This cache is named after our affinity for bringing bagels here to eat on a bench as part of our beloved weekend Coffee Walks™. We've also been known to play a round of cribbage or set up a table top board game or two! Hope you enjoy your trip to our beloved park!
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Read on for the real history from the NYC Parks website ...
The calm setting of present-day Cobble Hill Park belies an area with a history of contention. Its namesake, the surrounding neighborhood of Cobble Hill, was first settled in the mid-17th century by Dutch farmers when Governor Peter Stuyvesant permitted farming north of Red Hook. At this time, the area was known as Punkiesberg. In 1776, during the Battle of Long Island, the Continental Army called the area "Cobble Hill" after a similar hill they had recently fortified during the Siege of Boston. The redoubt at Cobble Hill was actually named "Smith's Barbette" after the army engineer, Captain William Smith, who supervised its construction. The hill was part of a line of defense running from Gowanus Bay to Wallabout Bay, site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard . The area was again fortified during the War of 1812 and temporarily renamed "Fort Swift," but the name Cobble Hill remained associated with the area.
Fast forward: By the early-to-middle decades of the 20th Century, the area, like much of what was then called South Brooklyn, was a working-class community intertwined with the industry of the nearby waterfront.
"In the 40s and into the 50s, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights were not hot ticket neighborhoods," said Barbara Krongel, of the Cobble Hill Association and Friends of Cobble Hill Park. "There were a lot of boarding houses that served the docks."
In 1962, the Parks Department acquires the property for an experimental “vest-pocket park,” a pilot for what would become a major, citywide initiative under Mayor John Lindsay a few years later.
Influenced by Jane Jacobs’ theories, vest-pocket parks were small green spaces meant to be located in the middle of neighborhoods, a departure from the larger parks and ball fields Robert Moses tended to favor. To Jacobs, parks would only be popular if they were small enough, far enough from other parks, and placed in accessible enough locations to feel full and thriving.
“Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
For his part, Robert Moses advised Lindsay that such parks would be too expensive and hard to oversee, as the Times reported in 1966.
“These tiny parks will not bring light and air to the neighborhoods where they are built and will in the end prove to be neighborhood nuisances,” he warned in a private note the press got hold of.
Today - the park is often crowded, with children, their parents and babysitters in the playground in the rear of the park, adults and teenagers using the tables near the front and dog-walkers circling the large, grassy mound in the center.