Park

A day in the life of a parks blogger:

Quietly, almost without telling anyone, a big new park opened just last fall on the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Absent the kind of fanfare (and controversies) that accompanied the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park – the brightest new stars in the firmament of New York City parks – Bush Terminal Park began welcoming visitors a few months ago, after a decade of planning.

It happened on the eve of a cold and seemingly interminable winter, during which, naturally, hardly anyone was thinking about parks. I was, of course. But I hadn't heard the news about Bush Terminal Park, also known as Bush Terminal Piers Park.

Fast-forward to last Friday morning. We've got the TV news on, and an item appeared on NY1's "Community Calendar" about an event at Bush Terminal Park in Brooklyn. I did a literal double take: There was a park in Brooklyn I'd never heard of? A park big enough to have an event in? Maybe it was a typo – maybe it wasn't a park, but a misprint for "Bush Terminal Armory," or "Bush Terminal Market," or "Bush Terminal Moraine." Or maybe it was a park, but in Brooklyn, Missouri.

As it turns out, Bush Terminal Park is very real and definitely in Brooklyn. I headed there that very same day, as the sunny afternoon faded into evening and a blustery wind made the upper-50s temperatures feel brisk.

The new park was built on a former brownfield site, which means it was contaminated by hazardous or toxic substances ("oils, oil sludges, and wastewaters" according to Wikipedia). The former Piers 1-4 now hosts restored tide ponds and beautiful blue water. Everything looks and smells nice. Still, the grassy rises near the water made me think about what might lie, or have lain, beneath.

Athletic fields take up big chunks of the park's 22 acres, but they're closed off and separate from the waterfront areas.

I wasn't surprised to see geese and ducks. In the next image, the strip of earth covered with netting is part of the fenced-off "Protected Natural Area No Access" – a part, I guess, of what the Parks Department website refers to as "a nature preserve that allows a fun glimpse into Brooklyn's wild side." Which is, as things look now, really pushing the point. But nature will take time to take its course!

I did hear and see some unexpected wildlife here, two kinds of non-urban-typical birds. One songbird flew into a high tree before I could get a good look or a photo, but these black birds were less shy, though hard for me to identify in this faraway image. Might they be rusty blackbirds?

One thing I didn't expect, after looking at the site on a map, was this great view of the Lower Manhattan and Jersey City skylines.

Another skyline view, from the south end of the park, takes in a small fraction of the enormous quantity of grey rocks that were employed in the construction and landscaping of the park. I'd be interested to know where they came from.

So what's Bush Terminal, and who was Bush?

Irving T. Bush began freight and warehousing operations here in 1895. After some struggles, his Bush Terminal Company became very successful. Wikipedia has a good history on its page about Industry City, the modern name for what the complex has become. The company headquarters, complete with a statue of Bush, still stands, just outside the entrance to the park.

Though today Industry City is noted for artists' studios and modern businesses, I gather from the Trainweb website that the modern-day New York Cross Harbor Railroad still floats goods, including steel and biosolids (fertilizer made from treated sewage), on rail cars between Brooklyn and New Jersey.

I habitually looked both ways before crossing these disused tracks. The local stray cats take no such cautions.

Not everything here has been preserved or refurbished.

But after seeing all the businesses closing up shop for the day, I didn't need Prosperity Noodle, way back up on Fourth Avenue, to tell me there's a lot more going on in Sunset Park in 2015 than Sunset Park.

One of the best things about my quest to visit every park in New York City is the history I uncover as a by-product, including recent history. If Bush Terminal Park had not come into being, nobody who doesn't work in the Industry City area would pass by this firefighters' memorial.

The editor in me feels they deserved a possessive apostrophe and a correct spelling of "heroes." But the explorer in me is glad to know that it's here – along with all the rest of the history of Bush Terminal, which in its heyday had thousands of employees, its own police force and fire department, two power plants, restaurants, a bank, a trolley for commuting workers, and a longshoremen's hall. (I wonder what the longshoremen did in their hall. Did they drink mead?)

Don't be fooled by looking at a Google map: the only entrance to Bush Terminal Park is via 43rd Street. Take the R train to 45th or the N to 36th and walk west through the extremely un-park-like industrial district separating the neighborhood's commercial area from the waterfront and the new park. Enter through a gate that looks like it might be private, but isn't (you can tell from the bike-path markings).

In closing, here's a pump by the building with the fire department memorial. I have nothing to say about it. It just looks cool.

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.