Brooklyn Parks Monster Preview
by Emily Votruba
April 2003

I don’t go to parks. I invoke an agreeable and right-headed remark by writer Joy Williams to explain myself, because Williams and I are in synch re: nature. When an interviewer suggested that, given that humans are a corrosive force in the natural world, the "moral alternative" is to live not in the wilds of Montana but in New York City, Williams agreed. "I don’t have to see a place," she said. To paraphrase: Just knowing the wilderness is pristinely out there is good enough, without one’s having actually to be in it.

Allow me to zoom in to wild New York City, whose natural wonders are most saliently evidenced in an array of jewel-like public parks. I came here after college largely because I had decided that I would have to worry less about my heavy treading on the earth in a place that has already been trod on a lot. In the same way that I take vicarious enjoyment in knowing that at press time there were still rolling hills of sage and foggy bogs out there in the interior, I derive benefit from this city’s glorious greenspaces, large and small, more and less concrete covered, heaving with bedrock outcrops or sprinkled by a clown’s-head fountain. When I moved to Sunset Park four years ago, it took me a year to spend more than 10 minutes in its namesake public space. One afternoon, a friend called to alert me to the eponymous sunset, so I walked over and watched it glorify the denouements of several soccer games. I don’t use the parks often; but I will defend to my death their existence for the pleasure of those who do.

One recent morning my boyfriend wondered aloud whether it was possible to visit every park in Brooklyn in a day. Couched in these terms, the idea of spending a whole day at the park(s) suddenly sounded thrilling, in a devil-may-care, Jackass sort of way. The answer to his question is no. Brooklyn has more than 400 parks, a figure that includes Greenstreets and greenways, playgrounds, sitting areas, memorial triangles, memorial squares, and indeed, large pristine nature preserves. Although you cannot visit them all in a day, you can fascinate yourself trying to hit 64 of them, as we did, managing 48. The comprehensive and user-friendly New York City Parks Service website, www.nycgovparks.org, was useful in planning. The highlights of our adventure follow. Get out there and see what we missed!


Leif Ericsson Park and Square; Valhalla Courts
Acreage N/A
Sunset Park/Bay Ridge
Ft. Hamilton Parkway, 66-67th Streets, Fourth Avenue

Our first stop, and the first instantiation of what will be a pronounced seafaring motif. One entrance to this heavily treed park is not far from the Lief [sic] bar on Fifth Avenue, which has a large metal cutout leaf on its front; convenient for your refreshment after you vanquish someone Valhalla style at tennis. Although the original Leif the Lucky never made it as far south as Brooklyn, he has long had a home in the hearts of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park Norwegians and thus has many public works named after him. Shore Parkway, we learn later, was actually officially renamed Leif Ericsson Drive in 1969, on the latest wave of Viking mania fed by President Johnson’s designation of October 9 as Leif Ericsson Day in 1964. This name change may also have been a way for City Council to throw a bone to Brooklyn Scandinavians: By then much of the activity at the Brooklyn piers, where many Skandis worked and played, had disappeared, cargo being diverted by the Port Authority to New Jersey and plans for the cross-harbor rail tunnel scuttled in favor of a more vertical project, namely, the Twin Towers. We decide not to go into the park, but make a mental note to drain a pint at the Lief sometime.

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