Spring Creek Park is a public park along the Jamaica Bay shoreline between the neighborhoods of Howard Beach, Queens, and Spring Creek, Brooklyn, in New York City. Created on landfilled former marshland, the park is mostly an undeveloped nature preserve, with only small portions accessible to the public for recreation.
Spring Creek Park consists of three major parts, which surround the park's eponymous creek and several smaller waterways. Spring Creek South comprises the section on the Queens side south of the Belt Parkway, which consists mostly of a marsh and forest on the shore of the Howard Beach peninsula, surrounding the neighborhood on its western and southern sides. Spring Creek North consists of a largely fenced-off section of land north of Belt Parkway; it straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border, which runs along Spring Creek. A third section of parkland was built around the Gateway Center shopping mall, which is located north of Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn side. The southern section is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area and under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, while the northern and Gateway Center portions are managed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
A park along Spring Creek was first proposed in 1930 by the New York Park Association's Metropolitan Conference on Parks. It was ultimately decided that the park be built upon fill, since the site mostly consisted of marshland. Spring Creek Park was approved in 1942, and land-filling operations began in 1949. Temporary landfills for waste disposal were operated at the future park site until the South Shore Incinerator along Spring Creek was completed in 1954. The southern section of Spring Creek Park was integrated into the Gateway National Recreation Area in 1974. In the 1990s, the northern section of the park was expanded via land acquisition, and in 2003, The Related Companies built extra parkland as part of Gateway Center's construction. The New York state government opened the Shirley Chisholm State Park along the Brooklyn coastline, south of the Gateway Center section of the park, in 2019.
Description
Spring Creek Park is on the northern coastline of Jamaica Bay, extending west from Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach to the Fresh Creek Basin near Starrett City in the Spring Creek neighborhood. Most of the site lies adjacent or to the south of the Shore Parkway section of the Belt Parkway. A small portion of the park along the former Spring Creek Basin (concurrent with the Brooklyn-Queens border) extends north as far as Stanley Avenue.
Spring Creek South The southernmost and easternmost section of the park is located entirely within Howard Beach, bound by the Belt Parkway to the north and Jamaica Bay to the south, with Cross Bay Boulevard to the east and the mouth of Spring Creek (or Old Mill Creek) to the west. The park is on a peninsula adjacent to the "New Howard Beach" or Rockwood Park community. This area is known as "Spring Creek South" or "Lower Spring Creek", and is managed by the federal National Park Service as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Much of this area was formerly a municipal garbage landfill. Existing vegetation in Spring Creek South includes upland forest, grassland and shrubland, along with both freshwater and tidal marshes. Two pathways run through this section of the park. The area has been referred to as "the Weeds" or "the Baja" by local residents due to its vegetation and remoteness. It is also susceptible to brush fires during prolonged dry weather. Because it is part of the national park system, the area is accessible to the public.
Spring Creek North
The second section of the park is north of the Belt Parkway along the Brooklyn-Queens border, between Fountain Avenue to the west and 78th Street to the east, extending past Flatlands Avenue to Stanley Avenue at its north end. This portion contains the remnants of Spring Creek and a second small creek called Ralph's Creek, which feed into the mouth of Old Mill Creek. It is managed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. This area is known as "Spring Creek North" or "Upper Spring Creek", or as the "Spring Creek Park Preserve". The portion of Spring Creek North within Queens which contains Ralph's Creek is called the "Spring Creek Park Addition", added to the site in the 1990s.
The area is designated by the Parks Department as a "Forever Wild" nature preserve site, and is inaccessible to the public. Because of this, the property is entirely lined with chain-link fencing. According to the Parks Department, this area is the "largest undeveloped salt marsh in northern Jamaica Bay", and serves as a habitat for numerous bird species as well as land animals. In spite of its status as "Forever Wild", Spring Creek North contains two major waste disposal facilities. A water treatment plant, the Spring Creek Auxiliary Water Pollution Control Plant, is in this section near the intersection of Fountain and Vandalia Avenues. Farther north along Forbell Street is the former South Shore Incinerator, now used as a cleaning garage and composting facility by the New York City Department of Sanitation. Like Spring Creek South, this area was also subjected to garbage landfilling. The site of the water treatment plant was initially the Crescent Street Landfill. This was later replaced by the South Shore Landfill, which extended north to Stanley Avenue and received ash from the incinerator. A narrow concrete berm bridge crosses the Spring Creek waterway along the right-of-way of 157th Avenue, separating the remnants of the creek. The bridge may have been used for landfilling operations, and contains within it a combined sewage overflow pipe leading to the water treatment plant. The presence of the two waste facilities has led to criticism by park advocates and local residents.
