The woods of Forest Park are safe for now from new parking lots, but the park's “forever wild” status is still precarious. maudnewton writes
Photo: Max Clarke I’ve learned not to walk too deep into Forest Park when I’m in a hurry. It’s easy to get turned around amid the magical old red and white oaks, their walnut and tulip tree allies, and the understory of ferns and violets and poison ivy that grow right in the middle of Queens. I was late to a phone appointment because of my meandering once. The truth — that I got lost in the woods in New York City — seemed so implausible that I considered making up an excuse.
I wasn’t in denial that something might happen to the woodlands; the existence of the trees on that particular stretch of land has been contentious for decades. They surround a section of the Long Island Rail Road that was abandoned in 1962. Some locals have called for transforming the old tracks into a “Queensway,” a walking trail like the High Line where native plantings and wildlife could flourish.
After reading my friend’s text, I looked out my window at the trees across the way, their leaves vibrant even on a gloomy morning. This parking-lot scheme would not just mean bulldozing the trees; it would also require the earth beneath them to be flattened. Forest Park lies at the far southern edge of the Wisconsin glacier, and when the ice melted about 18,000 years ago, it left behind pebbles and giant boulders and hills and depressions — a “knob and kettle” terrain.
Heavy storms are strange on this land. Water accumulates unpredictably. My house sits on one knob, and the trees across the street grow along a briefly gentle then steep rise to another hill where abandoned tracks lie. Between these hills runs a road from the co-op complex to the north — a road that did not exist in the 1950s. During Ida, that street transformed into a river that overwhelmed the busier, lower-lying cross street below.
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