Starlight Park

Starlight Park, an essential part of the slowly-but-surely developing Bronx River Greenway, officially opened in the spring of 2023 after 20-plus years of work. The result is a unique park of 13 acres hugging both sides of the Bronx River between Concrete Plant Park and the Bronx Zoo.

Starlight Park inherits its whimsical name from an early-20th-century amusement park that use to reside here. The Bowery Boys write that Starlight Amusement Park sounds like it was "a hyper, dizzying place" with "an enormous swimming pool with faux rock features, a nearby roller coaster" (where a terrible accident occurred in 1922), and "Coney Island-esque games and rides, boat rides, and outdoor performances by opera singers and greased up wrestlers."

Picture that. Opera singers and greased-up wrestlers. Now that's entertainment!

Today's park is a colorful mix, with river views, retired infrastructure, sports and boating facilities, and the Bronx River Alliance headquarters.

The site preserves relics of a time, decades ago, when the Bronx River was an active route for transporting goods. A disused railroad bridge still stands.

Traversing the park you cross the river more than once on well-preserved, cheery-blue bridges.

These bridges, according to a city press release, "help to link the park to surrounding communities, one going over the Bronx River itself just north of Westchester Avenue and one going over railroad tracks owned by Amtrak at E. 172 Street. New York State DOT built one new bridge spanning the river as part of the creation of Sheridan Boulevard, completed in 2019."

Sheridan Boulevard, incidentally, which runs alongside Starlight Park, is New York State Route 895 – "the highest-numbered signed state route in New York," per East Coast Roads. A few years ago this grade-level road replaced the elevated Sheridan Expressway, the onetime Interstate 895 – another boon to the people of the Bronx.

The Bronx Times report on the completion of the conversion, dated Dec. 20, 2019, noted: "Other improvements included in the project are transforming the currently overgrown Garrison Park and building a shared use path between Concrete Plant Park and Garrison Park."

Done and done.

In the (redundantly named) "Edible Food Garden" at Concrete Plant Park. This didn't exist on our first visit back in 2016.

Views of the river reveal both its prettied-up stretches and its grimy history. In some spots, you could really think you're in the wild.

In others, not so much.

The Bronx River Greenway is by no means a contiguous whole. Not yet.

The Greenway project has been a collaboration among city agencies: Parks, Transportation, and the Department of Design and Construction. Not to mention the aforementioned Bronx River Alliance. New York State's ongoing work on the roads and highways is playing a part too. And all this work is paying off. Starlight Park and the other completed sections are already a big positive for the surrounding Bronx neighborhoods.

To this point the parks include, according to the city press release, "140 new trees and close to 12,000 new shrubs to support the restoration of the Bronx River shoreline, including wetlands that improve water quality in the river and help to curtail erosion." We do love our wetlands here at Park Odyssey.

They've also installed new retaining walls and lighting, a dog run, "4,000 feet of new pathway" and "drainage and electrical upgrades." The press release notes that 50,000 tons of soil has been "removed and replaced to promote ecological health." That's a helluva lot of soil. I wonder where they put the old dirt.

A final note: There's another little park called West Farms Rapids Park at the north end of Starlight, completed in 2020. We somehow missed it on this walk, although we may have traversed this spot on a Bronx River walking and canoeing adventure back in 2019, which also took us on something called the Mitsubishi Riverwalk, which, if it still exists, is part of the Bronx Zoo.

The moral, as if it needed repeating: There's always something more to explore.

All photos © Oren Hope

Garrison Park

Never forgetting the quest that launched this blog project 13 years ago, I continue to seek to visit every park in New York City. And although there have been a few exceptions, each park gets its own blog post. In that spirit, I give you Garrison Park.

Part of the in-progress Bronx River Greenway, a ribbon of parkland that's slowly blossoming along the rejuvenated Bronx River, Garrison itself is little more than a stretch of bike and walking path dangling like a tail off the industrially picturesque Concrete Plant Park. But when I discovered the latter in 2016, it was something of an oasis.

Concrete Plant Park, 2023

Looking north from Concrete Plant Park

Today, Concrete Plant Park continues as Garrison Park to the south, and to the north links up with a tiny entity called West Farms Rapids (formerly Bronx River Park) and then the very substantial new Starlight Park.