Gateway Center parkland
The third and westernmost section of the park is north of the Belt Parkway along the southern and western edges of the Gateway Center shopping mall. This portion of the park is managed by the Parks Department, and was constructed in 2003 by The Related Companies who developed Gateway Center. It contains a total of of parkland, though only between Erskine Street to the east and Flatlands Avenue to the north is accessible.
This section features man-made or constructed wetlands which line the Belt Parkway. The parkland acts as a natural filter for stormwater runoff from the mall parking lot, after which the water flows into Hendrix Creek on the west side of the mall and park, or into the wetlands along the parkway. Numerous sewer pipes run through this portion of the park from the Gateway Center parking lot towards either Hendrix Creek or the Belt Parkway.
This section also contains a cricket pitch called the Roy Sweeney Cricket Oval, at the southwest corner of the Gateway site, with several small bleachers surrounding the field. It is the first New York City park field to be designated specifically for cricket. It was named in 2016 for Roy Sweeney, who founded the United States Cricket Promoters Association in 1986. A bikeway and running path runs through the park, including a roundabout circumscribing the cricket oval. A comfort station is at the cricket oval, completed in July 2013. It is prefabricated, consisting of concrete designed to mimic wood. It also uses storage tanks due to the park's distance from major sewer lines.
Former parkland The 1954 plans for the park had two additional tracts included in the park, which are now the Pennsylvania Avenue and Fountain Avenue Landfills. The Fountain Avenue Landfill is across to the south of the Gateway section of Spring Creek Park, and across to the west from Spring Creek South. The Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill is farther west, south of Starrett City. These former landfills were designated in 2018 as Shirley Chisholm State Park, which opened to the public on July 2, 2019.
Transportation The bus routes serve the portions of the park within Brooklyn. All four routes serve the Gateway Center, while the B13, B84, and Q8 all operate on Fountain Avenue near the Park Preserve. The Howard Beach portions of the park can be reached via the and local routes and the Q52 and Q53 Select Bus Service routes which operate on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach. The closest New York City Subway stations to the area are New Lots Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn served by the (connected by the B84 bus), and the Howard Beach–JFK Airport station served by the and AirTrain JFK.
History During at least three glacial periods, including the Wisconsin glaciation around 20,000 years ago, ice sheets advanced south across North America carving moraines, valleys, and hills. A terminal moraine was formed across the center of Long Island creating a drainage divide, with streams such as Spring Creek flowing south from the moraine (in what is now Highland Park at modern Jamaica Avenue) towards Jamaica Bay. The creek would later form the border between Brooklyn and Queens. What is now Spring Creek, Brooklyn, was characterized by marshland and streams such as Spring Creek and Hendrix Creek into the 20th century. Similarly, the section of Howard Beach, Queens, west of Cross Bay Boulevard (now New Howard Beach) consisted of undeveloped wetlands, while the peninsula was triangular and much smaller than its current extents.
Initial construction and landfill
In February 1930, the New York Park Association's Metropolitan Conference on Parks released a large report on potential parks and highways to be built in the city. The conference was chaired by the Long Island State Park commissioner at the time, Robert Moses, who would later become the New York City Parks commissioner. The report included a Spring Creek Park as well the Shore Parkway portion of the Belt Parkway, both in Brooklyn. The Metropolitan Park Conference called the Spring Creek site '"the last opportunity in Brooklyn for a new park of substantial size which can be acquired at reasonable cost.'" By October of that year, it was determined that the swampy land would have to be filled in order to turn it into a proper park. At this time, the tract was bound by Fountain Avenue to the west, Cozine Avenue (then Fairfield Avenue) to the north, and Sheridan Avenue to the east, on the western banks of Spring Creek where the water treatment plant now sits. Moses planned to create several parks on wetlands by filling the land with municipal waste before developing the land into parkland. These included the future Spring Creek Park and sites in Marine Park, Brooklyn; Ferry Point, Bronx; Fresh Kills, Staten Island; and Edgemere, Queens.