Site Visit: Owl’s Head Park
Owl’s Head Park was originally private land, purchased by the city in 1930. Moses remade it in 1934 along with several other parks, including Fort Greene, McCarren, and the Prospect Park Zoo. Geographically, it was the pivot point of Moses’ Circumferential Parkway plan. For several years, the BQE did not connect to any of the southern expressways; it wasn’t until the aftermath of Moses’ battle to build a Battery crossing that a connection was finally approved. The first segment, the Belt Parkway, ran along the southern shore of the island and looped around the western shore to stop at Owl’s Head, and was completed in 1940. The second segment, from Owl’s Head to the Prospect Expressway and Battery Tunnel, was completed a year later. Unlike what you may be used to from interstate highways, these transitions are far from seamless.
Broadly speaking, the park is located at the western edge of Bay Ridge, a couple miles north of the Verrazano Bridge, at a bend in the shore. It’s directly across the bay from the northeastern tip of Staten Island. It received its name because the point once looked like an owl’s head.
The park is bound on the south by 68th Street, on the east by Colonial Road, and on the west and north by essentially an entrance ramp to the Belt Parkway. If I could think of a better-known analogue, it would be the area by Riverside Drive in Manhattan: a quiet, pretty neighborhood right next to a major expressway, but largely isolated from it. You can also see the 69th Street Pier here, which will be mentioned below.
The park’s design is very Moses. The walls, shown above, are solid and classical, blocking off the park from the street.
A playground has a prominent place, sitting just inside the park’s main entrance at the corner of 68th and Colonial. There is also a dog run at the opposite end, but it seems to have been recently tacked on.
The landscaping is open and pastoral, with few spaces for public interaction. The emphasis is more on quiet contemplation, or on opportunities for play or picnicking.
True to Moses form, the only building on the grounds is a bathroom facility, referred to on the sign as a “comfort station.”
The centerpiece of the park is supposed to be this terrace at the top of the hill, from where you would be able to view the bay. Unfortunately, it is under construction. Says the Parks Department website:
The upper overlook terrace and paths are closed. We are reconstructing the 70-year old terrace with new paving, benches, fences, landscaping and lighting. A new path will make the terrace accessible to everyone. We are also adding a drinking fountain and bike rack. In addition, we will be pruning and fertilizing the trees and cleaning the drainage system. The result will be a lovely, tranquil spot to relax and enjoy nature, or to participate in special events.
You can still sit on benches outside the terrance and see the bay, however, as these boys are doing.
This is actually a view of the Belt Parkway, which is just on the other side of the park. That you can’t see it is a perfect example of Moses’ method of design. He used the land he appropriated for expressways to build public facilities, so playgrounds abut six-lane highways, and need to be separated somehow.
What happens after the park ends is the real point of interest here, though the park is absolutely lovely. At the southwest corner stands a sign pointing motorists to the on-ramp to the BQE, but if you cross Shore Road, before you hit the Belt Parkway you encounter a bike path lined with trees, bushes, and flowers. This is, obviously, a recent addition, park of the Greenstreets program:
The Greenstreets program is a partnership between the Department of Parks & Recreation and the Department of Transportation. Launched in 1996, Greenstreets is a citywide program to convert paved, vacant traffic islands and medians into green spaces filled with shade trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and groundcover.
This is a good catchall term for a number of projects that have sprung up around Owl’s Head in the last ten years. One, a skateboarding park, was proposed but failed to come to fruition. Another, a bike lane on Shore Road, was there when I visited. But that bike path, and its continuance alongside the water, is actually an original feature from the 40s, though it was recently renovated. This is the confusing thing, of course. I was all set to write about how Moses’ works cut people off from each other and the city, representing an overly romanticized view of human interaction that put play pastoralities into urban spaces, whereas more modern design brought people together and sought to connect them with the actual environment in which they lived. But that pedestrian and bike path is exactly the kind of thing that’s being proposed now, and Moses thought to put it in when he built the expressway. I didn’t know that because of the renovations, which seemed to bring it in line with more recent projects. New York’s history, which seems so visible, is often an illusion. But, as for those other projects:
Known more colloquially as the 69th Street Pier, it served for many years as the embarkation point for the ferry to St. George on Staten Island. That ferry service closed when the Verrazano Bridge opened, perhaps reasonably. The wooden pier fell into disrepair, but was reconstructed in the 70s as a concrete pier, and was briefly used to provide ferry service to Manhattan in the 80s. It’s hard to figure out exactly when the current version of the pier came about, but the Forgotten New York page, written in 2001, gives no mention of the pier’s current use, but it was apparently shut down for safety reasons in 1997 and reopened sometimes later as…
This! Nicely designed, full of picnic tables and benches, it’s apparently a popular spot for fishing and provides absolutely lovely views of…
…the Verrazano Bridge, and…
…the Manhattan skyline.
This is what you see in the foreground of the previous shot. Despite its seemingly environmentally-friendly name, it is really a sewage plant.
The people fishing on the pier all seemed to know each other.
Ultimately, nothing in New York is new. Though the pier seemed like a trademark 00s feature, and in many ways it was, it was there at all because of New York’s old transportation system, the one that predated Moses. The bike path, which seemed modern, was Moses; and the other green spaces (like the one above, just down Shore Road from the pier) are from who-knows-when. Everything is just layers, and everything new is just a modification of the old: the park as a modification of private space, the pier a modification of a transport network. Even when things are demolished, the very fact of their bounded space imparts some of that history on whatever springs up in its place. The tyrrany of lots, of airspace, and of the shore all conspire to force everything to be a variation on a theme. Moses could mount such monumental works, but that’s no longer possible, or even desirable. Now, we work with what we have.
See the full Flickr set here.
2 years ago | Tags: site visit moses park bridge expressway brooklyn
