South Oxford Park and Underwood Park

Searching out every park in the city, you're bound to come upon some strange ones. South Oxford Park in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood has a playground and two tennis courts, not surprising since the site used to be a tennis club, but its most striking feature is this huge "multi-purpose synthetic turf lawn" as the Parks Department describes it. I like the term "multi-purpose" here. Looks like this little girl was using it learn how to ride a bike.

Here she is a again, being observed by someone who is apparently still looking for her purpose. But the swirly pattern on the pavement is what had caught my eye.

Another eye-catching aspect of South Oxford Park is the lighting.

The Parks Dept. website also describes a "large cat-tail themed spray shower." I guess that's this; you can see the hesitant upsquirt of water.

I had all this playful landscaping to myself, since the weather was so confusing on the day of my visit – soupily humid, little rain showers on and off, then blazingly hot sunshine. I don't think there was a single kid in the playground. And since South Oxford Park hasn't got much in the way of shade, I didn't tarry long.

My tramp through Fort Greene also included a stop at Underwood Park, which to my disappointment doesn't have a typewriter-inspired design. However, it is where typewriter mogul John Thomas Underwood had his mansion. It doesn't merit its own post here because it is almost nothing but playground, except for the Sarah Anesta Samuel Garden.

At present this "Garden" appears to be just a lawn, but we all have our hopes and dreams, don't we? Maybe next year John Underwood will hit that great carriage return in the sky and start the garden afresh.

Sarah Anesta Samuel was an educator and community activist who also, according to this obituary, "developed a chain of successful beauty shops in the Republic of Panama." You just can't predict what you're going to learn when you explore the parks of New York City.

Cuyler Gore

I'm always glad to learn a new four-letter word. A gore, it turns out, is a triangular patch of land. Parks all over New York City could be called gores, including quite a few "Squares." But only a few actually bear the "gore" designation. One is Cuyler Gore, or Cuyler Gore Park, where I stopped in after my excursion to the nearby and much more famous Fort Greene Park.

Nestled in the culturally humming and architecturally beautiful Fort Greene neighborhood, right near the Paul Robeson Theater – a synagogue turned church turned performance space that I mean to visit one day – Cuyler Gore feels a bit like a playful riff on the usual idea of a neighborhood park. Lots of parks have chess tables, but Cuyler has a chess floor.

Despite the neighborhood's fairly upscale nature, an internet search for "Cuyler Gore" turns up news items detailing shootings, robberies, and rats. But I was there on a day too hot for criminals and vermin. Only a few people were using the park. No one was playing in the sun on the expanse of pavement in the next photo. The meaning of the origami-like shapes escapes me. Maybe it's a generational thing? The last reconstruction project here was back in 1989. Are these glyphs actually characters from a primitive video game? Does anyone know?

The following intriguing notation wasn't intriguing enough for me to obey, especially given the hot weather, but I did enjoy the orthography. Hey, they're artists, not spellers.

"This small triangular park is free of monuments," a Time Out New York "Kids" listing reported. True enough. This carefully placed rock has no notation whatsoever. (The little sign just says "DEP," for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.) Unless it's an altar to the pagan god Anonymous.

Cuyler Gore does have a modest row of handsome trees (oaks?).

And it has one other thing going for it: it's easy to get to.

Now that I know what a gore is, who's Cuyler? Answer: a Presbyterian minister who died in 1909. This old park was named for him in 1901, when he was still alive. Clearly Dr. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler was a very well-respected man in town, but pretty much forgotten, I guess, today, except for his park. So it goes.

Fort Greene Park

Brooklyn's oldest park has so much history attached to it that narrating it all here would be an exercise in folly.

The Parks Dept. provides a very good sum-up here. But here are the highlights of Fort Greene Park in one sentence:

Inspired into existence by Walt Whitman and designated a public park in 1845, Fort Greene Park was designed by park gods Olmsted and Vaux (of Central Park and Prospect Park fame); named Washington Park, then renamed for the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 fort that had stood on the site; houses the remains of thousands of Revolutionary War prisoners beneath a monument designed by famed architects McKim, Mead and White; and has green, rolling hills, excellent old trees, and really nice-looking tennis courts.

