Forest Park Archives - Queens Ledger

Forest Park: 128 Years of Beauty and History

webadmin on February 1, 2023

By Ed Wendell

The Forest Park Golf Course, one of the few public golf courses in New York City, has been a big part of the Woodhaven landscape for 127 years. Forest Park itself is 128 years old and is rich with history and beauty.

This past weekend, we had the pleasure of giving a presentation on the history of Forest Park to a large group of volunteers who help maintain and beautify our park, which is now entering its 128th year. For a combination of beauty and history in Woodhaven, you’d be hard pressed to beat Forest Park.

Although much of Forest Park’s 538 acres consists of natural woodland, the park itself was planned and designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Originally envisioned as one giant, continuous park stretching from Brooklyn all the way to Jamaica (and originally called Brooklyn Forest), changes in population and the resulting development reduced the scope of that plan.

A nine-hole golf course was opened to the public and by 1905, the popularity of the golf course would prompt it to expand to 18 holes, originally stretching south all the way to Ashland Avenue, where residential homes marked the start of Woodhaven proper.

As part of the expansion, a Dutch Colonial golf clubhouse was built on the course in 1905 by the architectural firm of Helmle, Huberty & Hudswell, who also designed the landmark Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower in Brooklyn.

The golf course is still active and the beautiful clubhouse today is called Oak Ridge and serves as the home of the Forest Park Administration offices.

If you go east from the old clubhouse, you’ll eventually reach the Seuffert Bandshell (pronounced Soy-fert), a near 100-year old bandstand named after bandleader George Seuffert Sr.

For many years, Seuffert and his band entertained people at the bandshell and it was officially named in his honor in 1979.

A little further along, you’ll come across the Forest Park Carousel, which was designated as a landmark by the City of New York ten years ago, in 2013.

Artistically, the Forest Park Carousel is particularly notable as it was the handiwork of the legendary master carver Daniel Muller. Muller came to the United States from Germany as a child in the 1880s and as a young man he and his brother worked for Gustav Dentzel, a renowned carousel builder in his own right.

Dentzel’s father built carousels back in Germany going back to the mid-18th century. Muller took advantage of the opportunity to learn all of these old-world skills from Dentzel and blended it with his own realistic style to carve out a name for himself and in 1903, D.C. Muller and Bro. Company was founded.

Muller’s carvings were notable not only for being very beautiful and realistic; in some cases the carvings were militaristic, with horses sporting bugles, swords and canteens.

Over 14 years, D.C. Muller and Bro. created over a dozen carousels but, sadly, today only two remain: one in Cedar Point, Ohio, and ours right here in Forest Park.

The Forest Park Carousel contains three rows of carvings; the outer row contains 13 standing horses, three menagerie animals and two chariots. The inner two rows each contain 18 jumping horses (for a total of 36).

While the Forest Park Carousel is often referred to as a Muller carousel, you will also find a few carvings from Dentzel and Charles Carmel, another notable carousel artist of the same era, on the inner two rows.

Not far from the carousel you will find one of the most beautiful spots in New York City, the Greenhouse at Forest Park, which was designed by legendary greenhouse builders Lord & Burnham, who also built the New York Botanical Garden, the United States Botanic Garden in Washington D.C., and the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh.

Flowers and plants throughout parks in Queens and Brooklyn are grown right here, as they have been for over 100 years.

And if you continue walking east you will cross Woodhaven Boulevard and reach Victory Field, a large recreation complex with baseball fields, a running track, and a handball court. Victory Field was named after the Unknown Soldier of World War 1.

Today the track portion of Victory Field is named after longtime Woodhaven Assemblyman, the legendary Frederick D. Schmidt.

Forest Park is full of beauty, but it is also full of history and visitors to the park 100 years ago would be pleasantly surprised to see so much of their history preserved and beloved by the current residents of Woodhaven and the many volunteers that tend to the park.

If you are interested in this presentation we will be repeating it via Zoom on Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. Email us at [email protected] for a free invite.

Wendell: Memorial Trees still standing in Forest Park 102 years later

Ed Wendell on May 24, 2022

Of all the memorials in and about Woodhaven, of all of the monuments and tributes to those who sacrificed their lives for our country, I think the most touching is the Memorial Trees in Forest Park.

Woodhaven was a small but growing community and World War I took a tremendous toll on its population. Week after week, names of young Woodhaven men who were killed in battle appeared under the somber headline Taps on the front page of the very newspaper you are reading right now.

By the time the war had ended, over 60 bright young lights had been extinguished, their lives ‘sacrificed on the altar of liberty,’ as the Leader-Observer described it in 1918.

After the war had ended the families of the fallen, supported by the residents of Woodhaven, came up with a plan to create a unique memorial that would live on for years to come.

One tree was planted in the name of each fallen soldier along the road through Forest Park. On Sunday, May 11th 1919, residents from Woodhaven gathered in Forest Park, across from the golf clubhouse, and took part in a somber ceremony honoring their lives.

That year, and each year after, the families of the fallen would decorate their loved ones’ tree for Memorial Day. For the families, it was more than just a memorial. For them, it was a place to grieve their losses.

The names of the fallen soldiers would be etched in bronze and affixed to a large marble monument. If you want to see those names, that monument now sits in the front yard of American Legion Post 118 on 91st Street and 89th Avenue.

But it’s the memorial in Forest Park, the long row of 103-year old trees, which really touched me as each of those trees each had a very personal connection to the families of the dead.

As time marched on, the tradition began to fade and was all but lost by the time yet another World War came to pass. Pretty soon, even the memories of this lovely tradition were gone.

But this tradition was revived in 2015 when the Woodhaven Cultural & Historical Society rediscovered the purpose of the trees. And ever since, residents of Woodhaven have decorated the trees and paid honor to these young men from Woodhaven.

But on top of paying tribute to the soldiers, I think the purpose of the tree decorations is to honor the families and the pain and loss that they all suffered.

On Memorial Day, we all pause and pay tribute to the soldiers who lost their lives in service to our country. And then, we go back to our lives.

But for the families of the dead, their pain goes on and on. And every day, when the sun rises and the sun sets, their pain is still there. To me, that’s what the Memorial Trees symbolize; that although the young men the trees were planted for have been gone for over a century, the pain their families endured continued long after.

And so, it is very fitting that the residents of this community carry on this tradition in the names of the families who lived with this pain for so many years. And I think that if those families knew that their neighbors were carrying on that very personal tradition a century later, it would help ease their pain, even just a little bit.

A small group gathered this Monday in Forest Park and one by one, decorated the trees. At the back end of the trees, where the road is now closed to vehicular traffic, we paused for a moment of silence and played Taps.

We have no guarantees this tradition will continue deep into the future. We hope it will. We hope that future generations will learn of this and continue to honor the fallen and their families for many years to come.

But in the here and now, the best we can do is to remember and to pray; to pray that these families found some measure of comfort in their lives.

And together we pray that someday there will be no need for any new memorials. That would be the most fitting tribute of all, and it can be summed up in one word – Peace.

Forest Park: 128 Years of Beauty and History

Wendell: Memorial Trees still standing in Forest Park 102 years later

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