Cobble Hill Park

Cobble Hill, one of New York City's prettiest neighborhoods, is also lucky to have beautiful Cobble Hill Park in its midst. The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (1998), an ever-useful (though now somewhat outdated) book from Yale University Press, calls it "one of the first vest-pocket parks in New York City," but at more than half an acre it doesn't seem to me to quite fit that category.

Curved paths and plantings do, of course, make a park feel bigger than it is.

The curves even extend to the playground.

In the early 1960s the community blocked construction of a supermarket on the abandoned site of two mansions and a church, and successfully petitioned to have the city take over the property that would become Cobble Hill Park. The park officially opened in 1965. A 1989-90 renovation won several design awards, a fact that won't surprise visitors with fresh eyes. The plantings are lovingly cared for, and the park is very popular with local fauna of more than one species. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the great park success stories of the era.

Why "Cobble Hill"? It's an old name that predates the residential neighborhood that now bears it. The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn says the early Dutch farmers' name for the area, "Ponkiesbergh," translates as "Coble (or Cobble) Hill," named for the cobblestones in the area, but I don't think I buy that. According to the Parks Department website, "In 1776, during the Battle of Long Island, the Continental Army called the area 'Cobble Hill' after a similar hill they had recently fortified during the Siege of Boston." I invite any local historians who can settle this question to leave a comment below.

Of course, that has nothing to do with today's park, which isn't paved with cobblestones – though there are some under the benches – but does have bluestone, cast iron, and herringbone-patterned brick walkways. And plenty of flowers.

Cobble Hill trivia: The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn says the writer Thomas Wolfe lived on this block of Verandah Place alongside the park.

Cobble Hill Park is a treasure. I lived in nearby Park Slope for many years but never knew this small park was here. Finding places like it is one of the things that makes my ongoing park odyssey worthwhile.

Important message spotted at nearby Van Voorhees Playground

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Park Odyssey Featured in amNewYork

While not normally one for self-referential blog posts, I think being featured in amNewYork, "Manhattan's highest daily circulation newspaper," is worth a mention. Reporter Mark Chiusano interviewed me last week for his column. The resulting article appeared online last Thursday, and a shorter but still substantial version appeared in the printed edition today. Chiusano profiled me and the odyssey, and also used my ongoing quest to visit every park in New York City as an angle for providing readers general information about the parks.

Many thanks to Mark and amNewYork for the coverage.

James J. Walker Park

I've passed by James J. Walker Park in the West Village many times, but never thought it of interest because it looked like little more than a big ballfield.

However, there's more to this unprepossessing one-and-two-thirds acres. And I'm not referring to the colorful life of the famous NYC mayor after whom it's named.

Jimmy Walker, Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 (and at one time an aspiring songwriter), led a flamboyant and controversial public life. But "Beau James" was but a teenager when the city acquired Trinity Church's St. John's Burying Ground in 1895, intended to convert the cemetery into a park.

In fact, the plan originated with the future mayor's father, Assemblyman William H. Walker.

More than 10,000 bodies had been interred here since 1812. Their fate would be much discussed 80 years later, as an article called "A Great Opening of Tombs" in The World from December 4, 1892 explained.

As transcribed here on the NYCNuts website, the paper reported that the elder Walker "said that the city would remove the bodies now in the cemetery and would do it very carefully and in a manner that could not offend and of the relatives of the dead."

But it seems it was not to be. As I understand it, the vast majority of the bodies – those that did not have families to claim them and arrange for reburial – are still there, beneath the ballfield, the pavement, the handball courts, the playground, and the sitting area, which I discovered sandwiched between the fields.

When I slipped in early on a recent Sunday afternoon, there were people using the handball courts, and kids in the playground.

No one was using the bocce court, though. It's one of only two Manhattan bocce ball locations listed by the Parks Department. It's also one of the locations listed and presumably used by the good people at NYC Bocce.

Whatever you do, don't confuse bocce with pétanque, which you can find at Bryant Park. Bocce is Italian; pétanque is French. (Although the word, Wikipedia informs me, is actually Occitan. Didn't know that was a language? You learn all kinds of stuff researching New York City's parks.)

Anyway, next time you're in the southern reaches of the West Village, stop by James J. Walker Park and give a thought to the memory of one of Gotham's most memorable mayors. Then give a thought to the memories of the thousands of people in the ground beneath your feet.

Railroad Park, The Bronx

Railroad Park in the Melrose neighborhood of The Bronx has one, just one, notable feature, and that's the abandoned railroad station at East 161 Street. Though the station is long abandoned, Metro North's tracks still run underground right by the park.

