Forest Park and the homeless

Today, I completed what has now become an annual inspection of the woods around the area of Strack Pond. I am pleased to announce that the combination of persistent response to  problem areas and, now that the understory has shed its leaves and the poison ivy has subsided, the cleaning of remote sections has produced a clean segment of the park here on the corner of Woodhaven Boulevard and Forest Park Drive. Just two years ago, when I first began this work this same slice of the park was described as heavily trashed. Without the assistance of Forest Park's administrative and management personnel and its Urban Ranger office, this work could not have been accomplished. I thank all of them for their support of my efforts, their taking the time to patiently listen to my gripes, and their timely and continued response to my calls for assistance.

As a daily visitor to the park, I collect what must be years of the repeated use of the park by it's night time visitors. Judging only by the empircal evidence I collect, I have reached some startling truths that reflect a lot on us as citizens, as parents, as a city and ultimately as a society. By day, Forest Park is a serene place of beauty, at night, it does business as a place to get drunk and smoke, a place to have sex, and a place to stay over if you are homeless. All of that activity leaves litter. I've written a lot about the smoking and drinking before. Parents, wake up!! By the way, a special thank you to President Obama for banning those flavored blunts. That is the preferred way of smoking pot in Woodhaven. The way I look at it, one less thing I have to pick up of these kids.

I'm pretty sure that the park is frequently used by homeless men. What does that say about us, that staying overnight in a city park is a more attractive alternative to a city shelter. It seems evident that these encampments I have discovered in the past year also involve a lot of alcohol consumption. That's depressing. I don't like throwing away someone's clothes or sleeping bags. I always try to signal that I'm in a little hideaway by scrubbing the area of cans and debris before I bag clothes or blankets. Since I've started, I've seen evidence of  about seven or eight homeless locations on the Woodhaven side of the park. That's too many.

Forest Park was once part of a beautiful 1895 plan to have a continuous green belt ranging from Prospect Park in Brooklyn and culminating with Forest Park. It is a beautiful heritage of our city, and a treasure to the neighborhoods surrounding it. As a senior and a member of the Flower Child generation that would fix the world, I can't let it be passed on to the next generation sullied by our neglect, by our failure as parents and teachers and  citizens. I won't let that happen between Woodhaven Boulevard and the Carriage Walk, anyway. Pick it up, folks.

Confession: I am removing evidence from a crime scene

Rene, the Park Manager told me that he would have two more of the large trash bags I left off the trail in the woods disposed of. It takes me 3 or 4 visits to the park to fill one of those bags. There are other places in the park I leave garbage also, so this just amounts to the trash collected from the portion of the woods near the tennis courts on Forest Park South. In those bags are many plastic bags, the containers for coffee and food eaten in the woods, some beverage containers, and a lot of cigar wrappers. That portion of the  trash takes up about 15 % of the volume in a bag. The 85% remaining consists of  beer and other alcohol containers. I would guess conservatively, there are on average, a hundred and twenty beer containers in each bag. Now, many of them are the quart size containers, so there is an enormous amount of beer consumed in this part of the  park.Why do I say "I'm removing evidence from a crime scene"? I'm willing to bet that all of the vandalism that occurs in the park is a direct result of illegal drinking in the woods. The police call it the "broken window theory". One relatively small crime which leads to others. Since I've been involved with the park these past three years, I have seen the destruction of every sign park officials erected, the bat houses which were placed behind the pond, and the three or four "ice ladders" which are put there for safety each winter. A large laminated sign detailing the kind of wildlife at the pond was also torn loose from its mooring and thrown in the water. There have been at least three fires that I know of. And of course,broken glass is everywhere. Add to that, the other trash that accompanies the broken bottles and cans and you can readily see why I never have a day where there isn't some garbage to be disposed of. Never! There are areas in the woods that were empty a year ago and now take two or three visits to empty of bottles of malt liquor, beer, gin and vodka. What does this say of our generation that we tolerate our youngsters getting drunk unchecked every weekend in a city park? I realize the police and urban rangers can't patrol the woods nightly, but can nothing else be done? Most of the alcohol comes from two all night delicatessens, one on Jamaica Avenue and one on Woodhaven Boulevard. Those establishments sell the same size cans, bottles and brands I find and remove. Can't the police visit these places and warn the owners of the consequences of selling alcohol to minors?  And, what is going on with the parents of these budding alcoholics? These are middle class neighborhoods. You parents don't care if your children consume alcohol in the park? There is a $1,000 fine for littering in the park. Carrying and consuming alcoholic beverages in the woods can be a misdemeanor. Something like that on your kid's record can mean not getting into college, the Armed Services or a job. Nowadays, everything you do stays on your record. I will get the local police involved. As a fellow parent, I ask  the parents of these individuals to talk to your kids. I'm turning myself in. I am guilty of removing hundreds of bags of evidence.