A word about the name: the fort that stood here originally was called Fort Putnam, named for Col. Rufus Putnam, an officer in the French and Indian War, and not, per my first guess, General Israel Putnam of Bunker Hill fame, the son of Rufus's half-brother. When the fort was rebuilt for the War of 1812, it was renamed for General Nathanael Greene, who comes off in Ron Chernow's excellent biography Washington as the most heroic and trustworthy of all Washington's generals, a man who died in his 40s just a few years after the Revolutionary War's successful conclusion. This blog doesn't pass up an opportunity to pay respects to Nathanael Greene.

Fort Greene Park's singular attraction is the crypt bearing the remains of thousands of American Revolutionary War prisoners who were kept, and died, in horrible conditions on British prison ships in nearby Wallabout Bay (in the East River), along with the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument topped with its enormous Doric column marking the spot.

For more information and a glimpse inside the mausoleum, see Jason Cochran's site here. I've also embedded his video at the end of this post.

Seen from the monument plaza with the bronze eagles at the corners, the neoclassical visitors' center – also designed by McKim, Mead and White – is a nice-looking building, but seems small for the purpose. No wonder: it was originally a comfort station. Now it just contains one. Along with a cannon and other historical memorabilia.

What would a summertime visit to a picturesque park be without stopping to smell (or at least ogle) the flowers?

The old name, Washington Park, is preserved in the name of the street on Fort Greene Park's eastern border. Washington Park, the street, resembles the great cobblestoned sidewalks lining the sides of Central Park, but on a more domestic scale, and without the tourists and buses. Be sure not to miss it when you visit.

Few New York City parks are this loaded with history and beauty. And no other has a crypt like this below it. Be sure to pay Fort Greene Park a visit one day during your Brooklyn peregrinations; it's not one to be missed.

Forest Park

The aptly named Forest Park is the third-largest park in Queens, at over 500 acres. It abuts several neighborhoods, including Woodhaven, Kew Gardens, and what is probably New York City's most verdant section, Forest Hills. With a little imagination one could almost think of Forest Hills itself as a park.

I read recently that 24% of New York City's land area is "forested." That doesn't mean with actual forests – it includes all forms of parkland and undeveloped areas, I think – but it's surprising nonetheless, until you think about the fact that a huge park like Forest Park is only the third-largest in Queens, which is only one of the five boroughs. Still, entering through the Kew Gardens Gate at the northeastern tip of the park, you're greeted with grassy fields that don't look anything like a forest.

Even in this section, though, there are some impressive trees. I grew up in a suburb sticky with maple trees, so I'm always aware that you don't see too many of them in this plane-tree city. This Norway Maple is a welcome sight.

Walk through the grassy areas and around the playground, feed through a narrow connecting strip of parkland, and you enter the spacious main eastern section, where you'll understand why it's called Forest Park. There are few places in the city where you can feel like you're really hiking in the woods. The Forest Park trails (three of them, marked with different colored blazes, plus a bridle path) constitute one of those places.

The Parks Department says there are some trees here over 150 years old, and with the fatness of some of the trunks I believe it. I enjoy knowing that the parklands here were known as Brooklyn Forest Park before the boroughs were consolidated into one big New York City in 1898. "Brooklyn Forest" – that has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

On the other hand, we're in Queens, not Brooklyn, so go figure.

I don't know what happened here. It wasn't a fire. Did the Blair Witch have a murderous fit?

Things soon got back to normal along the orange trail.

As it was a hot, muggy day, we appreciated the coolness of the forest shade. But shortly after passing the tree above, we were attacked by a battalion of unstoppable mosquitos, and were glad to escape back out to Forest Park Drive – a road designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, incidentally – with our lives.

Near some big athletic fields there's accommodation for more cerebral combat. These chess tables must have been around for a while, because the "black" squares have faded so much you can hardly see that they're darker than the white ones.

It's nice to see Urban Park Rangers still up and running in this era of program cutbacks and corporatizing of government.

In the central wedge of the park spins the Forest Park Carousel, which was just designated an official New York City landmark and is so self-satisfied it even has its own website.

Crafted by Daniel Muller, the carousel's hand-carved horses and other figures date back to 1903. (Its frame is even older.) After a long first act in Massachusetts the carousel embarked on a second life here in Forest Park in 1973, several years after the park's original merry-go-round had burned. Shuttered in 2009 after apparent mismanagement, it reopened last year run by a new concessionaire. With its new landmark status, it looks good for another century, especially since Forest Park appears to lie outside even the most pessimistic new flood zones.

