Paerdegat Basin Park

Paerdegat Basin Park, on the southeast Brooklyn coast, is one of those more-or-less natural areas that's called a park, but that you can't actually go into – with one very recent exception.

The "park" is a saltwater wetland surrounding Paerdegat Basin, which divides the neighborhoods of Canarsie to the northeast and Bergen Beach to the southwest. The basin is a one-time tidal creek that was widened and dredged in the 1930s into a 1.25-mile-long channel as part of an aborted Long Island Railroad extension project.

Last year the city's Department of Environmental Protection completed a $455 million "holistic upgrade" to the grasslands and waterway, improving the grounds and the water quality and planting 1,100 trees. The DEP monitors the park – half of which is technically underwater – "to ensure that it remains a stable environment to support the wildlife in the area," according to the Parks Department.

The only wildlife we saw was a man walking his dog in one of the McGuire ballfields at the mouth of the basin.

We became aware of Paerdegat Basin from an NY1 report last summer about the opening of something there. I didn't catch the details at the time, but it must have been about the new five-acre Paerdegat Basin Ecology Park, discussed in this DEP press release from October 2015. The release also goes into detail about that costly upgrade to the formerly very polluted basin area.

The Paerdegat Basin Ecology Park, photographed through the double-locked gate

In addition to the Ecology Park there's supposed to be a walkable grassland park. We'll return in the warmer weather to see if those areas have been opened.

Meanwhile, here's a short DEP video about the restoration of wetlands around New York City. It includes photos of the Paerdegat Basin area and the Ecology Park. And if you're wondering how locals pronounce "Paerdegat" – which means "horse gate" in Dutch – you can listen to the video for that too.

Winfield Plaza/Crosson Memorial Park

New York City has plenty of mini-parks where streets cross at acute and obtuse angles leaving small triangular patches of land with no other practical use. Rarely, though, is one of the streets the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known colloquially as the BQE. Winfield Plaza, also designated Crosson Memorial Park, in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, is just such a place.

Actually suspended above the BQE, where 68th and 69th Streets both run into Woodside Avenue, the little plaza was acquired by the city in 1955 as part of a renovation project on the expressway – a road which, as everyone knows, is now a beautiful jewel in the golden chain of pastoral highways that spiderweb our fair city.

Why "Winfield"? Well, wouldn't you know it, there used to be a neighborhood here called Winfield, named after Civil War general and 1880 Democratic presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock. (If you were hoping it had something to do with Dave Winfield, sorry. This is Queens, after all, not The Bronx. As a consolation prize, see the baseball reference below.)

Why "Crosson"? In the 20th century the neighborhood of Winfield lost its identity and was absorbed into Maspeth and Woodside. In 1968 the City Council renamed the spot Reverend Matthew J. Crosson Memorial Park after a noted World War II army chaplain and local pastor, born in Manhattan but a resident of Woodside in his youth and when he was ordained. According to the Parks Department, Crosson was later nicknamed "the baseball priest" because he was closely associated with youth sports leagues.

Either the Park Department signage hasn't caught up, or somebody over there has a sentimental attachment to the Winfield connection. The department's historical sign program, at least online, still lists it as Winfield Park.

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Winterregnum

The winter months are a slow time for Park Odyssey, but scenes still catch my eye in and around parks. Here are a few Manhattan snapshots from the end of 2015 and the start of 2016.

The first is the tip of Pier 45 in Hudson River Park, where on some days, in the late afternoon and early evening, dancers gather to tango, waltz, and otherwise while away the time in each others' arms. I see them sometimes when I'm out running. In the winter I go running only on unseasonably warm days, and on one of those, to my surprise, there were the dancers – unseasonably dancing.

Dancers at Pier 45, Hudson River Park, December 2015

My perambulations through some of the parks in the interior of the great island revealed scenes of restfulness, community, and frosty beauty.

Madison Square Park, December 2015

Ice skaters in Bryant Park, January 2016

Sunset over Union Square Park, December 2015

Union Square Park after the snow, January 2016

I'll be back with newly explored parks well before the winter's out. Stay tuned!

Barrett Triangle and Baker Square

Barrett Triangle, a tiny park near Staten Island's Borough Hall, is notable for the Clarence T. Barrett Memorial, a bronze classical warrior figure on a marble pedestal.

Barrett fought notably in the Civil War and then worked as a landscape architect, making him an especially appropriate park honoree, and a sanitation engineer (likewise, if you ask me). He also served as a Police Commissioner, back when there was actually a Commission consisting of multiple Commissioners (Theodore Roosevelt being the most famous example). And he held a position we no longer have (but maybe should): Superintendent of the Poor.

The monument is by Sherry Edmundson Fry (1879–1966), a sculptor who worked at the confluence of art and war. Not only was Fry a noted sculptor, he helped found the U.S Army's first Camouflage Corps, responsible for camouflaging artillery positions during World War One. But according to Wikipedia, Fry "defied regulations and went out alone in abandoned trenches, looking for enemy helmets, belt buckles and other souvenirs." He sounds like a man I would have liked to know.

