Jacob Riis Park

Not a city park, but a part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, Jacob Riis Park honors the great Danish-American photographer and journalist who documented life on the poor side of town in the New York of an earlier age. The beach at Jacob Riis Park was, appropriately perhaps, intended as a getaway to which car-less city folk could actually get away, as opposed to, say, Jones Beach. Today, public transportation here from most parts of the city involves a long trip via subway and bus – or a ferry which leaves, ironically, from Wall Street.

If you drive, there's plenty of parking in the enormous sunbaked lot.

There's pitch-and-putt golf, but Jacob Riis is mostly a beach, and there's nothing wrong with that. On the day of our visit this summer the water was extremely rough – no chance for swimming, but you could get wet and salty and have fun.

That's right. It's a beach.

Like Jones Beach, and with similar architecture (on display at the Riis Bathhouse, below), Jacob Riis Park was laid out by megalomaniacal city planner Robert Moses in the 1930s on the site of an early U.S. naval air station. It became part of the National Park system in 1972.

In its present condition, this clock won't actually help you tell the time. But it will remind you of times gone by.

Pelham Bay Park

In area, Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx is New York City's largest park, but in public consciousness it's much smaller. A big part of the reason is the paucity of public transportation. The park contains golf courses, Orchard Beach, and a historic mansion and grounds, but getting there without a car takes real planning.
The Bartow-Pell Mansion from the edge of the rear woods
Not having done any planning (except to check the Barlow-Pell Mansion website for its hours), we got in the car and crawled our way through construction traffic to the wet green corner of the Bronx called Pelham Bay Park, aiming first for the mansion. It's the only one remaining of the many large estate houses that used to dot this area; when the city acquired the land in the late 19th century, they all ended up going the way of the dinosaurs except this one, which, built around 1840, later became the headquarters of the International Garden Club, which added the formal gardens around the time of World War I. The mansion has been a museum since 1946, and it's been populated with period furnishings. There's some modest landscaping in the vicinity… …and a few trees that have a lot of personality… But things get wild pretty fast as you wander out back of the mansion grounds. A yellow-marked but partly overgrown trail (look out for poison ivy, and check for ticks when you're done) takes you along the shore of the Lagoon. On the other side of this water is a landfill on the far side of which sits Orchard Beach, but at this lower section, there's no civilization in sight.
With your back to the Lagoon you can look out over this lush sward. You can ride a horse in Pelham Bay Park, or bike on the bike paths. But the whole place has a very un-manicured quality; this park is huge, but it's about as different from Central or Prospect Park as you can get and still be a park. Of course, anytime there's a beautiful weekend day, people are going to take advantage. In this parking area by the ballfields (ballfields completely unused during our visit), people had gathered to, uh, sit in the parking lot and eat and socialize. One interesting sight and sound: men playing live percussion along with a recording of Latin music. Golf, beach, horses, a historic house, beautiful watery views – Pelham Bay Park has a lot. But it's not too conducive to just wandering about. Robert Moses, not Frederick Law Olmsted, shaped much of this area. In the mansion's little museum room, there's a photo of Fiorello LaGuardia using the Bartow-Pell mansion as a "City Hall in the Country" and a placard explaining that one reason the Mayor spent time here was to "keep an eye on" Moses's vast geographic manipulations.

Inwood Hill Park

Inwood Hill Park, at the very northern tip of Manhattan, is a park like no other on the island, with the only remaining natural forest and a real salt marsh. The forest claws up the steep hill abruptly from the flat lower section with its benches and athletic fields. This pair of birds darted across the salt marsh below. I'm not sure what they are – they look a bit like ducklings but ducklings wouldn't be running around by themselves. Immature coots? If anyone knows, please leave a comment! I've seen more exotic-looking birds than that in Inwood Hill Park on past trips, but on this early June jaunt the songbirds made their presence known through sound more than sight. It had rained heavily the previous day, and the air in the woods smelled heavy, rich, and loamy, as if the Hudson River had lofted itself into the atmosphere. The many unmarked trails with their straightaways, curves, and steps allow one to get some actual exercise while feeling more and more lost. Fortunately you can't go too far without catching a view of some waterway or other, and if you have a general sense of what's where surrounding Manhattan things tend to become clear. Inwood Hill Park puts one in touch with the distant past in a way very few spots in the city do. The old growth and unleveled terrain hide signs of ancient habitation by the Lenape Indians, and the famous transaction at which Peter Minuit "bought" Manhattan from them in 1606 is said to have occurred here. It is said to have occurred in a number of other locations as well; we'll probably never know for sure. Whatever the case, these mounted authority figures are making sure the Indians don't try to take it back. Not too many years ago the park and environs didn't feel all that safe, and you could wander the crumbling paths of Inwood Hill all afternoon and meet hardly anyone, with only a creeping anxiety for company. Nowadays, though, on a warm weekend day the park sees plenty of action. It's even safe for games of ultimate frisbee: At the north end you can walk under the Henry Hudson Bridge, which leads to the Bronx… …catch a view of some boats in the far distance… …and on the way down, get a look at that impressive salt marsh. It's impossible to get a true experience of the wild on the island of Manhattan, but in Inwood Hill Park's nearly 200 acres you can get closer than anywhere else to the natural elements that Henry Hudson saw when he first sailed up that wide, breathing estuary that bears his name.

