Rufus King Park

Rufus King was a signer of the Constitution, President George Washington's Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, the last Federalist U.S. Senator, and James Monroe's opponent in the 1816 presidential election. He was a key figure in stopping the expansion of slavery into new U.S. territories.

And he lived in Jamaica, Queens, where his house is now the King Manor Museum, the centerpiece of Rufus King Park.

The oldest part of the manor was built in 1750. King bought it and the surrounding 90-care farm in 1805. His oldest son John Alsop King, a governor of New York, inherited the house, and the King family resided here until 1896. The eleven acres that remained of the property became a park, which has recreational facilities and a bandstand. The manor itself was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been a museum open to the public since 1900.

These days the museum hosts events including concerts, such as the Five Boroughs Music Festival program I covered recently where the ensemble Tenet played music much older than the house, and much older, in fact than the colonies themselves.

At night the park takes on an expressive, if artificial, glow –

– a glow that makes it hard to take a picture of the house without capturing your own shadow cast large on the exterior.

Ocean Breeze Park

The same day I visited Eibs Pond Park I stopped by two other Staten Island natural sites, Brady's Pond (the supposed public access to which I couldn't find) and Ocean Breeze Park, a large tidal meadow near South Beach. Aside from an athletic complex in one corner, the park has precious little for the breezes to waft over. All I found walking its paths were big stretches of nothing.

Entering from Quintard Street, which was under heavy construction, I found sandy paths, some of them flooded.

A big hump of asphalt was a mystery.

At first I thought I was the only human being in the park. But I did pass one couple walking the sandy paths (and avoiding the watery ones).

The Parks Department website explains that Ocean Breeze Park's 136 acres were "originally part of a vast tidal meadow through which a network of winding tidal creek channels traversed." It seems the creeks don't want to take no for an answer.

Eibs Pond Park

One of Staten Island's little-known treasures is 16-acre Eibs Pond Park, a wetland nature reserve set surprisingly amid drab housing developments in the Park Hill neighborhood. At three acres the biggest kettle pond in the city, Eibs Pond centers a 16-acre protected wetlands area.

(Forest Park and Blue Heron Park also have kettle ponds, water-filled depressions left by a retreating glacier.)

The entrances and signage reflect the park's homespun nature. Officially a New York City park only since 1989, it feels like the kind of reserve you might find in a distant suburb.

A dirt path circles the pond. On my first approach, something fairly large jumped off a rock into the water with a loud splash, but my eyes weren't quick enough to see what it was. It didn't surface. At least not nearby. But I think it must have been a mammal.

I did see a red-winged blackbird. They're common in New York City's wetland areas.

A crude boardwalk bridge crosses the center of the wetland.

Residue of a complicated past litters the park. The Eibs family watered their horses and dairy cows here in the 1800s. Spending the summer of 1843 nearby, Henry David Thoreau, according to the Parks Department website, was inspired to write that "The whole island is like a garden," meaning Staten Island I think. In the early 20th century D.W. Griffith shot Birth of a Nation's Civil War battle sequences around the pond.

Then it became a water hazard for a golf course, and hosted curling competitions in the winter. During World War Two the site hosted Italian prisoners of war.

A major restoration around the turn of the century gave us Eibs Pond Park roughly as we see it today. Tangles of trees and vines lend it a dense, murky, vaguely dangerous air, heightened by its small size, its evidence of occupation by the homeless, and, when I visited on a warm spring weekend, its emptiness.

On the other hand, the layout doesn't lend itself to lounging about, or to any sort of recreation. Unless you're a mysterious possible-mammal with a penchant for sudden dives into the pond. And I wouldn't have it any other way.