Alongside these parks runs a train track. Following it south on the map, it curves away from the river and appears to end up at Hunts Point. The fact that you can just walk across it here suggests that it's no longer in use, but I don't know that for sure.

The park also passes under the Bruckner Expressway.

Though it's mostly a pathway, Garrison Park does offer benches for enjoying riparian breezes and inner-city quiet.

Next up: Starlight Park

All photos © Oren Hope

Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff

Just in the past couple of years the West Village/Chelsea section of Hudson River Park has absorbed the additions of Little Island and Pier 57 Rooftop Park. Now this part of Manhattan has yet another option for outdoor culture: the Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff, a pier off Gansevoort Street with a sand "beach."

This square-ish pier has plenty of seating for picnics, space for the sand-averse, and good views up and down the Hudson.

Maybe the coolest thing here is invisible: an underwater oyster habitat on the north side, seeded in 2022 with 20 million juvenile oysters – part of the Billion Oyster Project.

There are boardwalks, a lawn, a picnic area, and an "ecological salt marsh" (where the oysters live, I presume). My favorite part is the boardwalk-promenade, where you can seek out a bit of quiet. It made me think a little bit of the promenades at the Central Park Conservatory Garden.

There's art too, courtesy of the neighboring Whitney Museum of American Art. I assumed Day's End was a remnant or incomplete piece of infrastructure. But this installation is, according to the good folks at the Hudson River Park Trust, a "ghost monument" to an earlier work by Gordon Matta-Clark that once stood on another pier.

It "allud[es] to the changing history of New York’s waterfront with an open, skeletal structure that precisely follows the outline, dimensions and location of the original structure" – a structure which no one who sees this will have been aware of. So what exactly is the point? If we are to have public art, whether site-specific or not, shouldn't it be something new and original?

Anyway, while it may officially be the Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff, people are sure to be calling this new amenity a beach. But it's not really a beach. You can't swim here, or even wade. (You're not supposed to, anyway.)

The south side of the pier does sport some ocean-like spray that I was not expecting.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this place.

On the one hand, the more nice open space in the city, the better. Despite centuries of development, long stretches of the West Side waterfront remain beautiful enough to suggest what the early European explorers and settlers found so appealing about the sparkling waterways and green, island-studded harbor that became New Amsterdam and then New York. We can and should enjoy this wondrous facet of our city.

On the other hand, this wealthy part of town already has the whole of Hudson River Park itself, with its various protuberances as bonuses. Wouldn't resources be better spent developing and improving green or waterfront space in sections of the city not so lucky and well-heeled? Like, for example, the East River waterfront across town? (Yes, the rebuilding of places like East River Park and Stuyvesant Cove to defend against sea level rise is underway, but this is mostly to preserve what was already there.)

Rich neighborhoods almost always get what they want. When I attended the 2019 opening of Chelsea Green, for example, I didn't know that that weird new little kids' park/playground on West 20th Street had been born of a struggle between forces that wanted to develop affordable housing on the lot and NIMBYers who blocked it and got this unneeded parklet instead.

Dedication of Chelsea Green, 25 July 2019

Walk west to the river and there's a very nice playground on Pier 51. Walk east a couple of blocks and there's the playground at Union Square. (Oh, but maybe too many poor kids play there...)

But back to the matter at hand.

Designed by Field Operations, the firm behind the High Line and Domino Park, the new Gansevoort Peninsula development resulted from a collaboration between New York City and New York State. The site had been a Department of Sanitation parking lot, but long before, in the late 19th century, it was part of a stretch of landfill that was to be 13th Avenue.

13th Avenue never manifested. But we inherited this squarish pier which the powers that be decided to call a peninsula, because why not?

I have mixed feelings about sand, too – to me it's little more than a necessary evil you have to deal with to experience the ocean. So a patch like this is kind of a tease. And most of the people enjoying it when I visited were actually sitting on the Adirondack chairs.

Look at that tiny kid in the lower right of the following picture, though. I guess it's worth it just for him.

All photos © Oren Hope