Crotona Park is a public park in the South Bronx in New York City, covering . The park is bounded by streets of the same name on its northern, eastern, southern, and western borders, and is adjacent to the Crotona Park East and Morrisania neighborhoods of the Bronx. It is divided into four portions by Claremont Parkway and Crotona Avenue, which run through it.
Crotona Park formerly belonged to the Bathgate family, a prominent landowning family in the South Bronx. It was created through the New Parks Act in 1888 as part of a boroughwide network of parks connected by parkways. The Crotona Play Center was added in 1936. Crotona Park was formerly , but the northern portion was cut off by the Cross Bronx Expressway in 1945, becoming what is now known as Walter Gladwin Park. After a period of deterioration in the late 20th century, several improvement projects were commenced starting in the 1990s.
Crotona Park includes a lake, as well as numerous recreational facilities such as a swimming pool. The Crotona Play Center, a national and city-designated landmark, is in the western part of the park. The park is operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, also known as NYC Parks.
History Early history
In the 1870s, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned a greenbelt across the Bronx, consisting of parks and parkways that would align more with existing geography. This contrasted with Manhattan's grid system, laid out during the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which had given rise to Central Park, a park with mostly artificial features within the bounds of the grid. However, in 1877, the city declined to act upon his plan. Around the same time, New York Herald editor John Mullaly pushed for the creation of parks in New York City, particularly lauding the Van Cortlandt and Pell families' properties in the western and eastern Bronx respectively. He formed the New York Park Association in November 1881. There were objections to the system, which would apparently be too far from Manhattan, in addition to precluding development on the parks' sites. However, newspapers and prominent lobbyists, who supported such a park system, were able to petition the bill into the New York State Senate, and later, the New York State Assembly (the legislature's lower house). In June 1884, Governor Grover Cleveland signed the New Parks Act into law, authorizing the creation of the park system.
Acquired in 1888 as a result of the New Parks Act, Crotona Park is on part of the former estate of the Bathgate family, which owned large plots of land in the South Bronx. Alexander Bathgate, a Scottish immigrant, had acquired the land from his employer Gouverneur Morris. At the time, the land comprising present-day Crotona Park was called Bathgate Woods, which was on a high point and contained woods and a pond called Indian Lake. The Bathgate family opened the area near Indian Lake to the public, and it became a picnicking spot. The Bronx Department of Parks, in its 1884 report to the state legislature, noted the land as having "indispensable requisites for a park", such as a "luxuriant growth of forest" with native oaks, elms, and magnolias, as well as proximity to railroad lines such as the Third Avenue elevated and the Harlem Line. Due to rapid urbanization, Bathgate Farm quickly became one of the few remaining greenspaces in the Bronx. When the Bronx Department of Parks acquired the parkland, it originally planned to name the now-public parkland Bathgate Park. Due to one park engineer's disagreements with the Bathgate family, it was named "Crotona", after the ancient Greek city of Crotone in what is now Italy, and to distinguish it from the nearby, similarly named Croton Aqueduct water system. The northernmost section of Crotona Park was known as Old Borough Hall Park due to the presence of Bronx Borough Hall in the park.
The park did not receive many improvements until the 20th century. Indian Lake's perimeter was paved in the early 1900s, and an ice-skaters' concession stand and a warming hut were installed. In addition, landscaping work was performed, and a new grandstand for concerts and ball games was erected. Three hundred American elms were planted around the lake in 1903. Two years later, an athletic field for the New York City Department of Education was built. A bill was introduced in the Assembly in 1909, which would install a New York National Guard armory in Crotona Park. The bill was heavily denounced by the public, and though both the Assembly and Senate passed the bill, mayor George B. McClellan Jr. vetoed it. Crotona Park was expanded via land acquisition in 1907 and 1911, and extra tennis courts were added in 1915. A concrete wall around the lake's perimeter, as well as lamps and paths, were installed in 1914. A "farm garden", to teach children about farming, was added in 1928.
By 1911, local landowners complained that the sporting events at the athletic field and bandstand were too loud. They requested that the field be moved further within Crotona Park. In 1916, several local landowners filed a lawsuit, calling the athletic field and bandstand "nuisances" that were not conducive to park operation. Some of these landowners alleged that they could not sell their property.
Works Progress Administration renovation
In 1934, mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia nominated Robert Moses to become commissioner of a unified New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. At the time, the United States was experiencing the Great Depression; immediately after La Guardia won the 1933 election, Moses began to write "a plan for putting 80,000 men to work on 1,700 relief projects". By the time he was in office, several hundred such projects were underway across the city.
