Hunter’s Point South Park

For more than a century, our waterfront was a center of industrial and shipping activities. These preserved tracks are a reminder of the neighborhood's historic role as the port for good produced elsewhere in Queens and Long Island to be loaded onto ships to be sent to Manhattan and beyond.

One of the most striking features of Hunter’s Point South Park are the garden beds that separate it from the street. These gardens are bioswales, or rain gardens, which absorb rainwater during heavy storms and help filter it before it reaches our rivers and creeks.

This helps prevent flooding, and also reduces pollution in our waterways. NYC’s sewers are 80 years old, and not designed for the number of people in the city or the heavy rain events we’re getting with climate change. Every time it rains, storm drains empty into the sewage system, and raw sewage is dumped into our waterways.

Capturing rainwater in bioswales and other features that reduce impermeable surfaces, helps limit the amount of sewage in the water.

The turf athletic field in Hunter’s Point South Park is a prime example of efficiency and practicality in a design feature that serves two very different, but important purposes. The field is designed to be a multi-use play surface, where on a sunny day you will see people of all ages running around, playing frisbee, soccer, football, and more. You can attend many of our programs in this space.

In addition, it is also a feature which can hold up to 600,000 gallons of water, protecting the neighborhood from potential storm surge. While we focus a lot on green infrastructure, using gray infrastructure like reservoirs that serve multiple purposes are an excellent way to increase an area’s resiliency. 

One of the more interesting features of the bioswales in Hunter’s Point South Park are that they contain a gabion or gabion wall which runs its length. It is a long wire cage filled with rocks of varying size which helps filter sediment and heavy metals from the water retained in the bioswale and helps the water slowly infiltrate into the soil. Because our parks are boarded by a river and a number of roadways, it’s particularly important to limit the amount of pollution that reaches the waterways.

This area contains two plants that are well adapted to salty, sandy soil: pitch pines and rosa rugosa.

Pitch pines, which are the pine trees that give the pine barrens their name, are known for their ability to grow in difficult conditions, including sandy and acidic soil. These trees are native to the eastern US, and were used by indigenous groups including the Iroquois, Shinnecock, and Cherokee for medicinal treatment of burns, cuts, and boils, and to build canoes.

Rosa rugosa, which is also known as the beach rose, are a naturalized species and are very salt tolerant, which is why they do so well lining our wetlands and the bank of the East River. Rosa Rugosa love full sun which is why we’ve planted them along our park paths, and their tolerance for salt spray helps them survive flooding and protect against erosion when they boarder the river.