Grover Cleveland Park

My trip to Cleveland Park was an addendum to a visit to the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House (inset photo), a 1709 Dutch farmhouse in Ridgewood, Queens that's well worth a trip (and worth your support, especially if you're a Ridgewood-area resident). With several restored rooms in two sections, the older section of fieldstone (shown in photo) and the newer of wood, and an acre and a half of grass behind (with chickens!), this historic house is one of those hidden New York City treasures everyone should know about.

But this being a parks blog, a stopover at a nearby park was de rigeur, and Cleveland Park presented itself as the most obvious choice. The sign at the entrance says "Grover Cleveland Playground" but the park is much bigger than a playground – over five acres – with green stretches and space for passive enjoyment. It's named for the President who, though born in New Jersey, made his career in New York State, becoming governor in 1883 and winning the presidency for the first time the following year. The park adjoins Linden Hill Cemetery and dates from the 1920s. It includes a variety of playgrounds and facilities; originally, it even had tennis courts, according to the Parks Department.

The comfort station was a not insignificant part of my appreciation of Cleveland Park:

And in fact, there isn't very much else picturesque about the park. It took me a while to find this splash of flowery color: And, uh…well, here's that handsome comfort station again. The black figures on the right are not shades drifted over from the cemetery next door but Muslim mothers taking their children on a perfectly normal trip to the playground. And the most memorable aspect of my visit wasn't anything visible, but the smell of the skewered meat being enthusiastically cooked at a vendor cart just outside the entrance. However, until they invent Smell-o-Rama for blogs, you'll just have to take my word for that.

Coffey Park

Red Hook's famous food trucks frame Red Hook Recreation Area, but for an actual park, Coffey is your destination in this legendary neighborhood.

Coffey Park, named for an Irish-born local politician, is 8-plus acres of passive and active recreation in the middle of Red Hook, the formerly scary-dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood that, in spite of a lack of subway service, has undergone a cultural renaissance in recent years – as well as a commercial one with the arrival of a Fairway supermarket, an Ikea, and a cruise ship dock.

The park's flat lawns welcome small fry and their dads.

Shapely evergreens line up proudly… and April flowers are a colorful sight.

The park provides a good view of Visitation Church and the (sort of) famous "R" sign. And this last shot…well, it's just a nice picture. So check out Coffey Park when you're in Red Hook. And there are plenty of good reasons to visit Red Hook. Bars. Waterfront. Fairway. (And Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies – way better than what Ikea has the nerve to serve as "Swedish meatballs." Just sayin'.)

McKinley Park

There's nothing special about this small park in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Then I reviewed my photos and noticed the decided leftward tilt of much of the landscape of modest McKinley Park.

I'd noticed these curiously angled tree stumps but pegged them as nothing more than a curious anomaly, and nothing else had particularly caught my eye:



Springtime made these blossoming trees a pleasant sight, so I snapped this photo, not noticing the leftward bend of the tree at the right of the stand.



The following photo seemed like a pretty standard shot, the kind I like to take to give a sense of perspective and the size of the park. Sure, there's a kid running to the left, and a couple of the trees are leaning a little bit that way, but these didn't seem remarkable in themselves.



But take a look at the image that struck me when I first entered the park. Leaving aside the question of what kind of animal this is – an otter? a beaver? a fanciful seal with a land-animal tail? something else? – I'm wondering why the garbage pail was knocked over in this otherwise fairly well maintained six-acre park, with its playground, ball courts, trees, pathways, and modest hill.



An answer to the mystery suggested itself only after I exited the park and spotted this shrine, with the inscription: "No Farewell Words Were Spoken, No Time To Say Goodbye, You Were Gone Before We Knew It, And Only God Knows Why." It hangs across the street from the park, on the fence that keeps you from tumbling down into the Gowanus Expressway gully.

Had someone fallen onto the highway somehow, in spite of the high fence? Or was the memorial to a victim of an auto accident? No way of knowing, but one thing was for sure: the juxtaposition of high McKinley Park with the Expressway-in-a-Ditch had created a tachyonic dimensional vortex that was pulling the trees, the trash cans, the nameless memorialized person, probably even the children towards the highway. That explained why the fence had to be so high. It explained the two stumps, the remains of trees that had bent over so far they had started to freak out the park-going populace and had to be cut. It explained the toppled trash can, and the leaning trees. It certainly explained the fact that whichever direction I faced, things were leaning to the left.

It's Occam's razor, see. The simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Honestly, I don't know how I didn't see it right away.

Owl's Head Park

Nestled along the western Brooklyn coast, Owl's Head Park is 24 acres of rolling hills, grassland, trees, and paths that take you far enough away from the neighborhood of Bay Ridge – quiet enough in the first place – that it can be hard to believe you're still in the city.



In the photo above you can glimpse the bay on the left. A path will take you almost to the water, in fact. It was awfully quiet in Owl's Head Park on the unseasonably warm and beautiful early March day of my visit, a perfect day for an escape from city life. A few people idling on benches, a few children playing, but very easy to wander into the middle of a seeming nowhere.



What can I say? I'm a sucker for gnarly roots.



A couple of moms pushed strollers in the distance:



Turning back towards the entrance, the vista of houses and apartment buildings does remind us that we are, in fact, still in New York City. But Owl's Head Park, the origin of whose name is unknown, provides ample opportunity for an extended break from a busy life.