Nameless SoHo Park (Bobby Boles Park)

Down in SoHo, at the convocation of Watts, Broome, and Thompson Streets just west of West Broadway, sits a small triangular park – a sliver park, as these tiny oases are sometimes called. As near as my research can determine, it's part of the Parks Department's Greenstreets program, though I didn't notice a Greenstreets sign.

Forgotten New York explains that the island is a "result of latter-day street engineering, as prior to 1905 or thereabouts, Watts ended its eastern progress at Sullivan, but then it was extended to meet Broome just west of W. Broadway, creating the triangle."

Forgotten New York doesn't explain, and I can't tell you either, why the little park didn't get a name when, around the turn of the 21st century, it was landscaped with patterned stones, pleasant plantings (including a beautiful crape myrtle), a circle of benches, and a central sculpture. I think it deserves one.

Fortunately, every neighborhood has its chroniclers, you sometimes just have to hunt for them. Soho Memory tells us that the park has been unofficially called Bobby Bolles Park, because before it was turned into a park, sculptor and pro welder Robert S. Bolles, sometimes known as Bob Steel, installed his works here – without permission.

As amNY reported back in 2003, "For years, Bolles' sculptures covered what was then an asphalt traffic island. Bolles, a Gypsy, carved the 'Tree of Life' on the site with a blowtorch from a large metal pipe. It was his last major work before he died in 1980." By then, though, he had received official permission to install his works, according to a 1979 profile by Francis X. Clines in the New York Times. Bolles and his work were notable enough to get a mention in the Fifth Edition (2010) of the AIA Guide to New York City.

The city removed the sculptures when it made the park, but it seems one was re-installed, and in a place of honor. From what I've read of the "Tree of Life" sculpture, this isn't that one, but it does look like his work:

The little park narrows to a point at its eastern end where it stabs West Broadway.

No, the passions of current politics haven't bypassed this obscure little spot.

But it's good to be reminded that continuity can sometimes be found if you look hard enough. Sometimes a locally legendary character will, decades on, be memorialized, even if unofficially, in the urban landscape on which he had at one time a notable influence. Bob Bolles didn't live to see the world brought to its knees by COVID-19 in 2020, the Twin Towers fall in 2001, or even the Mets win the World Series in 1986. But in this unnamed little park in SoHo, he lives on.

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Allison Pond Park, Goodhue Park, and Jones Woods Park

For vanity's sake I'm loathe to compile multiple parks into one post. Writing one discrete post for each park means not only a fairly accurate count of parks visited but also a maximum marker of pride in how many I've covered.

Still, it makes sense to combine Staten Island's Allison Pond Park and Goodhue Park since I couldn't identify the border separating the two. And I've added Jones Woods Park because it's more-or-less contiguous with Goodhue.

I've been to Sailors' Snug Harbor – officially known today as Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden – numerous times, both for leisurely visits and to review productions by the late lamented Harbor Lights Theater Company. I never knew or noticed that a large park lay just across the street to the south. Until this year, that is, when a neighbor clued me in. I looked on a map and lo and behold, there it was. Or rather, there they were.

Allison Pond Park

Entering Allison Pond Park from Prospect Avenue, you immediately face an excellent prospect: the pond itself, graced by a gracious fountain and paddled by the largest turtles I've ever seen in a New York City park.

An egret, too, posed conveniently on our recent visit.

Venturing beyond the pond, one finds the Allison Pond Park Trail well maintained.

You can easily feel like you're in a remote forest as you gaze at Harbor Brook.

Still there are plenty of signs this is anything but a virgin forest.

And speaking of virgins, both Allison Pond Park and Goodhue Park were festooned with recently planted saplings protected by plastic tubes.

George William Allison (1888-1939) was an engineer who, as Borough Works Commissioner, supervised all of Staten Island's Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects beginning in 1934. According to SI Live, these New Deal programs employed 19,000 Staten Islanders.

The park that bears his name was once part of Sailors' Snug Harbor, at the time a home for retired sailors. Allison Pond itself, according to Forgotten New York, is "small glacial leftover that once provided water" to nearby Snug Harbor. The pond, along with the surrounding area through which the brook flows, officially became New York City parkland in the 1940s. The city renovated Allison Pond Park in 1990.

Goodhue Park

Jonathan Goodhue bought and began developing the property in 1841, building his Woodbrook Mansion. In 1912 his descendant Sarah Parker Goodhue (1828-1917), "a grande dame of Gilded Age New York City" who with her husband collected art treasures in Europe and the U.S., donated the land to the Children's Aid Society, which operated a summer camp and an agricultural camp for girls here. Goodhue Park is still partly managed by the Society, which today oversees athletic fields and an outdoor swimming pool among other facilities.

The city began acquiring the property in 2009, a few years after the Society announced it needed to sell the land in order to survive here. The purchase came in stages, with funds allocated for a third parcel in 2017 after community action against a sale to private developers. The arrangement seems to have worked out OK, with the Society continuing to manage activities here.

The friendly pool manager told us that some young teenagers had recently been caught vandalizing the saplings. This appetite for destruction is almost inconceivable to me, as it was to him. The kids were punished for it, but – lesson learned? Who knows.

Goodhue Park has more to recommend it than trees, forest trails and turtles. This weird thing, for example:

I couldn't figure out what it was. What were all these stump things? Was it some weird pagan ritual site?

Mrs. Odyssey spotted the key structure. It's in the sunlight in the following photo.