That's right. Hurricance Sandy changed everything, at least in my thinking about the future of this city (not to mention the world). City parks, being small concentrated patches of nature in the midst of the concrete jungle, are especially good places to think about where we're going and where we've been from the standpoint of terrain. Case in point: Forest Park's Strack Pond. When Pfc. Laurence Strack died in Vietnam in 1967 at the age of 19, having spent happy childhood hours here, he probably couldn't have imagined that a) it would be named for him one day, and b) 46 years later we'd be worrying about which parts of Gotham will be submerged in the next decades.

This charming body of water is a kettle pond, a depression left by the Ice Age's retreating glaciers. Turned into ballfields in the 1960s, it soon reasserted its true nature, and the city wisely decided to let it revert to a pond, lining the bottom and building runoff streams to stabilize it. Today it's a transcendently lovely big-city oasis.

Families come to the shores to experience the isolating shock of nature. Artists set up easels and paint. Birds sing in the trees. Turtles, lots and lots of turtles, sunbathe and swim about.

A short path through the woods led us back to the quiet street and thence home. We skipped visiting the western half of the park, devoted as it is mostly to a golf course. So for a report on the condition of the greens after a very rainy June, you'll have to find a very different blog. But come back here soon. We have many, many more parks to visit.

Soho Square, Father Fagan Park, and Avenue of the Americas

There's a string of small gardens and parks that decorate Sixth Avenue, otherwise known as Avenue of the Americas, in the West Village. From north to south, there's the Jefferson Market Garden, Minetta Green and Minetta Triangle, Father Demo Square, and Winston Churchill Square. There's also Little Red Square, named not for the Moscow landmark but (presumably) for the adjacent Little Red School House.

The sequence doesn't stop when you continue further south into Soho, because Avenue of the Americas down here refuses to line up precisely in parallel with the streets to its west and east, giving rise to lots of wee triangles too small for buildings.

Down here on the Soho stretch there's nothing with the green density of the Jefferson Market Garden or Minetta Green, but there is, to begin with, the sliver of a triangle known as Charlton Plaza, which I've documented before. Even though it isn't a park, and not even remotely a "plaza," I like it because of its startling narrowness. I note it again today because when I walked by the other day I saw, for the first time, its gate open.

No one was inside that I could see, and, fearing transformation into a Flatlander, I didn't venture in. On the far left, you can see a woman tending the vegetation, but doing it from outside the fence – seems she knows about that sinister Flatland possibility too.

Across the street on the next block, a slightly wider but much less green triangle known as Father Fagan Park doesn't seem to get much use. Those passing through doubtless give little thought to the 27-year-old Franciscan priest who gave his life to rescue two colleagues from a fire at his Thompson Street rectory in 1938 before lending his name to this space. Plaques also honor three firefighters who died in the line of duty at another nearby blaze in 1994.

The tree partially visible on the left, with leaves obscuring the sign, is one of the three callery pear trees planted here that same year.

Seen from the southern end at this early evening hour, Father Fagan Park looks none too appetizing, for sure.

A little farther south you hit Soho Square (not a square but, of course, a triangle), which is larger and more inviting. The northern fringe now hosts a Citi Bike station, one of the few that was positioned sensibly (that is, not taking up valuable parking spaces). On this occasion, you can see that most of the bikes are out, rented. In spite of all the technical problems with the city's new bikeshare program (and the cranky old bats blasting it with unhinged fervor), many's the time I walk by a station with almost all the bikes gone, and I see people riding them around Manhattan all the time, so by that early measure, it's a success.

Is Soho Square a park? Well, I see the Parks Dept. leaf logo on the sign. There's no grass to speak of, but plenty of trees and benches, and a red-and-black paving pattern that sets it off from its surroundings. So I give it the benefit of the doubt and tally it up as a park.

If you're wondering why Sixth Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Americas – or, to be more realistic, why it was given that alternate name – just walk down the southern section and you'll find monuments to figures from Latin American countries. At the southern end of Soho Square, near where its scalene triangle tapers to a point, you'll find General José Artigas, "National Hero of Uruguay," a cattle smuggler turned guerrilla warrior who became "the father of Uruguayan nationhood." This statue is a cast of an original by José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín that stands in Montevideo, and the base – here's a piece of unusual trivia – is of Uruguayan granite.

So, while Avenue of the Americas doesn't actually extend south into any other Americas, you can wander along it and acknowledge some of their heroes, while partaking of the Pan-American spirit that gave Mayor LaGuardia that crazy street-renaming idea in the first place.