Immigration and Forest Park

Our park touches five different neighborhoods in Queens. If you took a tour of all the homes on the blocks adjacent to or within a walk of the park, you would find urban mansions, condos, new homes, large and small apartment complexes and simple one family homes. You will find people who have only arrived in our country and those who have been here for many generations. The streets are neat and the homes kept clean. The users of Forest Park are, for the most part middle class and up. The difference is that many of the new immigrants to this part of Queens come from the third world. They arrive here from cultures where conditions are such that existence means exploiting the place you live for sustenance. These places don't have public parks, they don't have reliable plumbing, they lack sanitation and there is no sense that land must be preserved for further generations. We, the people of the United States, more specifically the teachers, park officials, social workers, police and citizenry of Queens have obviously not done enough to educate and inform our growing population of third world immigrants. I grew up in Queens and learned in first grade that we never throw so much as a gum wrapper on the street or certainly not in a public park. For all the talk about raising standards and lowering class sizes, do we still teach kids not to litter? Particularly, for these new immigrants who have come to us from countries that have been long exploited by the first world, robbed of their natural resources, forced into lives of abject poverty, have we done enough to inculcate our values ? I think it's time for America to realize that the past is over. We are feeling the effect of the long exploitation of the third world. The answer isn't to build bigger fences.

The red trail

This morning I walked around my adopted woods surrounding Strack Pond with the administer of Forest Park responsible for the wooded areas in the park. She gave me permission to mark out a trail through the woods. I hope to elicit the help of all who read this blog in mapping out and maintaining this beautiful walk through the woods surrounding Strack Pond.

Thoughts by the pond

I remember sitting in my favorite spot beneath a wide oak tree just off the trail that surrounds the pond. The last snow was still on the ground but the sun and air told of spring coming. You can see the buildings that surround the park and the tops of trucks that pass on Wooodhaven Boulevard at that time before the forest has awakened. It's a reminder of how fragile the park is, how vulnerable to the outside world.

I was caught in the rain tonight. It started as I was walking to the pond , so I stopped by a bank protected by the double canopy of trees that grow there. It was dry there . I watched the rain disturb the mottled green surface of the water. I took in this beautiful scene of the pond and its surrounding woods too thick now to see those buildings and trucks of March but, they are still there. The park is lush and beautiful now, but no less fragile or vulnerable. Help me put an end to littering in our green spaces.

The Other Forest Park

Although I wish for this blog to be a public forum, so far I have received little comment (publicly) from the readers. Word has reached me however, that at least one of my readers worries that the blog because many of the posts focus on the business of picking up and analyzing trash (I have become some kind of forensic trashologist), because of this, paints a negative image of Forest Park which might lead to the wrong impression of its value or might even deter visitors from coming to the park. I would like to dispel that image from the minds of readers who don't know the park first hand. Let me say that in the hundreds of hours I spend in the park, I have witnessed unlawfull activity including littering only on about three occassions. None of these incidents were threatening or caused me any anxiety. The park is a safe place to be during daylight hours. If you aren't aware of the geography of the park, Forest Park is a big park! By far, the largest portion is all forest. Because of it's size, it forms a border with four separate neighborhoods, Glendale on one end, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens and Richmond Hill on its other side .Two sets of railroad tracks dissect it. Myrtle Avenue runs through it and Woodhaven Boulevard cuts off another section . The downside of that is there are just too many ways of entering the park apart from the designated areas planned by its designers.My work of picking up trash is largely confined to the edges of the park the unplanned entrances. That's where I find homeless encampments, places to hide illegal activities and most litter. I pick up that litter and look for it every day. Perhaps the reporting of my work has skewed my readers overall view of the park. I should therefore, paint a fairer picture of the vast majority of the park and take you there on a virtual journey.