Moses was especially interested in creating new pools and other bathing facilities, such as those in Jacob Riis Park, Jones Beach, and Orchard Beach. He devised a list of 23 pools around the city, including one at Crotona Park. The pools would be built using funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency created as part of the New Deal to combat the Depression's negative effects. Eleven of these pools were to be designed concurrently and open in 1936. Moses, along with the architects Aymar Embury II and Gilmore David Clarke, created a common design for these proposed aquatic centers. Each location was to have distinct pools for diving, swimming, and wading; bleachers and viewing areas; and bathhouses with locker rooms that could be used as gymnasiums. The pools were to have several common features, such as a minimum length, underwater lighting, heating, and filtration, all constructed using inexpensive materials. To fit the requirement for efficiency and low-cost construction, each building would be built using elements of the Streamline Moderne and Classical architectural styles. The buildings would also be near "comfort stations", additional playgrounds, and spruced-up landscapes.
Plans for the construction of ten tennis courts, a new playground, and additional handball courts and baseball diamonds at Crotona Park were announced in May 1934. Construction for some of the 11 pools began that October. Of these, Crotona Park was the only location in the Bronx where a WPA pool would be constructed. A wading pool had opened to the north of the future bathhouse site by mid-1935. The blueprints for the Crotona Park pool and bathhouse were submitted to the New York City Department of Buildings that August. By mid-1936, ten of the eleven WPA-funded pools were completed and were being opened at a rate of one per week. The Crotona Pool was the seventh of these pools to open. It opened on July 25, 1936, in front of a crowd of five thousand; according to The New York Times, about 10,000 would-be participants had to be refused entry. The center was composed of the main swimming pool, a bathhouse, and the wading pool to the north of the bathhouse.
In 1938, further improvements were announced for the 11 locations that had received new pools. About $2.87 million (equal to around $ million in ) was allocated to the renovation of Crotona Park, including the sidewalks on the surrounding streets. NYC Parks started rebuilding the baseball and softball fields and the existing athletic field. Sometime in the 1940s, a brick boathouse was built along the lake to replace a previous wooden structure that had burned down. In 1941, NYC Parks announced the completion of these improvements. In total, seven playgrounds were added, three others were rebuilt, and a children's farm and two comfort stations were constructed. In total, between 1934 and the 1960s, NYC Parks added the pool and bathhouse, as well as five baseball fields, nine playgrounds, twenty tennis courts, four comfort stations, paths, and sitting areas.
Decline
At its peak, Crotona Park encompassed of land. When the Cross Bronx Expressway was built in the 1950s and early 1960s, the northernmost portion of Crotona Park was cut off from the rest of the park. The northernmost section was still known as Crotona Park until 1987, when it was renamed Highland Park. The name was changed to Tremont Park in 1999 and again, to Walter Gladwin Park, in 2020.
By the 1950s, Crotona Park had become the setting for several high-profile crimes, as gangs began to develop in the surrounding neighborhoods. Incidents included a thwarted battle between dozens of teenage gang members in 1950; a series of muggings at the park in 1954; the beating of a teacher in 1958; and the fatal stabbing of a teenager in 1965. Additionally, in July 1960, a six-year-old boy drowned in the Crotona Play Center's swimming pool. To deter crime, and especially in response to a murder in a poorly lit playground in Manhattan, Robert F. Wagner Jr. proposed replacing the lighting in Crotona Park and other city parks. The project was completed by 1963.
Restoration work in the Crotona Play Center was announced in 1965 as part of Wagner's plan to restore parks, playgrounds, and libraries around the city. Ultimately, these improvements did not occur, and many benches and water fountains were damaged without being replaced. The boathouse stopped offering boat tours in 1970. In early 1971, vandals stole multiple electric and plumbing fixtures from the play center, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage. To deter future crimes of similar magnitude, the bath house's and filter house's windows were filled in. Nevertheless, the play center remained popular. In 1973, to determine the feasibility of completely renovating Crotona Park, the city performed a "blitz cleanup" with maintenance crews from all five boroughs. According to one official, such a cleanup had not been performed previously because NYC Parks officials were scared of being attacked by area teenagers. Around this time, surrounding portions of the South Bronx were being decimated by fire and crime. One particularly egregious example was Charlotte Street, directly southeast of Crotona Park, which by the late 1970s saw the demolition of almost every building along its three-block length.
Restoration to present day
1970s and 1980s