The Bronx River

Eddie C3 has added a photo to the pool:

This is a view of the New York Botanical Garden Forest. Before being named the NYBG Forest it was once called the Hemlock Forest. Then came the Hemlock Blight and the loss of the Canadian Hemlock throughout the fifty acre forest forced a name change.

Now, in a sign of the times, the New York Botanical Garden Forest has had another name change. After a banker named John A. Thain put up some cash for forest restoration, the forest was renamed the Thaine Family Forest. Few visitors will miss the new name, as one writer wrote in The New York Times,

At the garden, however, the words “Thain Family Forest” are slipped into signs about black oaks, hemlocks and hillside blueberries (“a favorite of birds and small mammals in the Thain Family Forest”); about vernal pools and great horned owls; about mound formations and forest layering; and even about snags, as standing dead trees are called, which help “reveal the Thain Family Forest’s great age.”

They turn up on prohibitory signs, too. “Please Stay on the Path: The Thain Family Forest is a fragile ecosystem.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the sign beginning, “When a tree falls in the Thain Family Forest —,” you may be tempted to finish the thought yourself, “— does it make a Thain Family Sound?”

What many have forgotten was that before there was a New York Botanical Garden, this was the Lorillard Family Forest. Because of the money generated from grinding snuff on the property that family never needed to cut down trees for income. As much change as this forest has seen because of tobacco income this forest can claim to be the only virgin forest in New York City. All because of the riches of a tobacco family that knew where their next meal was coming from.

Some of the changes are very much for the better. This photo from 2007 cannot be repeated without some heavy Photoshop work now. Today in the foreground there is a thick rope running across the river with a big sign in the middle of the rope. The sign warns people in canoes of the waterfall in their path. A real sign of progress is adults willing to go paddling on the Bronx River. Most long time residents of the Bronx remember this waterway as a toxic waste dump.

Of course children and adults have different perspectives. Toxic as it was this is also a view of and area I used as a swimming hole in the 1960's, when the river was most foul. The vertical rock on the right was once called "Flatrock." The water in front of that rock was not deep enough to dive but jumping off into the chemical stench and quickly bending your knees once seemed like fun.

The fun didn't even end when my own brother jumped in and wound up getting fifty stitches from some unseen underwater object. Well it ended for my crowd; we found some rapids downriver and closer to the historic Snuff Mill. Someone named it "The Sliding Pond" and we did our swimming there. But the children that didn't hear about my brother's leg continued jumping of "Flatrock."

Years back, before this golden era of The New York Botanical Garden there was little security and few fences. The Garden was a public park to the kids from the surrounding neighborhoods. I learned to ice skate on the Twin Lakes. We played war games in the forest and when we got older many of us discovered alcohol and lost our virginity in that same forest. Now to save the forest people must stay on the few trails and if kids went swimming in the Bronx River they would be surrounded by Garden Security and the NYPD before they got their hair wet.

Now the forest is beautiful and you actually get a sense of that unique status, the only virgin forest in New York City. Even if all those signs make the forest seem a bit violated by the Thain Family and you feels a bit like a visitor on private property, this is one place in New York City that has always been a forest.