Cooper Park

Just a few weeks after walking through Stuyvesant Oval at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, I learned that Brooklyn has a park named after Peter Cooper, the 19th century inventor, industrialist and philanthropist. Cooper also founded Cooper Union, "the first private college open to all classes, races, and genders" according to the capsule biography on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers website, where you can also learn that as a by-product of one of his glue technologies he invented Jell-O.

In 1838 Cooper relocated his Manhattan glue factory to a strategic shipping location in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn near Newtown Creek. The City of Brooklyn bought the site in 1895, and behold: Cooper Park.

Cooper Park seems to get a fair amount of use, and is in a decent if not glorious state of maintenance. It can be fun to find pockets of wild neglect, though. Just across Maspeth Avenue is a stretch of overgrown sidewalk, with a plastic bag on the pavement playing the the role of The Tumbleweed.

Cooper Park's dog run is actually one of the nicer ones I've seen in the city, with wood chips and wide open spaces. With a natural look, it hardly even looks like a dog run. Though I don't suppose that matters much to the dogs.

Ices, anyone?

Early evening shadows turn the landscape into a lushly striped panorama.

Lying in the grass seems to get some people's creativity flowing. One woman looked to be writing something on old-fashioned "paper" with a stick-like "pen" or "pencil" device, while some kids were putting the grass to a different but equally productive use.

On the other hand, there was this:

Two nearby community gardens looked to be well tended.

Red Shed Community Garden
The Olive Garden, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn

It seems intuitively obvious that a walk in the park, or any time spent in natural surroundings, is good for you. But now there's scientific evidence that walking in the park changes your brain. One of the authors appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show yesterday talking about it:

Next up: a study of whether reading a blog about parks has relaxing and recharging effects too.

Memorial Gore

Just to keep things philologically interesting, Brooklyn's park pioneers denoted a couple of tiny parks with the word "gore" instead of (or in addition to) "park." I first encountered the term two years ago when I discovered Cuyler Gore (Park) in Fort Greene. And the other day on my way to visit Cooper Park I happened upon Memorial Gore.

Right now at least, this Williamsburg gore is the less welcoming of the two.

A "gore" in this context is a small triangular park. The word may come from the textile industry, where a gore is a triangular piece of cloth, as the Parks Department website suggests – much like Mayor Lindsay's vest pocket parks. But the OED tells me the word is also used for a triangular piece of land, as well as triangular components in architecture and other fields.

Once an English major, always an English major. If you've got a problem with that, take it up with Garrison Keillor.

In any case, triangles are the common factor, and here's something else with three sides and a point: a spearhead. The use of "gore" for a small pointed park seems to be from the same root that gave us today's much more common meaning of being impaled by a spear or bullhorn, and by extension, the viscera that come out of your body as a result. Nice!

Violence like the shooting that occurred last week in Franz Sigel Park are unlikely in Memorial Gore, at least for the moment, as it is locked up tight.

The memorial is perfectly visible from the surrounding sidewalks, though. Sculpted by the Piccirilli Brothers of Lincoln Memorial fame and dedicated in 1920, its sides are engraved with the names of World War I dead.

It's all the same white color, but the big sphere is marble and the eagle bronze, according to the Parks Department website.

The site also notes a $20,000 renovation funded in 1999, but evidently this affected the little park's surroundings more than its grounds. It also reports that "Council Member Kenneth K. Fisher is funding a $50,000 renovation to the site that will provide new play equipment with safety surfacing and new fences."

I couldn't detect any play equipment, old or new, through the fences or the locked gate. The only sign that people were ever meant to enter here is an extremely overgrown pathway leading in from the gate. Peer carefully into the following photo and you can pick it out. It's at the bottom and just to the left of center.

Maybe someday we'll be able to tread its secretive stones.

Clement Clarke Moore Park

As it's named for Clement C. Moore, author of the famous poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (popularly known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"), it's only fitting that the name of Clement Clarke Moore Park is itself a micro-poem:

Clement Clarke
Moore Park

There, you see? And who says a poem needs a verb?

