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

Clason Point Park and Waterfront Garden

Thanks to the NYC Ferry it's now easy for people from around the city to visit some of the parks on the Bronx coast that aren't otherwise easy to get to by public transportation. A few years ago, for example, a visit to Soundview Park required a long subway ride followed by a walk through a neighborhood that seemed saddled with infrastructural neglect.

The ferry's new Soundview line terminates at Clason Point Park (the name is pronounced "Clawson") at the tip of a small peninsula that houses the tiny neighborhood of Harding Park. To quote Forgotten New York, Harding Park is "the maze of little unnamed streets and bungalows found along Bronx River, Leland, Gildersleeve and Cornell Avenues in the southwest sector of Clason Point...[I]t 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."

As exploratory documentarians demonstrate year after year, New York City encompasses many "very, very odd" places and things. Clason Point Park itself, though, isn't one of them.

As in many places on July 5, the grounds were littered with fireworks debris. But the park's virtues, like its swathes of grass shaded by trees, remained evident.

Viewed from beneficial angles, the winding paths and healthy-looking trees shading clean benches and jumbles of grey rocks make the park an appealing waterfront green space...

...though not one for swimming.

A more recent Forgotten New York post – by Sergey Kadinsky, author of Hidden Waters of New York City (a book any NYC explorer who's interested in history will find valuable) – recounts how Clason Point once housed an amusement park, and later a sort of mini-Catskills resort called Shore Haven that catered to the Bronx's then-substantial Jewish population.

Back in the 1940s, revelers would have had a nice view of the Whitestone Bridge connecting the Bronx with Queens, though not the newer Throgs Neck Bridge, which you can see beyond the Whitestone today.

Information about Isaac Clason, other than that he was a Scottish landowner and merchant, is hard to find. The "point" that bears his name has an interesting history, though. Here's one awful detail recounted in the AIA Guide, as quoted in a 2000 New York Times article by Philip Lopate: "Tragedy came in 1924 when a freak wind squall blew down the Clason Point Amusement Park's Ferris wheel...killing 24."

The park's upper portion winds northward along the eastern edge of the peninsula. It's not hard to imagine a good-sized resort or amusement park on this large, flat, unused grassy field.

Continuing north through this quiet area of the park, we encountered only one other human, who appeared to be unhoused and was sleeping on the ground. (Not pictured.)

A tree full of delicious mulberries rewarded us on this hot, sweaty day of exploration.

Leaving the park, we wended our way to a nearby community garden called the Waterfront Garden. Its lush, fanciful landscaping and view of the East River (or Long Island Sound, if you prefer) welcomed us inside. So did a friendly local man who was passing by.

The garden is somehow affiliated with the New York Botanical Garden, and it shows.

Next up: onward to Pugsley Creek Park.

All photos © Critical Lens Media