Opened in 1902, this humble three-quarters of an acre was named Melrose Park in 1920, and renamed Railroad Park only in 2001.

The compass rose in the pavement includes the signs of the zodiac. Nice touch.

A curving path sweeps around the small park.

Here's the view toward the north, away from the station:

It was starting to rain and it had been an energetic excursion, visiting five parks in a couple of hours. (See below for the other four.) Fortunately, seeing Railroad Park was the work of just a few minutes, so I didn't linger, and legged it back to the subway. There's a Railroad Park in Queens, too. That's for another day.

Mullaly Park

Nobody deserves to have a park named after him more than the park visionary John Mullaly, who became known as the "Father of the Bronx park system" in the late 19th century, before the Great Consolidation of 1898 in which the five boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island – became one New York City.

Mullaly, Secretary of the New-York Park Association formed in 1891, aimed "to secure increased park area for the City of New-York" and called for "at least…two great breathing places beyond the Harlem River." By "beyond the Harlem River" he meant the three towns New York City had annexed in 1874: Morrisania, West Farms, and Kingsbridge, which became part of the new borough of The Bronx.

The results of Mullaly's commission: nearly 5,000 acres of parkland, comprising Van Cortlandt, Claremont, Crotona, St. Mary's, Pelham Bay, and Bronx Parks. (That last one encompasses the New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo.)

Mullaly died in 1911, or 1914, or 1915. (Internet sources disagree.) In the 1920s the City of New York acquired the land that would become Mullaly Park in the High Bridge section of The Bronx. The city has developed it over time beginning in the 1930s "as a multi-use recreational facility that complements Macombs Dam Park to the south," to quote the Parks Department website. It includes playgrounds, a pool, a skate park, basketball courts, and more.

But passive recreation is very possible here too. I entered at E. 165 St. and River Ave. and immediately encountered two totally passive people.

A second later, and a good deal less passively, I was nearly bonked on the head by a stripped ear of corn dropped out of a tree by a squirrel.

I didn't see the squirrel. But the people on the bench explained that my attacker was indeed one of those ratlike creatures whose furry tails and liking for trees rather than trash make them cute. And it did seem the only rational explanation.

Up ahead was a large, densely planted garden area "with an irrigation system, blooming trees, and landscaping." (The pretty tower in the distance isn't a church, it's PS 114, the Luis Lorens Torres School.)

Actually there are two of these garden areas, both threaded with narrow winding paths. I had the southern one all to myself. An organized group of teenagers from The Bronx is Blooming was tending the northern one.

A splashing sound drew my attention, and I was just quick enough to catch this robin after his water-fountain bath.

I like these playground dolphins too.

Back in the southern section, besides the skate park there's the big Mullaly Recreation Center (the brick building), more athletic facilities, chess tables, another playground, and a view of Yankee Stadium.

John Mullaly published a book in 1887 vividly describing his vision for the Bronx parks. Google has digitized the book and below is a screen shot of the fancy cover page. He was a fascinating character whose exploits went well beyond park planning: born in Belfast; Civil War draft resistance; a stint as New York Commissioner of Health; and finally dying "almost penniless…in a Second Avenue hall bedroom on a bitter day in 1914," according the October 20, 1929 edition of the New York Herald Tribune, a paper he had written for at yet another stage of his peripatetic career.

"Nearly 4000 acres of free playgrounds for the people." Now that's my kind of visionary. If no one has written a biography of John Mullaly – and it doesn't seem that anyone has – someone ought to.

Joyce Kilmer Park

Being an "English major for life," I suppose I should have known who Joyce Kilmer was, but I admit I didn't. I'd heard the name, but that's it.

Better late than never: now I know Joyce Kilmer was a he, and he was the poet who wrote "I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree." A famous Catholic writer and lecturer in his time, he was killed in World War I on the Western front in 1918 at the age of 31. And just a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, Joyce Kilmer Park in the Melrose/Morrisania section of The Bronx honors his memory – though he doesn't seem to have had any particular connection to the borough.

The former Concourse Plaza is a tall rectangle like a miniature Central Park, its southern and most dramatic entrance at 161st Street. Most of the park lies on flat terrain, but some picturesque rockage greets the visitor approaching from the south.

Because of the circumstances of Kilmer's death, the park named for him fits right in with all the doughboy monuments found in other parks throughout New York City, though there's no graven doughboy image in Joyce Kilmer Park. Nor is there an image of Kilmer, though "Trees" is inscribed into the pavement (see photo, above right).