Today, I parked on a street off of Woodhaven Boulevard and Union Turnpike and walked to its end where there is a big industrial looking building on a dead end street. It houses a Riding Academy with one of those indoor rings riding schools provide, and a small stable where one can either rent horses or stable their own. From there, riders cross Union Turnpike and enter the park's bridal path where they ride through 500 plus acres of mostly an oak and hickory forest covering the hills and gulleys of the glacial moraine that formed this part of Queens. I entered the park walking down the wide lane used by the horse riders as they travel to a place where they can access a tunnel under the Jackie Robinson Parkway which unfortunately shaves some 30 original acres from the park. This morning, I had my work gloves with me but no plan in my mind that I would clean up a particular spot. The woods on this other side of Woodhaven Boulevard are much cleaner than what I have described in earlier posts. There are four marked trails in and around the forest, and countless smaller off the trail paths that can end in dead ends or meet the marked trails at other points or exit the park.There is also the bridal path which intersects those trails at several places.This morning, I found a clean looking plastic bag that looked strong so I thought I would fill that one bag and continue my walk from where ever that led me. Littering on this side of the park isn't as pervasive as in the small strip of woods I normally prowl on the Strack Pond side of the park. So starting in the area where I found the bag, I took one of those off the trail paths close to the edge of the park and walked stopping to pick up water bottles, and all the stuff I normally find, but not in any one heavily concentrated area . When I had filled the bag, I looked for a place to dispose of it and found a can at an opening in the woods where Forest Park Drive cuts across its expanse. Thankfully, there is no traffic allowed on the Drive on this part of its length so I saw a few walkers and a biker or two this morning as I crossed the Drive and looked for the painted dots on fences, rocks and trees that mark where the orange trail leads one around the woods. The orange trail is the outermost trail and the longest in the park. It would take you about an hour or perhaps a little more to hike the whole trail. I decided to follow the trail for part of its length back around to where I could get off it at a place near where the horses and I entered .If you're thinking to yourself , this sounds like a really nice thing to do, you would be right. This morning, I walked through a section of the trail where towering pines dominate a flat area of about two hundred yards only to return me to be swallowed again by the hills of the forest. I walked down darkened lanes and climbed hills where the exposed roots of giant oak trees formed natural stairs in the soil. I love to examine the bottoms of the oak trees that are all over the woods. The roots of some of the larger and older ones reach into the soil like the legs of giants covered in green moss.In the spaces between where the roots meet the trunk, natural grottos form in these oak tree where one might expect to find an altar to the goddess or a faerie door leading to the nether world. At some point in the trail, I crossed a bridge over the active tracks of a spur of the Long Island Railroad where occasional freights pass hauled by diesel locomotives. It's serene and calming in spite of the traffic noise of the Jackie Robinson which plays in the background. It's a treasure-is Forest Park. It is a place to be preserved and supported.The staff there does a remarkable job with the limited resources spooned out by the city. We need more money, more staff, more rangers and more volunteers. Come, walk around this park. Explore the trails, pause on a hill to view a freight train rounding a curve. This is why I work--why I sometimes get obsessed with the trash I find. This is what makes it all worth the effort.

Sex in the Park

Picking up trash in the park is an interesting way to study human behavior. Heavy concentrations of particular kinds of trash lead one to certain conclusions about how the park is used, at least by those who litter. Now, hopefully there are those users of the park who never litter, so there is little or no evidence of their passage. Among those, I count horse riders, dog walkers, nature lovers and citizens who are conscientious about littering (like me). Horse riders do of course, leave some "trace" behind,but even that seems concentrated in certain areas- almost as if there is some kind of agreement among their steeds that one only uses certain parts of the trail to leave one's manure. Perhaps there is some kind of "elephant burial grounds" mentality among horses. I really don't know. Dog walkers seem very good at cleaning up after their pets. I rarely find those tell tale plastic bags knotted closed at their handles, in the mix of the other litter.By the way,since any littering is against the law in the park, anyone who does so is guilty of criminal behavior. However, it is interesting to note that among litterers, there are three specific groups of other law breakers. They are the drinkers of alcoholic beverages, the drug users and those for whom the park is a convenient place to have sex. I have addressed the former in other posts. Now, I would like to shed some light on the latter. I suppose it's good in a way that the use of condoms for sex is on the rise (at least among Forest Park patrons). The ubiquitous presence of those NYC condom packages are a testimony to the awareness that protected sex is important, even in the woods. I have never come upon anyone actually having sex, however I did see two teens trying to swallow one another's faces one afternoon. I suggested they "get a room". Depending on the time, I also encounter single men looking like they are looking for other single men. So, I surmise, both hetero and homosexual sex
are one of the unadvertised attractions to the woods of Forest Park. I have a friend who now lives in Seattle who tells me that her memories of Forest Park include the first few times she had sex as a young girl, so apparently the park is famous as a venue for early hetero sex.It appears that present day heterosexual users like to leave souvenirs of their encounters. Spent condoms and ripped panties or underwear seem to be a triumphant testament to sexual success. I find very few used condoms in the homosexual areas (thank you very much). Only the wrappers remain as evidence of any union.

To all litterers, I would like to say please, I am not impressed or moved in any way that you had lunch, drank a gallon of malt liquor, smoked dope and then got laid. Don't leave the evidence of your behavior behind. For God's sake, pick up that wrapper!