Tilyou Playground

When, at the beginning of the present century, the Muss Development Corporation built the Oceana Condominium and Club on the site of the old Brighton Beach Baths (1907-1994) in the face of some ineffectual opposition, it also funded the creation of a new city park and playground. It was one of those real estate deals where the developer agrees to create a public space in exchange for something the city grants it – a zoning change, an easement, something it needs.

Tilyou Playground is actually two separate pieces of land along Brighton Beach Ave., one an actual playground and therefore of no interest to this blog, the other an actual park, with benches and grass and trees – real trees, not plastic ones, as these exposed root systems prove. (Maybe Muss was worried the city would suspect some sort of vegetation fraud.)

In a fairly small space, the park welcomes both the old…

…and the young.

Just what is a Tilyou, you ask? The Tilyous were among Coney Island's first entrepreneurs. Peter Tilyou founded the Surf House and Surf Theater in the 1860s, and in the 1890s he and his son built the legendary Steeplechase Park, an amusement park whose name resounds to this day despite the fact that it closed in 1964.

Steeplechase Park itself lives on in its one remaining artifact: the famous Parachute Jump. No one jumps from it anymore, but this year it was (to coin a phrase) "re-blung" with cascading multicolored lights.

Asser Levy Park and Hennessy Triangle

Just a block inland off the Coney Island/Brighton Beach boardwalk lies a large grassy field lined with trees and capped with a bandshell, where Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's seaside concert series draws crowds during the summer. Asser Levy Park, named for Asser (or Asher) Levy, New Amsterdam's first prominent Jewish burgher (died 1680), may be a couple of stones' throws from the beach and adjacent to the New York Aquarium, but a walk through its acres takes you away from the area's seaside feel and into an atmosphere more reminiscent of a peaceful retirement community.

Some of the apartment buildings nearby remind me of Miami Beach. And practically the only park denizens this past Saturday afternoon were a big group of old folks clustered around the chess tables. Otherwise the park was nearly empty.

With its wide, flat expanse of grass, Asser Levy Park might at first glance seem pretty featureless aside from the bandshell. You could easily miss the fact that the trees are varied and non-standard for New York City parks. In one row, each tree is a different species. I couldn't find any information about them online, but these photos will give you an idea.

Across the road at the east end is a little traffic island called Hennessy Triangle, named, as so many NYC park features are, for a soldier who died in World War One. It's notable for its miniature lighthouse. Since normally you can't visit the actual lighthouse in the nearby gated community of Sea Gate, this Hennessy Special will have to do.

Stay tuned as our tour of Coney Island continues into its lesser-known parks and its practically unknown northern coast.

Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk

Coney Island is so storied, and so copiously documented, that with all the times I've been there I never thought to document it here. But the Parks Department has had jurisdiction over the beach and the historic boardwalk since 1938. That makes it a park!

Around 1938 is also when the boardwalk acquired the name Riegelmann Boardwalk, after the Brooklyn Borough President who began the process of making the whole place open to the public and whipping it into the shape it has today.

This'll be short and sweet – or at least short – because I took these humble Coney Island photos on a quest to find much more obscure – and therefore, to me, more interesting – parkland.

Here's that famous boardwalk, with the Aquarium in the distance on the right and beyond it the rides of the amusement areas.

You want beach? Here's some beach.

The 2.7-mile-long boardwalk contains 1.3 million boards. You notice damage as you tread them, at least some of which came from Superstorm Sandy. There's talk of replacing the whole shebang with concrete and plastic for greater durability. Controversial, of course.

For now, wooden boards still rule. Follow them east from the amusement parks and you come to the Brighton Beach section, where you hear mostly Russian on the boardwalk as well as the streets. The seaside restaurants in the next photo serve heavy Russian food of middling quality, but you can't beat the location.

Most people don't follow the Riegelmann Boardwalk all the way to its far east end. So I've done it for you.

Go elsewhere for blazing images of the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, Nathan's (and its hot dog eating contest), the boardwalk bar scene and all the craziness that goes with it, and the fab ballpark where the minor league Cyclones play. Go to other websites to see pictures of the happy beach frolickers and assorted New York eccentrics who give this place its legendary character. But come back here for what's next up: some Coney Island parks the tourists and revelers never see.

Bleecker Playground

One of the various factors making visiting every New York City park a Herculean task, aside from the sheer quantity, is inconsistent nomenclature. Athletic fields and playgrounds in themselves don't count as parks for this blog. But some "playgrounds" aren't just playgrounds.

Next to Bleecker Playground in the West Village, for example, and completely fenced off from the kids' play area, is a spacious, nicely landscaped seating area. Granted there were no children playing in the playground when I walked through the other day, but it felt like a peaceful oasis. So here it is (trumpets, please): the Bleecker Playground seating area.

But what, you ask, is that dancingly expressive statue in the first photo above? The Parks Department website is happy to oblige with the answer: it's Chaim Gross's The Family, "dedicated by the artist to former Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1992," the year after Gross died. I don't know why they had to rename the Queenboro/59th St. Bridge after Koch when he already had this nifty sculpture (and the bridge already had two perfectly good names). And who actually did the dedicating?

