Mariners Marsh Park

Head west on Richmond Terrace. Start from the familiar environs of the St. George ferry terminal (where you'll also find, believe it or not, an outdoor outlet mall). Drive further and further out along Staten Island's north shore, through parts unknown. Eventually pass through the neighborhoods of Mariners Harbor and Arlington.

Then the road creaks through two mysterious swaths of—parkland? wilderness? Or something in between? To your left: Mariners Marsh Park. To your right, the even more mysterious Arlington Marsh Park. Both fenced off, closed down, verboten since 2003. But beckoning.

What a pretty and welcoming sign! you may rightly declare. But the entrance pictured above, along residential Holland Ave., is nothing but a tease, drawing you in toward a tall fence with a gate blocked by a heavy metal rail pounded into the ground.

The gate swings open enough for a skinny explorer like yours truly to slip through, but not everyone in our party was game for the challenge. I'm talking about myself, mostly. Worried about someone coming along and padlocking the gate while we were inside.

A compromised fence along Richmond Terrace was more friendly. We slipped in where others, clearly, had before. In fact, although Mariners Marsh Park has been closed for some time – if it was even ever officially open – its accessibility seems to be something of an open secret. A year ago, for example, Caitlin van Dusen of City Lore explored the park, although she documented areas we didn't get to so I'm guessing she entered elsewhere.

We did, however, find a marked trail.

Fall colors and glistening marshlands made for an evocative experience, even if City Lore's description of the park as "the eeriest place in New York City" might be a slight exaggeration.

The builders of the green trail had laid out real infrastructure, including this plank walkway over some swampy ground.

The trail disgorges you into an open grassy field, resuming for a short distance on the other side before petering out.

You will find relics of the area's industrial past here. This hunk of concrete, for example.

And this rocky road:

As for these hexagonal paving stones, your guess is as good as mine:

There's more of Mariner's Marsh Park to explore, but we didn't want to push our luck. Alltrails, for example, seems to think the park is open, showing what it calls the Mariners March Loop Trail in an official-looking maplike manner. However the "green trail" we found is not marked on this map.

As for Arlington Marsh Park, it was sealed tight as a drum, at least along the stretch of Richmond Terrace we scanned. Perhaps on a more intrepid day, or in a beckoning future time of more advanced park development, Arlington shall reveal its secrets to us.

A Master Plan already exists for the transformation of these parks. The city has owned them since 1974, and transferred them to the Dept. of Parks and Recreation in 1993. In 2012 they were damaged by Sandy, and they remain at risk for flooding.

But with luck and determination, we'll be back. In the meantime, we'll keep exploring the countless parks of the five crazy boroughs of New York City.

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

Graniteville Swamp Park, Staten Island

After viewing the well-kept war memorial at Joseph Manna Park in the Mariner's Harbor section of Staten Island. we crossed Forest Avenue to peer into an inaccessible protected marsh called Graniteville Swamp Park, part of the 45-acre Graniteville Swamp area. Protected by the Harbor Herons Wildlife Refuge – a mysterious entity that covers Prall's Island, Shooter's Island, and some other spaces around the Arthur Kill – the park is, per the Parks Department, "a wonderful place to observe the natural world in a protected and undisturbed state."

Here's what we observed:

Maybe for something to be truly protected and undisturbed, it needs to be truly inaccessible.

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Joseph Manna Park, Staten Island

Joseph Manna Park is a war memorial inside a small curvy triangle less than an acre in size, by the Staten Island Expressway and near the Old Place Creek tidal wetlands at the island's northwest shore. It's named for Seaman First Class Radioman Joseph Manna (1924-1942), an immigrant from the Naples area who died on the Navy destroyer USS Duncan during the Battle of Cape Esperance near Guadalcanal. He grew up in this neighborhood, which is appropriately named Mariner's Harbor.

The little park is well maintained, as a war memorial should be.

Also honored here are two other Navy men, Frank Busso (1921-1942), who died at the Battle of Midway, and Constantine Busso (1919-1945), killed during an attack on the USS Ticonderoga. Their memorials are marked by anchors.

Plaques elsewhere in the park honor other Staten Island war dead and "the men and women of the Port of New York and New Jersey who served during World War II." (Thanks to the Parks Department website for this information.)

The park is also home to one heckuva handsome tree. (At least I think it's in this park – it was a heckuva long day, too.)

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Old Place Creek, Staten Island

With hundreds of miles of coastline, New York City has plenty of water-fronting parks. But how many of those can you visit only by boat? We found one this summer. To reach Old Place Creek – really the 70-acre Old Place Creek Tidal Wetlands Area – you have to drive to the northwest corner of Staten Island, find your way to the south-going lane of Gulf Avenue, dawdle past the National Grid headquarters, and then find a tiny dirt parking lot.

A short path leads to a small viewing platform where you can look out over the creek that winds through the wetlands.

Before we reached the platform we startled a huge stag that bounded across the path and disappeared into the impenetrable woods – the first and only time I've ever seen a male deer in NYC. Sadly, it was much too fast to get a photo.

Anyway, unless you have a boat, this is all there is to see here. Had you a kayak or canoe, you'd drag it to the rough launch and explore the wetlands. According to the map, you could follow the creek, twist your way for two miles, and end up in Arthur Kill, the narrow strait that separates Staten Island from New Jersey, looking up at the Goethals Bridge.

We don't have a boat.

Not to worry, though. This was only the first stop on a daylong Staten Island excursion. More posts will follow.

All photos © Critical Lens Media