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Community Corner

The Origins of Doug Bay and Udalls Cove Park

Preservation Committee President's Sixth Part in a Series on the Formation of Northeast Queens

In my last column, I described the gas explosion that killed three members of a Douglaston family who was living in a model home built on landfill in the marsh west of P.S. 98.  The tragedy halted development at the site for a few years, but in due course a new developer completed the build-out of the area, which is now known as Doug Bay. The homes were all electric with no gas service. 

The foundations were properly built, and the houses remained where they were built. So did the sewer line installed by the city. The land surrounding the houses, however, continued to settle and sink from the weight of the fill placed on the soft marsh soil. 

That is why the houses of Doug Bay all sit higher than the surrounding yards, sidewalks and roads. And that is also why, until a major road reconstruction a few years ago, a number of the streets had a pronounced hump running down their middle. The hump was where the correctly built sewer line was located. But it had not settled and the street around the sewer pipe kept sinking.

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At the southern end of Alley Creek, construction of the Long Island Expressway eliminated the last remnants of Alley Pond. A good deal of the waste concrete rubble from the removal of the LIE’s predecessor, Horace Harding Boulevard, was dumped into the Udalls Cove Ravine opposite St. Anastasia’s Church on Northern Boulevard. The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee removed about 1.5 million pounds of that concrete between 2003 and 2006.

On the east side of Douglaston, a development of single- and multiple-family homes was built to the north of the Little Neck Railroad Station along streets laid out on either side of what was originally called Old House Landing Road and later renamed Little Neck Parkway. 

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In the late 1960's, both the Udalls Cove marsh east of Douglaston and the Alley Creek marsh west of Douglaston were slated to be filled in for development.  Starting in the 1950s, hundreds of homes were built on fill on both sides of the Douglaston peninsula. 

In 1969, the Village of Great Neck Estates proposed to fill in almost the entire Udalls Cove marsh to build a golf course. This was the era of America’s great environmental awakening, spurred by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s famous book Silent Spring

Aurora Gareiss, a middle-aged woman who lived in Douglaston on the edge of the marsh, was determined not to lose any more of this ecologically valuable habitat. With a number of neighbors, she founded the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee. 

In the years to follow, the group lobbied successfully for the entire remaining marsh and its associated wooded uplands to be protected as a nature preserve. The area is now known as the Udalls Cove Park and Preserve.

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