Potamogeton Pond, a small

pond A pond is an area filled with water, either natural or artificial, that is smaller than a lake. Defining them to be less than in area, less than deep, and with less than 30% emergent vegetation helps in distinguishing their ecology from ...

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

(historically also known as Pea Pond), is located on a narrow strip of parkland in

Hollis Hills Queens Village is a mostly residential middle class neighborhood in the eastern part of the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Queens. It is bound by Hollis, Queens, Hollis to the west, Cambria Heights, Queens, Cambria Heights to the ...

alongside

Grand Central Parkway The Grand Central Parkway (GCP) is a 14.61-mile (23.51 km) long parkway that stretches from the Triborough Bridge in New York City to Nassau County on Long Island. At the Queens–Nassau border, it becomes the Northern State Parkway, ...

and named after an aquatic plant. It was once a stop on a bridle trail that connected

Cunningham Park Cunningham Park is a park in the New York City borough of Queens. The park lies between the Grand Central Parkway to the south and the Long Island Expressway, and is bifurcated by the Clearview Expressway. The park is operated by the New York Ci ...

Alley Pond Park Alley Pond Park is the second-largest public park in Queens, New York City, occupying . The park is bordered to the east by Douglaston, to the west by Bayside, to the north by Little Neck Bay, and to the south by Union Turnpike. The Cross ...

; but when local stables closed, the trail became disused. The pond can be found at 86th Avenue and 217th Street. The completion of Grand Central Parkway reduced the amount of water that fed the pond, resulting in less water intake and converting the once popular ice-skating site to a bog. The perch, carp, and catfish that lived in the pond died off in 1963 as the parkway was widened in conjunction with the

world's fair A world's fair, also known as a universal exhibition or an expo, is a large international exhibition designed to showcase the achievements of nations. These exhibitions vary in character and are held in different parts of the world at a specif ...

taking place in

Flushing Meadows Flushing may refer to: Places * Flushing, Cornwall, a village in the United Kingdom * Flushing, Queens, New York City ** Flushing Bay, a bay off the north shore of Queens ** Flushing Chinatown (法拉盛華埠), a community in Queens ** Flushin ...

the following year.

Silt Silt is granular material of a size between sand and clay and composed mostly of broken grains of quartz. Silt may occur as a soil (often mixed with sand or clay) or as sediment mixed in suspension with water. Silt usually has a floury feel ...

covered up the pond, and plants grew atop its former surface. Public awareness of the pond can be credited to the public-school science teacher Thomas F. Schweitzer and the Queens College ecology professor Andrew C. Greller, who led tours of the pond site and founded organizations that advocated for its restoration. Schweitzer's Hollis Hills Civic Association teamed up with Greller's Queens College Ecology Club to lobby the city, which by 1970 determined that "the area known as Pea Pond ... no longer receives sufficient water to maintain a pond". Undeterred, advocates for the pond enlisted the support of the

Boy Scouts Boy Scouts may refer to: * Boy Scout, a participant in the Boy Scout Movement. * Scouting, also known as the Boy Scout Movement. * An organisation in the Scouting Movement, although many of these organizations also have female members. There are ...

, the Queens Village Centennial Association, and local high school nature clubs. Under the banner of the East Queens Ad Hoc Committee for a Natural Attitude Toward Urban Recreational Environment (NATURE), supporters succeeded in blocking the state and city's plans to cover the pond's site. The pond is presently overgrown with ''

Phragmites ''Phragmites'' () is a genus of four species of large perennial reed grasses found in wetlands throughout temperate and tropical regions of the world. Taxonomy The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, maintained by Kew Garden in L ...

'' and

cattail ''Typha'' is a genus of about 30 species of monocotyledonous flowering plants in the family Typhaceae. These plants have a variety of common names, in British English as bulrush or reedmace, in American English as reed, cattail, or punks, in ...

s. It fills up completely only after heavy rains. Entrances to the Potamogeton Pond Trail can be found on Grand Central Parkway at 217th Street and at 82nd Avenue.

References

External links

* Walsh, Kevin.
Potamogeton Pond
. ''Forgotten New York''. March 21, 2011.
Finding Aid for the Andrew Greller Papers
Queens College Libraries Special Collections and Archives, City University of New York.
Andrew Greller Digitized Scrapbooks
Queens College Libraries Special Collections and Archives, JSTOR Open Community Collections. {{New York City waterways Lakes of Queens, New York Ponds of New York (state)