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THE PARK opens, the people come. That's how we tend to think about our public spaces - as places identified by contemporary planners, designed to specification and then opened for our enjoyment. But often, the opposite is true. "A lot of times," says New York City parks department historian Scott Sendrow, "parks grow out of natural places, places that people were already going to."
Kissena Lake is such a place. Although no one can say for sure, it's safe to say that local residents were probably drawn to the lake long before it was part of a New York City park - maybe even before there was a New York City. Indeed, people probably have been coming to this sparkling, 16-foot deep body of water since the founding of the nearby Dutch settlement, later incorporated into a village, known as Flushing.
Once, the lake was the centerpiece of a large plot of land owned by the great horticulturist Samuel Bowne Parsons, who gathered rare plants and trees from around the world and sold them in his famous nursery. It's believed that Parsons, an Indian buff, gave the lake its name. He used a word, "kissena," supposedly from the language of the Chippewa, a tribe from the Midwest, meaning, "it is cold." Later, as if to prove just how cold it was, a so-called "ice harvesting" company was established here, that cut and sold ice drawn from the lake.
In 1904, the city purchased the lake from the family that owned the ice company. Two years later, following Parsons' death, the city purchased his nursery and some adjoining swampland, and packaged it together with the lake and a few other land parcels - including a spur of the abandoned Creedmoor line of the Long Island Rail Road, that once ran south of the lake - to create Kissena Lake Park.
The name was shortened and the park expanded in subsequent years, to the point that today, Kissena Park encompasses 234.76 acres of north central Queens; the adjacent Kissena Park Corridor is an additional 100.87 acres of land that link together much of the parkland in Eastern Queens, to help form an uninterrupted, 4.5-mile "green belt" through the borough.
Kissena Park now includes many of the...