Another good question: Why is one section of this park paved in wooden boards? In any case, since my next post will take us to Coney Island, it makes a good transition. The sunlike image in the window is, I think, a display at the James Perse store, but I didn't want to get too close and burn my eyes (or melt my wings).

Finally, while I suppose none of us really needs to see yet another picture of a chess table, I like these solid-looking pieces of old furniture, and the presence of one does prove – to me at least – that this is indeed a New York City park.

Elizabeth Street Garden

It may not be a park, but it was a big park-like surprise to me when we happened past the Elizabeth Street Garden yesterday on the way back from a walk to the Bowery lighting district. It's not as if I'd never walked on Elizabeth Street before. It's just that I never knew this place existed.

It's associated with the Elizabeth Street Gallery next door, but it isn't clear to me exactly how. Community members are petitioning to prevent development of the site, which is presently full of haphazardly-positioned old sculptures and historic curios, with housing.

A woman and a little girl examine petitions (petition is also online)

Benches and a few cafe-style tables and chairs, where you can sit and while away some time on a nice day, give this garden the aura of a public space.

The collection inside is unlike anything you'll find at other antique stores or galleries in the area. The website doesn't list prices but they're posted in the store, and for many of these things they're well into the five figures. Inside, the giant wooden French gaming table and the pig feeder caught my eye especially. But there are interesting objects in the garden too.

I especially like this cast iron statue of a woman reclining atop a panther, gazing out at the sidewalks of Elizabeth Street. Just like real life!

Anyway, with development plans afoot, sooner might be a better time than later to visit the Elizabeth Street Gallery and Garden. Just sayin'.

Snug Harbor

Staten Island: The Next Hot Borough?

The topic of real estate guarantees every New York City social event against uncomfortable lapses into silence. Among the non-rich people I usually hang with, the talk turns to where within the five boroughs it might still be possible for regular people to afford to live. Brooklyn having ascended out of reach, Staten Island has become, suddenly, one of the places that sound interesting to struggling "creative class" types.

View from Richmond Terrace, Staten Island across the Kill Van Kull to Bayonne, NJ

It isn't just my friends. The City Council is talking about increasing the frequency of Staten Island Ferry service. Council Speaker and mayoral front-runner Christine Quinn is proposing a whole new ferry line to West 39th Street in Manhattan, and her campaign visits to Staten Island are heavily covered. (Quinn knows, of course, that Mayor Bloomberg wouldn't have been elected in the first place without the votes of the relatively white and conservative Staten Island population.) Residents themselves are becoming more vocal in urging improvements to Staten Island Rapid Transit. And so on.

It's a big island and many parts are not easy to reach by public transportation from the ferry. Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens, a former home for retired sailors, is, fortunately, a quick bus ride from the terminal, and a visit to review a production by the Harbor Lights Theater Company (also suddenly newsworthy) was the perfect excuse to check out the park as well. Here's the Music Hall, a former vaudeville house, a couple of hours before showtime.

The park has numerous other notable structures, too.

Unlike the show, the Neptune Fountain played (sprayed) for very small audiences on the extremely hot day of our visit.

Snug Harbor houses botanical gardens that were in various stages of gorgeous hot-weather bloom.

A walk through the Allée leads to more gardens – but to a lot more as well, including the Carlo Grillo Glass House, grassy vistas, and the Connie Gretz Secret Garden with its hedge maze.

For me, the wetlands were Snug Harbor's biggest and happiest surprise. Nothing about the vista from the Richmond Terrace entrance – the impressive row of large museum-type buildings – suggests that this park pockets a soggy, quietly humming expanse of grassy waters. Nor does the crisply manicured terrain in the center, with its paved walkways, imply wetlands nearby.

But there they are!

A look back up the gentle hill provides a glimpse into the Chinese Scholar's Garden (which wasn't open that day) and what surely counts as one of New York City's most beautiful willow trees.

Great green masses grow everywhere here at the wild back end of Snug Harbor. You may be only a couple of hundred feet from a street with houses, but in most of this expanse you'd never know.

Here's one creature who seems to like this place as much as I do.

Finally defeated by the pounding sunshine, we headed out, but not before passing Cottage Row, which housed members of the professional staff back when this was a retirement spot for old sailors (the full name of the place is "Sailor's Snug Harbor," after all) and then provided space for artists-in-residence.

Altogether, Snug Harbor has a somewhat confused character. Gorgeous gardens and grounds contrast with buildings that look somewhat faded and even creaky, and with ruins like this old compass rose on the ground at the entrance.

And judging solely from the day of our visit on a hot but beautiful weekend, the place is severely underused. But as I said at the top, Staten Island may be getting hotter in culture and real estate terms. Those who live there now and in the future have a superb outdoor resource here. And I haven't covered all the gardens and attractions at Snug Harbor by any means.

While you're there, check out this bit of nearby history just up Richmond Terrace from the entrance.

The Neville House was built around 1770 by retired naval officer John Neville, which fits the theme of Snug Harbor perfectly. So does its 19th century life as the Old Stone Jug tavern. A judge also lived there at one time. One of the few pre-Revolutionary houses still standing in New York City, it retains many original details and is a New York City landmark and, according to Wikipedia, on the National Register of Historic Places, though there's no plaque indicating the latter, so don't take my word for it.

The house isn't done with us yet. In 2012 a new owner fell through the floor into a well.