Sunday, November 22, 2015
What happened to Forest Park's lake?
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I came across this photo labelled "Forest Park Lake, Queens, 1936" and figured this must have been a mistake, because there's no place in Forest Park that looks like this. A sailboat pond with a walkway around it? No way.
So I started sleuthing via old maps. This 1951 aerial shot of the park does seem to show a body of water with a sidewalk around it just east of Woodhaven Blvd. So what happened to it?
Buildings. Lots of buildings.
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19 comments:
That's Jackson Pond, in Richmond Hill. From Richmond Hill Historical Society --
http://www.richmondhillhistory.org/JacksonPond_photos.html
As for the body of water in the map, that is the former Woodhaven Reservoir - now the site of the Forest Park Co-Ops.
Ed, this was the source. Are you saying it's incorrect?
No, it's correct - it says Myrtle Avenue - that's where Jackson Pond was (it's still called that). It's the same pond as in the pics on the Richmond Hill Historical Society page, same wall in the background, etc.
Is this the pond in 1924?
Yup - that's it - that's a neat view of it, you can really see how big it was.
The sailboat pond was on north side of Myrtle Ave and 108 St in Richmond Hill. Still there but now drained and has basketball courts.
Jackson Pond was located near Myrtle Avenue and Park Lane South. It was drained in 1966. Jackson Pond Playgroubd occupies the site. Another pond in Forest Park is Strack Pond, which was drained in the 1960s and restored a decade ago. The pond in your historic aerials is now the site of Victory Field. The apartments to its immediate south were never part of Forest Park. That was a utility property used as a water pumping station.
That's amazing. Riding by there for years and with all those co-ops it's hard to tell. From the photo it looks like that big parking lot by the bandshell.
This makes me even more curious about that massive apartment building that's between the rails going east and union turnpike and what used to be there.
I'm not sure but I think it was filled in the 60's after a kid drowned there.Same with Strack Pond near the band shell, kids drowned there too.Park's Dept. filled it in to make ball fields but it always flooded so it was returned to a pond.I'd like to see Jackson Pond play ground returned to a pond but doubt they will,it doesn't flood there.
Now that we know what happened to the pond, does anyone know why or how the park land was sold off to developers?
Strack Pond was manmade. It doesn't appear in the 1924 aerial.
Sergey Kadinsky said...
The pond in your historic aerials is now the site of Victory Field. The apartments to its immediate south were never part of Forest Park. That was a utility property used as a water pumping station.
Actually Sergey, the pond - or feeding reservoir known as the Woodhaven Reservoir as Ed Wendell mentioned - was not located at Victory Field; it was located where those apartment buildings, known as the Forest Park Coops, are presently extant just to the south. The Forest Park Coops were built in the early to mid-1950s. The land, as mentioned, was never parkland; rather, it was owned by the Jamaica Water Company. Once it was no longer needed for water distribution, it was sold off to developers, with the last piece being built on in the late 1970s.
Anonymous @ comment #11 - Strack Pond is most definitely NOT manmade. It's a kettle pond created by the last glacial retreat over 12,000 years ago. However, it was seasonal and has heavy forest cover, so it doesn't show up very well in the 1924 aerial, but it's there. It was filled in for a ballfield in the 1960s and restored about a decade ago.
Victory Field was actually created after the end of World War I to celebrate the victorious American forces which returned.
JQ LLC @ comment #8 - The Forest View Crescent Cooperative Apartments were built under the Mitchell-Lama program over a half century ago. Originally, what is now known as Trotting Course Lane was the northward extension of Woodhaven Boulevard, which started to be "straightened" out in the 1930s under the WPA and Robert Moses and completed a decade later into the super-highway that we know (and don't love!) today.
Hope this helps to clarify all of your questions.
Paul Graziano
Thanks, Paul. I stand corrected. The reservoir appears park-like but it was never part of Forest Park.
Thanks Paul
You should be legislating
godspeed
Great stuff. I'm in my forties and lived in the Woodhaven / Richmond Hill area more than 30 years and never knew how Victory Field got its name. Also the ballfields at Strack Pond we called Twins Fields and we're almost always too flooded to play little league games there.
Robert Moses mangled the entire Flushing River to truck in the second World Fair, after he had expanded the Flushing River for the First Fair.
As a boy, I sailed boats in Jackson pond and fished for sunnies and reds in what is now known as Strack pond. At the time it was two unnamed ponds which you can see in the third (?) picture of the original post. The ponds are on the west side of Woodhaven Blvd. south of Forest park drive. I assume one pond resulted from flattening and regrading the terrain for the ball fields. My guess is, the round structure on the north side of Forest Park Dr is the Carousel.
RE: The ponds at Forest Park, As boys we fished the two ponds in the "bowl"opposite the carousel , Around 1959 the ponds were drained. To do so a deep sewer trench was dug from Woodhaven Blvd thru the hill to the edge of the ponds. its important to note that the ponds were fed water from a large open sewer pipe that dumped out on the west side of the "bowl". That sewer outlet was fed by rain water from the parking lot and Forest Park Drive, If we knew when the parking lot was originally built then we would know for how long the bowl had been flooded by each rainstorm. In the aerial photo (DPR 13762) the ponds are not evident and the bowl appears wooded . When we fished there was a dead drowned tree standing in the water about 20 feet from shore at the east end of the big pond. Evidence of a rapid rise in water level? i speculate the area was swampy but the additional water from the storm drain created the ponds we remember.After the ponds were drained that open pipe was connected to the new sewer pipes that were laid across the floor of the bowl thru the trench and connected to the sewers under Woodhaven Blvd. After a couple years the bottom of the bowl was leveled and two baseball fields built named "Twin Fields" That was the early to mid 1960"s. The fields were not good because the area were just naturally boggy and so were little used. . I think that in the early years of development of the park( 1895-1940) the engineers used the bowl as a convenient place to dump rainwater but in doing so they created a future problem.Our beloved fishing hole was in reality a mosquito breeding eyesore that killed kids in the winter when they fell thru the ice. The ponds we fished were full of catfish,sunfish,carp(red and silver) bullfrogs ,smaller water frogs, snails and land toads and provided us with long summers of endless fun .Our ponds had no names , the pond that was put in their place is called the Strack pond and is not the pond that we fished as kids.
Didn't there used to be a pool with sprinklers in Forest Park. Was that the pond before it was drained?
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