As Promised
Yes, yes, yes, I'm behind on my posts (as I am with pretty much everything in my life). But I did, at last, get around to revisiting some of my past RWI stories and incorporating Professors Padwe's and Cunningham's edits so that I could give you a sense of what I've been writing outside the blog. So here's the first neighborhood story I did -- a portrait of a block.
The peninsula known as Hunts Point, due north of Rikers Island, sits with its back turned to the Bruckner Boulevard and the rest of the south Bronx. Its face juts out defiantly into the water, where it looks to be in a stare-down with College Point, across the expansive East River in Queens. It keeps a watchful eye on the prisoners at Rikers Island, like a pitcher keeping tabs on the runner at first base. Even on a map, Hunts Point looks to be nursing a grudge.
It could have been a contender.
With several miles of waterfront, Hunts Point might well have become a vibrant recreational area. Instead it is predominantly industrial, home to a vast food-distribution center, a fertilizer plant, a water pollution control plant, and a prison barge. Only 12.1% of the area is residential, compared with 33.3% for the Bronx overall, according to Bronx Community Board 2 and the Department of City Planning. Hunts Point is dominated by three categories of land use: industrial and manufacturing, transportation and utility, and vacant land. Together, they account for more than 50% of the area, more than four times the proportion for the borough as a whole.
If Hunts Point is incongruous at its shoreline edges, it is equally so at its center, where a 2.49-acre park sits virtually unused. At the park’s heart is a cemetery where the dead truly do rest in peace, cut off from visitors as much by circumstance as by the iron fence that surrounds their graves.
Joseph Rodman Drake Park sits on land acquired in the late 17th century by neighborhood namesake Thomas Hunt, according to the Parks Department. Hunt’s mansion, the Grange, was a haven of sorts for the young Drake, a businessman-cum-physician and noted poet. When Drake died of tuberculosis in 1820 at age 25, he was interred in the Hunt family burial ground at the Grange. The property was acquired by the Parks Department in 1909 and was dedicated in Drake’s name in 1915.
The trapezoid-shaped park is bounded on the north by busy Oak Point Avenue, on the west by Longfellow Avenue, and on the south by Drake Park South. Hunts Point Avenue provides a diagonal border to the east.
It is a most improbable park. The trucks, lumbering by in a steady parade, seem to outnumber the trees. Pigeons and squirrels have the run of the place, and an old man encourages them with countless handfuls of peanuts. Stray dogs wander through. Urban wildlife abounds, but the park is nearly devoid of people.
Not a single residential building fronts Joseph Rodman Drake Park. Instead, there are two auto-supply businesses, a bank, a junkyard, a papaya importer, a recycling operation, and a sheet-metal shop.
Three recent visits, all in warm weather, yielded fewer than a dozen sightings of actual parkgoers. During a five-hour period on a pleasantly sunny recent Tuesday, very few people ventured off the concrete into the park itself: the pigeon feeder, a man asleep on a flattened cardboard box, a family of three sitting on beach chairs with ice cream cones, and a local businessman playing fetch with his golden retriever.
The previous Sunday at noon, the park was all but abandoned. The week before, six men played a halfhearted game of softball for an audience of one. Another group eschewed the park and took batting practice in the street.
It is no great surprise that the park is used so infrequently. For one thing, it is located in one manufacturing zone and is on the border of another. Just about all of Hunts Point is zoned for manufacturing except for a residential district adjacent to Bruckner Boulevard, the midpoint of which is six blocks away.
In addition, the park lies within a census tract with a population of just 133, or 0.01% of the total population of the Bronx, according to the 2000 Census. The next closest census tract had a recorded population of only 439.
While the pool of probable parkgoers is especially small to begin with, there are several reasons why even the few area residents would choose to stay away. For one, the park lacks amenities of any kind. According to the posted Parks and Recreation Department sign, benches were installed along the park paths in 1953. Today, there are none. Four large tree stumps serve in their stead, and though the grass is mowed regularly, it is laced with broken glass.
Even if the seating were inviting, the park is not a place for quiet contemplation. On a recent afternoon, a persistent stream of trucks variously roared and rumbled past on Oak Point Avenue: a fire truck, an oil truck, pick-up trucks, a garbage truck, an armored car, delivery vans, a tow truck, SUVs, 18-wheelers and smaller tractor-trailers, plus the two- and three-axel varieties known to truck drivers as “straight jobs.”
The cemetery in the center of the park remains locked except when the Parks Department crew comes for its regular maintenance visit. Inside the iron gates lie approximately two dozen markers, some of which are only fragments. Two huge trees grace the northwest and southeast corners of the burial ground. The headstone for the park’s namesake is nowhere to be found.
Despite Joseph Rodman Drake’s literary gifts, the view from his park does not inspire poetry. Just across Hunts Point Avenue, an isosceles traffic island bears a Parks Department “Greenstreets” sign, yet on weekdays it is covered by mountains of clear plastic bags filled with beer and soda cans that spill onto the street from a sprawling recycling operation. In the other direction, at Alicea Auto Wreckers on Longfellow Avenue, tires in all sizes loom in piles outside the junkyard door. Overhead, the carcass of a red sedan dangled from a crane last week.
Nor does the park provide the soothing smells of blossoms or of fresh-mown grass. Instead, shifts in the wind bring with them a reminder that heavy industrial activity takes place nearby. A park sign dated May 2002 touts an Urban Silviculture Research and Education Project that “seeks to determine the effects that trees have on removing air pollutants.” For now, at least, they are no match for the rank odor that wafts through the park.
Walter Amaya, a 37-year-old Mack truck driver, waited in the shade of the park recently while workers unloaded his latest delivery further down the street. “They keep the park in good shape,” he said of the Parks Department.
The Parks Department rated the park “acceptable” for both cleanliness and overall condition after its most recent inspection, on July 5. On August 10, 2004, however, the park received an “unacceptable” rating for overall condition for the second time in 15 months. On Tuesday, the maintenance crew fanned out to collect litter with spiked sticks and made short work of the job, but trash marred the grass again just a few hours later.
“Even as the surrounding neighborhood has grown more industrial, the pastoral beauty of the Joseph Rodman Drake Park endures.” So says the Parks and Recreation Department sign, dated September 2000, that hangs on the cemetery gates. Perhaps those buried within would agree. The living appear to have voted with their feet.