Moore's family estate, which includes what is now the General Theological Seminary, was once a farm. Moore's grandfather, Captain Thomas Clarke, bought the property in 1750 and named it Chelsea, the name borne now by the whole neighborhood.

So I figure this little corner park, though mostly just playgrounds, is worth a mention because of that connection to the history of the area. Also, the surrounding trees sure do look nice in bloom in the spring.

Stopping by again on a warm summer afternoon, I found all the gates mysteriously closed, and all but one locked – yet there were people inside, a scattering of tiny children and their caretakers. Feeling unwelcome, I stayed outside the iron fence.

Just across Tenth Avenue you can see the High Line. But there's no serenity on the street. Although we're several blocks south of the tremendous Hudson Yards development now under construction, the traffic backups make Tenth a noisy crawl of trucks, buses and cars all day long.

It's hard to imagine the Hudson River is just one further block west. But maybe that's just what this spouting seal is doing. Though surrounded by colorful offerings left him by the local toddlers, he pines for the open water.

Bath Beach Park and Shore Parkway Greenway

Bath Beach Park, also known as Bath Beach Playground, is a utilitarian space at the seaside edge of Brooklyn's quiet Bath Beach neighborhood. A walkway through the park ending at a curved wall is named for Joseph L. Pezzuto, a local community activist who had a major hand in the livelihood of this park and the whole Bath Beach neighborhood through a big chunk of the 20th century.

Atop the wall is a raised platform with benches.

Visiting on a warm weekday afternoon in early summer, I encountered a whole lot of not very much, just a scattering of children and their caretakers. From some angles it was easy to imagine I was in an episode of Life After People. The dusty softball field looked like a desert, the bocce courts and chess tables just as empty.

It was only the middle of the afternoon, so there wasn't too much going on in the playground itself either.

But at the back of the playground a strange gate beckoned. Why was it open? Where did the path lead?

I had to investigate, so, keeping an eye out for poison ivy and goblins, I followed the trail around the corner of the playground…

…and to the end. Where I found, not to my surprise, nothing.

Behind the handball courts is another unused grassy area. It all seemed to add up to something strange about Bath Beach Park. In college at NYU, Joseph L. Pezzuto was a member of the Rho Epsilon real estate fraternity – did you know there was a real estate fraternity? I sure didn't – but he died in 1999, so I can't ask him about Bath Beach Park's weird extraneous real estate.

Just across Shore Parkway a pedestrian bridge leads to the long bike path running alongside the Belt Parkway and the edge of Gravesend Bay, the Shore Parkway Greenway.

Looking west you can see the Verrazano Bridge, which upon its completion in 1964 became the longest suspension bridge in the world, a distinction it held for some time. In that great age of accomplishment, the U.S. could boast many firsts, bests, and biggests.

This pair made a nice silhouette against the span.

And with them, we bid farewell to Bath Beach, that former fashionable retreat, and, at least for now, to the Shore Parkway Greenway.

Milestone Park

Milestone Park in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn is the site of New York City's oldest surviving milestone, a relic from 1741 now at the Brooklyn Historical Society for safekeeping. A marker explains that the post "stood at the juncture of two colonial roads[,] Kings Highway and Old New Utrecht-Flatbush Road (now 18th Avenue). It also served as a gauge to determine postal rates."

The milestone indicated distances to "N York Ferry" (8 1/4 or 10 1/2 miles depending on which road you took), "Deny's Ferry" (2 1/2 miles), and Jamaica (15 miles). Today it's all one big fat city, of course. But it's easy to imagine the time when today's Queens neighborhood of Jamaica was a village hours away through farms and forests, and it was a long hike to get a ferry to Manhattan.

Near the marker an old water fountain caught my eye. I thought it might be some kind of historic post as well – it looks like it could have been here since 1741 too – until I saw a man bend over it and take a drink.

The Chinese immigrants gathered around a gaming table reminded me of Columbus Park in Manhattan, where you can find similar scenes.

Hexagons, cobblestones. Hexagons, cobblestones.

On the next block: the New Utrecht Reformed Church.

