Lower Reservoir, Central Park

An experienced urban explorer knows that when an object appears unusual, it has a long history behind its appearance. One such example is the wall behind the 86th Street Shop in Central Park. This is where the Parks Department fuels and repairs its vehicles.

The wall behind the shop’s parking lot is slightly inclined and runs straight between the shop building and the Central Park Precinct. This wall is a remnant of Central Park’s Lower Reservoir, which contained the city’s drinking water from 1842 to 1929.

Cope Lake, Bronx Zoo

When the Bronx Zoo was developed at the turn of the 20th century, its design was considered innovative as it preserved much of its natural terrain, giving many of the animals room to roam at a time when many zoos kept their exhibits in tight cages. The preservation of the landscape enabled the Bronx River to flow freely through the zoo, and retained some of the ponds and brooks within the zoo for the enjoyment of the animals.

One such waterway is Cope Lake, located near the northern border of the zoo by Fordham Road.

Flushing Meadows Tour This Sunday

This Sunday October 16, I will be giving a tour of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park as part of the Open House New York presentation at the New York State Pavilion. My tour will begin at 1pm by the New York State Pavilion. So after you’re done with OHNY, you can learn more about the World’s Fairs that took place at this park with my tour, along with other details relating to the park’s history.

For more details, contact Vickie Karp. 718-760-6437. If you cannot make it to my tour, there will be tours given by other park docents every hour from noon to 3pm with the last tour at 3:30pm.

Trump Links at Ferry Point Park

In the course of choosing which waterways to profile in my book, the city’s golf courses hold many of them, including natural streams, inlets of the sea and artificial ponds used as water traps. Generally, I avoided those designed as part of a course with no natural history predating the links.

And then there’s Trump Links at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, an upscale course that transformed a former trash landfill into a landscape of rolling hills reminiscent of Trump’s two courses in Scotland.

Bit of Tibbett on the Old Put

Prior to urbanization, Tibbetts Brook flowed south from what is now Van Cortlandt Park to Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a course marked on maps by Tibbett Avenue. In the proposal to daylight the buried section of this stream, the new course is envisioned a few blocks to the east.

The proposed stream path runs on the route of a railway that rolled through northwestern Bronx until 1980. Since then, portions of it have become a naturally occurring wetland. With a little cleaning up and a path following it, one can imagine abandoned spaces such as the underpass above having a creek followed by a walking path.