Baisley Pond Park:
‘The Central Park Of Southeast Queens’

By Shams Tarek

One day in the late 1970s, South Jamaica resident Audrey Lucas decided to start jogging to lose weight.

A friend told her to do it in Baisley Pond Park, a 110-acre patch of green and blue just five blocks from her house.

Lucas, who had been living in the neighborhood for five years, had never seen the park before. When she finally went to check it out, her life changed forever.

“It was so pretty,” said Lucas, who over the years became known in the community as “The Park Lady.” “It was such a beautiful morning. There were birds in the sky and on the pond. I fell in love with the park that morning.”

It was a love that never faded, according to Lucas. Besides being a regular user of the park, she also became its leading supporter, starting two advocacy groups dedicated to its improvement and acting as its full-time steward for several years.

Today, the private grant that paid Lucas’ full-time salary for taking care of the park between 1998 and the end of 2002 has been spent. Left for the park are Lucas’ continuing dedication to her “Park Lady” title, a recent $35,000 study of the park and a slew of organizations—including the two founded by Lucas—invested in seeing that Baisley Pond Park lives up to its local nickname, “The Central Park of Southeast Queens.”

Like Manhattan’s Central Park, Baisley Pond Park started out as a farm with natural waterways that was later developed into a sprawling landscaped greenspace with a manmade pond.

The 30-acre Baisley Pond started life as a man made reservoir formed after local streams were dammed to power an 18th century grain mill. PRESS Photo By  Ira Cohen

The Long Island Democrat, a defunct newspaper that covered the area before it became part of New York City in the mid-19th century, described Baisley’s “clearness and sweetness of water, how beautifully the birds sing, and how the turtles leave their tracks as they crawl out of the mud.”

Nature is slow to change. Today, save for some inevitable litter along the banks of the popular pond, the Democrat’s description can still be applied.

There are dozens of types of birds at the park, according to Partnerships for Parks, including Canadian geese, mallards, grebes and gulls in the wintertime. During the summer blackbirds, herons, egrets, doves, mockingbirds, robins and cardinals call Baisley Pond Park home.

The pond, cleared for recreational use in the 1930s, is home to plenty of local wildlife, including lily pads, snapping and musk turtles and bullfrogs.  Local fishermen report largemouth bass, panfish and carp, as well as some freshwater eel.

Kids and other bug watchers revel in the pond’s eight types of dragonfly, and nine types of sedge and rush.

Baisley Pond’s natural distinctions date back over 10,000 years, in fact.  When workers drained and dredged the pond in the mid-19th century to prepare it for use as a source of freshwater for the residents of Brooklyn, they found the remains of an American mastadon, including five molars and bone fragments. Scientists think mastadons lived in the area at the end of the last ice age, when the last giant glaciers left Long Island.

Today, kids climb on a model of a mastadon — long, white tusks and all — at one of the park’s playgrounds.

The amount of facilities at the park is staggering: 18 basketball courts, 12 tennis courts, eight handball courts, six baseball diamonds and two cricket mounds. There’s a skating circle and five playgrounds, and athletes play football and soccer inside the park’s oval track.

“I love those cricket players in their little white suits,” Lucas chuckled at a recent meeting of park advocates. She noted that besides making the park look good, cricket league leaders contributed a lot of money to the park for its upkeep.

In its beginnings, Baisley Pond was a short horse and buggy ride from rural Jamaica’s commercial center on what is now Jamaica Avenue. Farmers dammed three streams in the area to power a grain mill in the 18th century, creating one of the oldest artificial bodies of water on Long Island.

The 30-acre Jamaica Pond became part of the estate of local farmer David Baisley, and came to be known in the early 19th century as “Baisley’s Pond.” It was acquired by the City of Brooklyn’s Water Works in 1852, providing 3,000,000 gallons of drinking water to Brooklyn for decades thereafter.

The site was transferred to the Parks and Recreation Department and opened as a public park in 1919. In the 1930s, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses constructed recreational facilities, turning the park from just a nature reserve to a place to play and watch sports.

The south extension of the park, separated by Sutphin and Rockaway Boulevards, was “a wasteland of old pumping stations and debris” when it came under Parks Department jurisdiction in the 1960s, according to the non-profit park advocacy group Partnerships for Parks.It took 20 years for the area to become usable, though, when Parks Commissioner Henry Stern installed handball courts, a track, athletic fields, basketball courts and playgrounds and turned the second park into Baisley’s Sports Complex.

Without Lucas as its full-time caretaker, Baisley Pond Park is being shepherded by not only her informally, but also by two organizations she founded during her tenure that are now somewhat competing for the title of park advocate of record.

Lucas founded the Friends of Baisley Pond Park right after starting her official tenure at the park. But differences in working style with the group’s members, as well as an unenthusiastic membership in which “people stopped going to meetings,” Lucas said, led her to start another group, called the Baisley Pond Park Coalition, for which she appointed different leadership.

Lucas said that the two groups, both of whom attended a community meeting about the park in January, “need to really work together.”

“I am personally hoping and praying that these people will work together,” The Park Lady said. “I’d hate to see three and a half years of work go to waste.”

Right now, the Baisley Pond Park Coalition seems poised to emerge as the one group to lead the park, as it’s an umbrella group featuring members of about two dozen organizations and offices. The Friends is a single group that used to be part of the Coalition, but recently withdrew.

As local lovers of the park work out under what guise they do their work, an international organization that studies parks and produces reports about them — including recent work with Rufus King Park — has just finished a $35,000 study that identifies the park’s strengths and weaknesses, and suggests how the community can build upon them both.

The J.M. Kaplan-funded study, conducted by Project for Public Spaces between the summer of 2001 and the end of last year, found that with some minor improvements, Baisley Pond Park and the area around it could become a kind of gold coast for Southeast Queens.

The two researchers working on the study found that there are three major needs for the park: the Parks Department must improve conditions there, more activities — especially water-related — have to be offered, and the neighboring community must take a more active role in the park.

The study found that the park’s landscaping could be better, that some paths are in disrepair and that the pond could be better-maintained and drained. It also found that poorly planned paths discourage walking to all the parts of the park.

Park neighbors at the presentation were excited about the study and its recommendations. They’ll be using a completed version of the report, published in March, to help gain the support of local elected officials and philanthropic groups that can put enough dollars into the park to make Baisley’s potential a reality.

“The things that PPS suggested won’t cost a lot of money,” Lucas said.  “There’s a lot of possibilities. It’s open. It’s free.”