We discovered Barrett Triangle when we arrived early for what proved a memorable meal at Enoteca Maria, a restaurant with more personality than ten trendy Manhattan eateries combined, and darn good food to boot.

On that September day, Staten Island Borough Hall preened with lush, colorful planters.

Around the back, I could resist taking this contrasting photo. I never knew retired U.S. flags were to be dropped in a mailbox that says "No Mail." You really do learn something every day in this city.

Nearby too is a Greenstreets plot called Baker Square, named for former Borough President Edward Grant Baker. The little amelanchier trees must be a beautiful sight when they're blooming.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Washington Square Park, Halloween Morning

October 31, 2015. A beautiful fall morning. Eleven o'clock, before the serious Halloween mayhem begins.

Alice Austen Park and Buono Beach

In the Rosebank neighborhood on Staten Island's eastern shore lies Alice Austen Park, site of the Alice Austen House, a New York City Landmark and National Historical Landmark. Named for Alice Austen, the documentary photographer who lived there for much of her life, the house has an original section that dates from the 1690s.

The house has more park to bask in – 15 acres of green – than many of New York City's historic houses do.

A path along the water offers a good look at the Verrazano Bridge.

Skip down to the actual waterline and things look a little rougher, though picturesque in their own way.

Here's a look south:

The adjacent Buono Beach, the former Penny Beach renamed for a Staten Islander killed in the Vietnam War, remains mostly closed after sustaining damage from Hurricane Sandy.

Alice Austen Park also appears to be home to another historic structure, the McFarlane-Bredt House, a onetime home to the New York Yacht Club at 30 Hylan Boulevard. I didn't know about it until after the fact, didn't notice it when I was there, and am not even sure what it looks like because different houses turn up on an internet image search. But I'll be sure to seek it out when I return to visit the Alice Austen House itself.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Silver Lake Park

Another very large Staten Island park unknown to most New Yorkers, Silver Lake Park presents an interesting mix of natural beauty and utilitarian planning and design.

Unlike parks that advertise a small pond as a big attraction, like a little pearl in a very large oyster, Silver Lake Park is dominated both aesthetically and geographically by its namesake body of water, a sizable reservoir that evolved under human hands from a natural lake.

Stretches of peaceful grassland with some really nice old trees greeted us as we entered from the north. These are just London plane trees, ubiquitous in New York City, but these particular guys have grown some noticeable personality over the decades.

And look! An apple tree!

It doesn't take much to get us city folk excited. Later we came upon another one: Look! An apple tree! And this one has red apples!

A big chunk of Silver Lake Park is a public golf course. The 18th fairway is believed, says the Parks Department website, to contain the remains of "perhaps several thousand" 19th-century immigrants who died from contagious diseases after being housed in the Marine Hospital Quarantine in Tompkinsville, including many refugees from Ireland's Potato Famine.

I'm imagining the kids in the next photo sneaking onto the course through the gap in the fence (on the left side of the above photo) to practice chip shots when no one's looking. You know. As kids will do.

Or ghosts of the dead immigrants using it to come in and out at night. Everyone knows ghosts hate to climb fences, right?

In 1913 the Board of Water Supply drained the original lake and created a reservoir to serve as the endpoint of the city's Catskill water supply system. (Infrastructure junkies interested in how engineers piped water from the Catskills to Staten Island can detour here.)

No longer a working reservoir, Silver Lake is used today for drainage of two huge underground water-storage tanks system built in the 1970s – two of the world's largest, in fact, with a capacity of 100 million gallons. That's a lot of flushes.

Infrastructure. Boring, right? Probably ugly, right?

Seems you're not supposed to swim in the reservoir. But fishing looks to be OK.

Elsewhere in the park, water gets more excited.

But I got more of a kick out of walking across the reservoir's divider, which you can see in the background of the picture with the fisherman above. Here it is from a closer vantage point.

The structures on the divider bear the engraving "CITY OF NEW YORK CATSKILL WATER SUPPLY" above the New York City seal, with its beavers, flour barrels, and windmill evoking the time of the early Dutch settlers.

Peering inside the structures doesn't reveal much. And they're locked up pretty tight. I don't think even the ghosts from the 18th hole could slip through these bars.

The view from the barrier gives you a good sense of the size of the reservoir.

By contrast, there's nothing too spectacular about the "park" part of the park. A staircase from one level to another. A dog run.

Winding paths. More trees. The moon.

When it was created more than a century ago, Silver Lake Park was envisioned as Staten Island's answer to Central Park and Prospect Park, vast sculptured masterpieces too inconveniently located for Staten Islanders to visit often. It is nothing like those parks.

But it has its own beauty – infrastructural at it may be. And it did fulfill the vision of park visionary John De Morgan, who, addressing the New York State Assembly in Albany in 1900, asked on behalf of his fellow islanders for a place "Where…their children [can be] kept from the contaminating influence of the saloon."

I didn't have a single urge for a whiskey the whole time I was in Silver Lake Park.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media