At the heart of the Great Neck Park District is the Village Green, a quiet, verdant space 100 years old. It represents a century of parkland donated, purchased and even swapped. All of it, all of our parks, have been left in our care.
The Village Green is both too small and too steeped in history to be a victim of poor thinking. It has the Rose Garden, whose designer was of storied fame. It holds our community’s Veterans Memorial and a gazebo. It has a water fountain whose poignant past caused it to be filled in. It has a series of trees killed in a storm, their trunks given new life as sculptures in tribute to nature. On its fringe it has a latter-day children’s playground area, a popular place of happy activity.
The Great Neck Park District believes in community service. So a resident spoke to a commissioner, and from that meager beginning it somehow grew into what we heard at a meeting on June 30: a percentage of the Village Green is to be carved out for a dog park. In other words, the commissioners are considering a plan to turn it brown.
In the 1990s the park district purchased a defunct country club at the intersection of East Shore Road and Colonial Road and created a dog park, Peninsula Park. It was hailed by dog owners. Startup costs for purchase and refurbishment were a million dollars. That’s a hefty sunk cost.
Dog owners I spoke with recently had this to say about Peninsula Park:
1. It smells. It stinks.
2. It has no sign.
3. When owners with pooch passes go there, no park worker materializes to let them in.
4. It has an abundance of poison ivy.
5. There is no sidewalk by which to approach and enter.
From this we can conclude that before allocating dog acreage in other parks, the park district needs to show the community it can rejuvenate and maintain the one dog park it has.
For example, remedy the absence of a sidewalk. Just as New York State established fire, water, water pollution control and park districts, it also created sidewalk districts, one of which oversaw the creation of the first sidewalks on Middle Neck Road. So our park district may have to take recourse to the commissioners of a somnolent sidewalk district, or to the trustees of a village, to address the need for a safe approach to that dog park by sidewalk.
I’ve spoken to dog owners I know and asked why they were not at the meeting. They said they do not take their dogs to a dog park, and they gave reasons why not. So the statistical increase in dog ownership during the pandemic does not translate to a need for turning over additional park acreage to dogs.
The park district has titled its proposal for dog parks on the Village Green and at Allenwood Park a pilot program, saying it will be short-lived. Yet the Great Neck school district’s current universal pre-K started as a pilot program back in the 1950s, so the word pilot in no way promises something will go away. As it happens, the pre-K was worthy at the outset because it was years in the planning. By contrast, the proposed alterations to the Village Green and Allenwood Park include none of the usual research about impact on the community and its environs.
A speaker at the meeting in favor of these takeovers of open space in two parks made it clear that he looks forward to this being only the beginning. He expects dog acreage in all the parks, great and small, in our Great Neck Park District: Steppingstone, Memorial Field, Parkwood, Allenwood, Cutter Mill, Grace Avenue/Firefighters, Lakeville, Manor, Ravine, Thomaston, Upland, Wyngate, Creek, Udall’s Pond Park, Woodland, Wooleys, plus Kings Point Park (which we have leased for 85 years), and the Village Green.
Peninsula Park needs a clean bill of health. Meanwhile, this idea to withdraw park space from the Village Green and Allenwood Park needs to be recognized for what it is: a pilot program not ready for prime time.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck