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Community Corner

A Small Puddle

Preservation committee president's fourteenth in a series on the formation of northeast Queens.

In my previous column, I described how Aurora Pond was formed in the 1930’s when Sandhill Road, also known as the “Back Road,” was paved and Gabler’s Creek was channelized in a culvert built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.

Aurora Pond was a sort of centerpiece at the newly created Udalls Cove Park for which Aurora Gareiss and the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee had worked since 1969.

This is not due to the fact that the pond is located half way between the southern end of the park on Northern Boulevard and its northern end near Douglaston’s Memorial Field. Rather, due to its location on Sandhill Road, it is the part of the park that is seen by more people than any other. 

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However, by the mid-1980s, the pond that had just recently been named for Aurora was in serious trouble. For five decades, the pond had been the receiving basin for the rainwater running down the steep nearby streets – Hillside, Little Neck and Cherry Streets in Douglaston. 

This rainwater carried large amounts of silt with it. And when the rushing torrent of rainwater reached the wooded slope above the pond, it carved out an erosion gully up to 12 feet deep in some spots. All that dirt ended up in the pond.

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The consequence was that the pond, which had never been very deep in the first place, became shallower with every rainstorm until, in most places, it was less than a foot deep. During summer dry spells the pond sometimes disappeared entirely, leaving nothing but a cracked mudflat to show where it should have been. 

In 1986, the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee began to urge that the pond be restored. The idea gained traction and our elected officials were able to secure some funding. A relatively simple restoration plan was developed by the city’s Parks Department, involving the excavation (dredging) of several feet of sediment from the bottom of the pond. 

The work began in April 1992 and was completed within a few weeks. The newly contoured basin, which at its deepest point was more than six feet below the level of Sandhill Road, looked lovely and residents sat back appreciatively to wait for the basin to refill.

But it didn’t. Though the basin was nearly three quarters of an acre in size, only the deepest central portion - that part deeper than four feet below the road grade - collected any water.

The remaining part of the basin, which had no water in it, quickly filled in with Phragmites reeds - the ubiquitous tall, slender reeds with fuzzy fronds on top. Soon all that was left was a small mud puddle in the middle of the basin, completely hidden by the surrounding reeds.

What went wrong? It turns out that what had held the pond water in place above the local water table was a layer of dense, clay-like organic material. Most of this layer was removed when the basin was excavated to a depth greater than the bottom of the original pond. 

It was like pulling the plug on the drain of a bathtub. The remaining mud puddle was where the excavated basin was deeper than the local groundwater table. Above that level, water simply couldn’t collect. 

In my next column, I’ll write about the second, more successful restoration.

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