Water Garden, Brooklyn

On my previous visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I reported on its historic Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. From this exotic-looking lake, a constructed brook flows through the garden through the Bluebell Wood, Rock Garden, Plant Family Collection, and the Water Garden. At its terminus, the stream first enters a forebay pond before pooling in the Water Garden pond.

Completed in 2016, the Water Garden pond provides an environmentally sustainable solution for managing the garden’s flow of water. It was designed by prolific landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, whose works can be found across the country, incorporating waterways into postmodern park landscapes. Above is a photo of Tupelo Point which juts into the pond.

Vaipito Stream, Pago Pago

In my Out of Town feature, I hadn’t yet featured a hidden urban waterway in the Oceania part of the world. In the southern hemisphere so far, I’ve only written about Tank Stream in Sydney, Australia. After a careful search, I’ve zoomed in on the only American territory on this half of the globe, American Samoa. Its capital Pago Pago is conveniently situated at the head of a harbor which collects water from a dozen streams. The one with the largest watershed is the 1.7-mile Vaipito Stream.

I can’t imagine when I would have the opportunity to visit Pago Pago. Fortunately Google Maps took its car and camera there in 2014. Above is a view of Vaipito looking downstream from Route One.

Brookfield Park, Staten Island

On December 12, 2017, NYC Parks celebrated its 30,000th acre with the opening of Brookfield Park on Staten Island. This 287-acre property is a former landfill transformed into a hilly prairie landscape overlooking Richmond Creek. For the purposes of this blog, I traveled to this new park in search of the brook for which Brookfield may be named.

A day after its official opening this 258-acre park still had an “authorized personnel only” kind of feel. Not too many bikes or joggers to be found here on a snowy morning.

Logan’s Spring Brook, Staten Island

Back in March 2017, I documented the brook flowing along Bard Avenue on the North Shore of Staten Island. At the time I wrote that its furthest place aboveground was at Moody Place, which borders on Richmond University Medical Center. A tip from a colleague at Parks sent me further upstream where I found another piece of Logan’s Spring Brook in open view.

This piece of Logan’s Spring Brook can be seen from the north side of Castleton Avenue between Walbrooke and Kissel Avenues. It flows in an alley then disappears below Castleton Avenue.

Altamont Ponds, Staten Island

On the ridge overlooking Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean is a set of connected parks, the Staten Island Greenbelt. High Rock Park is regarded by the Parks Department as the “buckle” of the Greenbelt. The park has its natural ponds, and not all of them have names.

Two such ponds are at the southern edge of High Rock Park, separated by the unused Altamont House. For the purpose of this post, I’ll call them Altamont Ponds.

Banzer’s Pond, Queens

In the cemetery belt that straddles the Brooklyn-Queens border there were a few glacial kettle ponds that were filled, one by one, to make way for more burials, and for the Jackie Robinson Parkway that sliced through the graveyards in 1927. One such waterway was Banzer’s Pond, whose disappearance has not been extensively documented.

The above photo comes from The East New York Project, an encyclopedic history source for this corner of Brooklyn. The pond here is possibly shown in 1916, when it hosted a popular amusement center run by its namesake family.