Instead of a doughboy statue, Joyce Kilmer Park has the Lorelei Fountain, also known as the Heinrich Heine Memorial, and a statue of Louis J. Heintz, the first commissioner of Bronx street improvements and progenitor of the Grand Concourse – a sort of Baron Haussmann of The Bronx.

What a lot of Germanic names in one little paragraph about one humble park! The fountain has an interesting history. Intended for Dusseldorf, the poet Heinrich Heine's hometown, Ernest Herter's sculpture was instead brought here from Germany after objections by, according to the Parks Department, "political groups opposed to Heine's Jewish origins and political views," and erected in 1899 through the largesse of German-Americans – much like the German Fountain in Santiago, Chile. I gather German emigrés of a century ago had a thing about fountains.

The Lorelei Fountain was the only place I saw tourists on my Bronx parks excursion last week. In the photo above, the two women on the left were looking at the monument while consulting a guidebook. I didn't listen in to see if they were speaking German.

The fountain also attracts a lot of birds, as fountains are wont to do.

The monument to Louis J. Heintz commemorates "the founding of the progress and prosperity of The Bronx." The sculpture by Pierre Fietu dates from 1909.

But most of the park is plain old grass and trees, with a playground at the north end.

Four urns once surrounded this little plaza by the playground. And then there were three…

Poets and other writers used to mean a lot more to park visionaries than they do now. There's the Poet's Walk or Literary Walk in Central Park, of course, with its statues of Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and the now otherwise forgotten Fitz-Greene Halleck. There's Dante Park. Clement C. Moore Park. And of course there's Underwood Park, named for the typewriter magnate without whose products no one could have typed their poems in the first place.

Fitting words for a city of immigrants:

I had a lovely homeland long ago.
The oak trees
Grew so high there, the violets nodded softly.
It was a dream.
- Heinrich Heine, "Ich hatte einst"

Trite, but true:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
- Joyce Kilmer, "Trees"

Macombs Dam Park

I've been a Mets fan all my life, always carrying some of the Yankee Resentment that goes with that. Having never been to a Yankee game, I've never gotten to know the Yankee Stadium area of the Bronx.

It was time to change that, so this past weekend I explored five parks in walking distance of the stadium. The first is an extravagant exception to my blog rule disqualifying parks that exist only for athletics. Macombs Dam Park, on the site of the old Yankee Stadium, merits coverage twice over: for its history and for its aesthetics.

Just across 161st Street from the new Yankee Stadium, Macombs Dam Park is named after an actual dam built across the Harlem River in 1814. I'd always wondered why the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge was named thus. Dams are not the first thing one thinks of in reference to New York City's waterways. But gristmill operator Robert Macomb managed to get the city's approval to build one two centuries ago.

Years later concerned citizens protested the blockage of the river by attacking the dam both rhetorically and physically. It was gone by 1858. In 1890 the accompanying bridge was replaced with the current Macombs Dam Bridge, described in this Forgotten New York post dating from before the creation of the park.

The bridge was already 13 years old when the New York Highlanders (later renamed the Yankees) came into being in 1903. Ten years later the team moved across the river from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to the newly built Yankee Stadium in The Bronx. One of the baseball fields in Macombs Dam Park is situated exactly over the diamond of that original Yankee Stadium, so you can stand (and even play ball) where Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Mickey Rivers, and Derek Jeter once batted.

Grassy landscaping and markers of the history of the Yankees and the stadium ring the baseball fields.

No doubt the fields are bustling with baseball on weekends. But on this weekday afternoon, as beautiful a day as it was, only a few people had come out.

One forlorn-looking young man sat alone in a dugout. Was he dreaming of the big leagues? Or just early for a practice or a friendly game?

From the baseball fields you can ascend via stairs or a ramp to the Joseph Yancey track and field area, which was much busier.

Driving? Park in the Ruppert Plaza Garage, named for Colonel Jacob Ruppert, onetime Yankees co-owner, and builder of the original Yankee Stadium. Ruppert has a park named for him too, in upper Manhattan.

Eye-pleasing design makes this big athletic facility parklike and just plain nice to walk around in. I'll close with some aesthetics. Here's a view showing some of the landscaping. The curved shape on the far right is the Yankees - East 153 St. Metro-North train station, which opened in 2009. I'm sure Yankee fans from the northern suburbs appreciate its utility. This Mets fan appreciates its architecture.

Good job on this one, MTA.