The longest stream flowing on the North Shore of Staten Island is Bodine Creek, which flows through an Olmstedian park, then descended beneath the streets, and briefly sees daylight again before meeting the water of the ocean.
Within Clove Lakes Park, the stream is also known as Clove Brook, descending down five manmade cascades, each of which has a unique design. The largest of these barriers is Martling Dam which has steps on it that were used for public bathing in the past.
On Staten Island there are four golf courses, three operated by city, and a private one operating on state-owned land. The Silver Lake Golf Course is located on rolling terrain on the slope of the Silver Lake Reservoir.
The shape of the lake resembles an expanded number eight with a dam across the lake’s midpoint to separate its two basins. Once a natural waterway, it was drained in 1913, lined with concrete and connected to the city’s aqueduct.
When I am not getting my shoes wet by exploring streams, I look carefully at old maps and aerials in search of where the hidden waterways once flowed in the open. Last week, I conducted a park inspection in the far-off Travis neighborhood of Staten Island, where the Parks Department has a plant nursery.
The plant nursery is a former farm, and on one of its walls is a 1968 reproduction of Charles W. Leng’s 1896 Map of Staten Island with Ye Olde Names & Nicknames by William T. Davis. There is so much information on it relating to the island borough’s history. Let’s zoom in on a few details. Continue reading
Staten Island is a latecomer among the city’s boroughs when it comes to urbanization, as it retained its small-town appearance for more than a half-century after becoming part of New York City. The land around Clove Lake was proposed as a park in 1897 with its trails and facilities completed in the 1930s. It was the first large park in the borough, a local counterpart to Central Park and Prospect Park.
A former estate of colonial governor Thomas Dongan, the valley around Clove Brook contains dense forest that hides the Ordovician period serpentine rock that forms Emerson and Grymes hills on either side of the valley.
As late as 1936, steam locomotives shared tracks in the city with diesel and electric trains, horses shared the roads with trucks, and could that be a tall-masted ship docking on Staten Island’s North Shore? This week’s selected photo comes from the NYPL collection, taken by noted urban photographer Percy Loomis Sperr on May 22, 1936.
Sperr’s photo shows Bodine Creek crossed by the old and new trestles of the North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railway. Continue reading
In 1874, a map like none other was unfurled before city planners by Col. Egbert Ludovicus Viele. Designed in a time when the city was rapidly expanding north thanks to advances in public transportation, Viele captured for posterity the locations of the island’s springs, brooks, creeks, and swamps, where land meets landfill, tracing former shorelines and hilltops. To this day, this map is used by structural engineers in Manhattan, who check it for buried streams when constructing buildings, tunnels and utility lines.
With 82 of the 101 hidden city streams in my book located outside of Manhattan, what map did I use to find these waterways? Continue reading
Hidden Waters blog 