In front of the church, the New Utrecht Liberty Pole "marks the spot over which the American flag first waved in the town of New Utrecht. The original pole was erected by our forefathers at the Evacuation of the British, November 1783, amid the firing of cannons and demonstration of joy."

I only learned why 84th Street also carries the name Liberty Pole Boulevard while doing research after my visit to Milestone Park. While there I failed to notice the tall flagpole topped with an American flag and with the original eagle and weathervane from the 1783 pole. The Friends of Historic New Utrecht website has plenty of photos.

Another historical note: the park is also the site of the 17th century Van Pelt Manor House, which lasted the better part of three centuries before succumbing to history's onward rush. Wikipedia has a capsule history.

Musicians of Washington Square Park

I walk down to Washington Square Park frequently and often hear very good music there in the open air, especially jazz. Sadly, sometimes a loud drummer accompanying a dance or acrobatic act ruins the whole park's aural atmosphere for everyone else. It was not so late yesterday afternoon, when I heard an unusual variety of music.

This act included a bass banjo, or banjo bass (take your pick). Outdoors and with no amplification, the instrument was barely audible, but it sure made a visual statement as Coyote and Crow played "House of the Rising Son." Here they are doing an original.

There are a few different pianists who wheel full-sized pianos, even grand pianos, out to the park to entertain the crowds on nice days. There's also the Sing for Hope piano project, which sets out "brightly colored" pianos at outdoor locales around the city. This piano isn't "brightly colored." But people were taking turns playing it, and I got to hear this gentleman playing Schubert's Impromptu in A-flat minor, one of my all-time favorite pieces to play when I was a piano student (and still today, once in a great while).

There's a long tradition of guitar "circles" in the park where ad hoc groups of players and singers gather to play favorite songs, usually classic rock and folk. I've taken part myself now and then. This gang was pushing out Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing" as I swung by.

So it was a good day for music in Washington Square Park. As the sound of a lone sax player piping under the arch caught my ear, the visual music of a tableau of flowers with one of NYC's iconic brass water fountains caught my eye. The water of life.

Come to think of it, that's almost a Dire Straits song too: "Water of Love," one of my favorites, from their first album.

Finally, this seems a good spot for one of the best Washington Square Park images I ever captured, from September 2013.

Talk about serendipity.

I mean, talk about consummate skill and artistic vision.

Green Central Knoll

The quaint word "knoll" isn't one you hear too often around New York City. Aside from Greywacke Knoll, the site of Cleopatra's Needle, the Central Park obelisk – and be honest, did you know that was called "Greywacke Knoll"? – Green Central Knoll in Bushwick seems to stand pretty much alone.

Specifically, it stands alone on the site of an old Rheingold Brewery, according to the Parks Department – though recent real estate news identifies a different Bushwick location for the historic suds factory. Maybe there were multiple Rheingold buildings or sites. Anyway, the park is called Green Central Knoll because it's bordered by Evergreen Avenue, Central Avenue, and Noll Street. (As to the derivation of the name Noll Street, your guess as is good as mine. Maybe a neighborhood historian can clue us in.)

Bushwick, the name given to the area by Peter Stuyvesant in 1661, comes from Boswijck, meaning "little town in the woods," "refuge in the woods," or "heavy woods" (depending on whom you ask) in 17th-century Dutch.

For modern times, I'd pick the "refuge" sense, since that's what city parks are. Most of Green Central Knoll is occupied by a large ball field.

At a lower level there's a sitting area, complete with cuddle benches.

The park's striking feature is an artificial rocky stream bed, complete with artificial (brass) fish and a painted landscape with white birds (ducks?) flapping by.

Because of a disabled L train, I was running late for the show I was reviewing that night, so I didn't have time to go down to the park's lower corner where, according to the Parks Department website, "the water pours into a catch basin adjacent to an area adorned with spray showers."

I did have time to observe, though, that there wasn't any water in the stream bed, leaving the metal fish just as dry as the artificial frog up at Highbridge Park in The Bronx. So I guess it would have been moot.