Gramercy Park

Some parks are hard to find. Others are hard to get to. Gramercy Park is hard to get into. A private park since its creation in the 1830s and '40s, this two-acre landscaped oasis is reserved for residents and institutions around the park who pay an annual fee and receive a key.

That's why in the six years of this blog I'd never set foot inside Gramercy Park. Until the other night, when we took advantage of the only time each year the park is opened to the public: Christmas Eve, for a one-hour caroling fest.

Hundreds of people lined up by the tall iron fence in anticipation of the 6 PM opening.

The first visitors squirmed inside and crowded around the bandstand, where a small choir and brass band had begun their program of carols (plus one Chanukah song).

Few spectators were singing along. Most of the visitors had come, like us, mainly for the novelty of getting inside this normally off-limits reserve. Some took breaks on benches far from the bandstand, as if it were a warm summer day.

Walking around the park on the dirt paths was tricky, as the park wasn't lit. Later it became tricky in an additional way: as hundreds more people crowded in, the walkways began to choke up like the High Line on a sunny weekend.

Samuel B. Ruggles, the park's founder, was (per the New York Times) an "urban visionary who in 1831 deeded two acres of his property to be used as an ornamental park surrounded and maintained by a residential neighborhood of discreetly proportioned mansions." Not much has changed.

Some of those mansions house institutions rather than wealthy families. I've been to events at the Players' Club (there's a statue of its founder, Edwin Booth, in the park), the National Arts Club, and the Brotherhood Synagogue, for example.

The Bowery Boys have a good podcast about the history of the park and some of the interesting people and events associated with those "discreetly proportioned mansions" surrounding it.

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

Concrete Plant Park, ABC Waterwash, and Colgate Close Park

A number of New York City parks are imaginative reframings of archaic infrastructure and industrial facilities. The High Line in Manhattan is the most famous example. For another, just last week we posted an account of a visit to a former reservoir in The Bronx, now a park called the Williamsbridge Oval.

Guess what Concrete Plant Park, also in The Bronx, used to be?

But first, speaking of archaic infrastructure: When you come out of the Whitlock Avenue subway station you're greeted by an almost medieval-looking ruin. This is part of the long-abandoned Westchester Avenue train station.

Forgotten NY has some pre-ivied pictures of this once-handsome structure.

Now, into the park.

The Parks Department joined forces with the Bronx River Alliance and community groups to revitalize a half-mile-long stretch of Bronx River waterfront at the start of the new century. In 2009, the park opened.

As you enter from the north, images of abandonment quickly give way to pretty, if not quite bucolic, waterfront views.

To the north is the bridge that carries Westchester Avenue across the river.

As you continue south, the structures that give the park its name loom into view.

These are the remains of the Transit Mix Concrete Corporation's concrete batch mix plant.

Painted a dusty red, they rise like titanic modernist sculptures against the sky.

A million trees? Piece of cake. A billion oysters? Now that would really be something.

In the meantime, you can fish here. There's even a boat launch – this is part of the Bronx River Blueway.

As you continue south, the park ends (unless you count the undeveloped, fenced-off strip between the bike/walking path and the river) and the path leads out toward Bruckner Boulevard and the Bruckner Expressway. Parallel to the path, colorful graffiti lines an overgrown railroad track.

Gazing north from Bruckner Boulevard gives a view of the whole long, narrow park strung along the river.

On the east side, ABC Carpet and Home sponsored a environmental wetland art project called Waterwash ABC by the artist Lillian Ball, which opened in 2012. "Through innovative design, the project will construct a wetland park to filter storm runoff, improve habitat, and increase Bronx River public access," the plan stated. "Outreach will educate community about watershed issues through an aesthetic nature experience."

There was no public access when we passed by; it was locked up tight. Was it still being maintained in the summer of 2016? We couldn't tell. There are some nice photos from the opening at Ball's website.

As we headed to Soundview Park (covered in the next post), we walked by Colgate Close Park, a onetime "unused concrete lot" now mostly occupied by a playground and athletic field but also a garden and nice ironwork fences that are very New York.

The Parks Department website explains the name "Colgate Close" and describes this fanciful design on the backstop as Cubby the Catcher. A Google search for "Cubby the Catcher" (in quotes) turns up exactly one result: the Parks Department website. Cubby's origin, then – or at least the derivation of his name – will have to remain obscure, at least for now.

The bigger mystery of Colgate Close Park is John Cloes (later spelled Close), whom the Parks Department knows only as "an early pioneer in New York." Financier James Boorman Colgate (1818-1904) was a founder and president of the New York Gold Exchange. In a money- and trade-centric city like New York, that's plenty to get a street and park named after you. But as for Cloes, the "early pioneer" who gave his name to Close Avenue and now Colgate Close Park, a quick web search doesn't help us much.

Also, I object to the redundant phrase "early pioneer." Just saying.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Williamsbridge Oval

Williamsbridge Oval in The Bronx is a repurposed reservoir. Like a number of other New York City parks, among them Highland Park on the Brooklyn-Queens border, Silver Lake Park in Staten Island, and Bryant Park in Manhattan, it sits where the city once stored drinking water.

The 17th-century farmer John Williams was reputed to have built the first bridge across the Bronx River. The ancient span was named for him, and the surrounding community acquired the name "Williamsbridge."

The city opened the Williamsbridge Reservoir in 1889 and used it as such until the 1930s. At that point its floor was raised to just 12 feet below street level and it was repurposed as a park, opened with fanfare by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in 1937.

The Bainbridge Avenue entrance, near the Valentine-Varian House

Inside, parents and kids were lined up for something – face painting, possibly, we couldn't tell – outside the Recreation Center.

It was a warm, muggy day, but only one kid was playing in the sprinkler.

A lot more were on the field, including teams of big kids playing football in uniforms.

We walked around the oval's quieter, tree-lined, but slightly nerve-inducing edge.

An impressive pink fungus stared up at us from the base of a sturdy-looking tree.

Not all the facilities were in use, and some aspects of the park don't appear very well maintained. There's no Williamsbridge Oval Alliance to supplement the Parks Department's limited budget. This isn't a rich part of town.

At the northern end it's easy to perceive the difference in elevation between the park and the street, and imagine the space's past as a reservoir.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media