It's hard to make out, so I'll just tell you: It's a stage. This is an amphitheater, which like most of the park's manmade features is a holdover from past Children's Aid Society activities. Overgrown, mossy, but right there by the trail. In an SI Live post with many photos, Tom Wrobleski reports counting about 200 seats.

More holdovers hide in the woods atop a steep climb.

Three abandoned structures also date from the Children's Aid Society's heyday here.

This sort of find is the kind of thing that you don't encounter in any other borough of New York City. Staten Island is a weird, wild world unto itself.

Harbor Brook runs through the ravine below the hills. As another SI Live post explains, it "drains the area from Jones Woods Park and the surrounding hillsides southward. As it exits Goodhue, the brook continues through Allison Pond Park. A culvert from Allison Pond leads to the stream in Snug Harbor and hence to the Kill van Kull." Yes, it's all connected.

The large reptiles here, again per SI Live, are snapping turtles. They're shy and slide into the water if you come near.

It wouldn't be a Staten Island excursion without an encounter with at least one ungulate. This deer was nosing around a Children's Aid Society building at the edge of Goodhue Park.

Jones Woods Park

A short trail runs into the abovementioned Jones Woods Park, some of which is dense inaccessible forest.

Soon the trail disgorges you onto a semi-hidden street, fenced off from the rest of the park.

There's one strange old blocky building. Abandoned?

On the other side of the street rises the mysterious part of Jones Woods.

Jones Woods Park came down to us from stockbroker and entrepreneur Shipley Jones, whose estate here was known as The Cedars, according to real estate writer Anthony Licciardello. Jones died in 1936, after which developers began to sniff around.

Like Goodhue Park, Jones Woods was saved from development thanks to a movement to preserve the land that progressed in stages, beginning in 1996. The city paid $17 million for it.

I've seen blog posts (like this one) and photos that suggest there's another entrance to Jones Woods Park from another side. If there's access we didn't reach, we'll get to it next time and I'll update this post.

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Castle Hill Point Park

Castle Island Point Park was the final reward of our walk that began at the NYC Ferry's Soundview terminal in Clason Point Park, snaked along Snakapins Path through Pugsley Creek Park, and wound around said creek. It doesn't feel like New York City at all as you approach the edge of Castle Point. More like a seaside resort in some almost-rural sort of place.

Here at Castle Island Point one comes closest to the sublime.

With the mouth of Westchester Creek on the east side, the mouth of Pugsley Creek on the west, and the East River straight ahead leading into the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, Castle Hill Point is one of the New York City waterfront's many excellent spots for observing water-loving birds. This heron, for example (I think it's a great blue heron):

And this egret, a great egret I think. (Egrets, I have read, are also a type of heron):

Look away from the water and you might catch a pretty bird too. A juvenile robin, for example:

After an unsuccessful attempt to find a bathroom (Blackgal Sea Food is a takeout spot that doesn't offer one) we headed back the way we had come, onto the Wappinger Trail, which turns into the Snakapins Path, which leads through Pugsley Creek Park, and then through the streets back to Clason Point Park, where we boarded an NYC Ferry, which had a bathroom, and back to Odyssey HQ where we plotted our next adventure – which takes us to several parks in Staten Island that I hadn't been aware of even though they're very close to Snug Harbor. Stay tuned!

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Pugsley Creek Park

Watching The Addams Family reruns back in the '70s, I used to think "Pugsley" a funny name. No doubt it was chosen – over the too sexual-sounding "Pubert," as it happens – for its hint of humor. However, as far as I know, there's nothing especially funny about the Pugsley family that is today memorialized by Pugsley Creek and Pugsley Creek Park in the Soundview section of the Bronx, just north of Clason Point Park.

I suppose back then the Pugsleys might have been the "authorities" and had a sign much like this one, which greets visitors to the neighborhood with a strange sort of welcome:

In the 1800s the Pugsleys used the creek to bring supplies to their farm. (The waterway ran further inland back then.) What was once Cromwell's Creek – after John Cromwell (a cousin of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell) who had settled neighboring Castle Hill Neck around 1650 – became known as the more lighthearted, but sadly less alliterative, Pugsley Creek.

Of course the history goes much further back than the Lord Protector's time over in the mother country. The Parks Department website informs us that archaeologists discovered "primitive" stone tools near the head of the creek, tools presumably used by the Siwanoy Indians in the workshop mentioned in this 2001 NYC School Construction Authority report. The Siwanoy village was near the tip of Castle Hill Neck.

(Note: "Siwanoy" is likely just a loose term that European settlers came to apply to Indigenous populations of the area. There's no definitive evidence of a distinct group by that name. So what did the villagers call themselves? Maybe just "us over here." I suppose we'll never know.)

The entrance to the park from the south is marked by a sign denoting Snakapins Path. (Snakapins was the Indigenous people's name for nearby Clason's Point or for their settlement there.) While it may have once been a pathway used by the "Siwanoy," today's it's a pleasant and uncrowded bikeway. We encountered only one party of bikers and one or two pedestrians during our hike. Along the way the path morphs into the Wappinger Trail, named for the Indigenous people of today's Westchester.

Someone apparently wants to lay a claim to the place.

The path intersects the water near the creek's terminus.

The water level was very low here on this hot July day. I suppose this stretch didn't contain any fish because we saw no water birds here. (Stay tuned for the next post, though.)

The path bends around the creek and continues along its opposite side into Castle Hill Point Park, the subject of the next post.

All photos © Critical Lens Media