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Community Corner

Virginia Point: Out of the Wilderness

Preservation committee president's series of columns on the formation of northeast Queens.

In my , I wrote about Virginia Point, which is located near the northern terminus of Little Neck Parkway, and explained that until around 1960, two commercial boatyards operated there.

In the 50 years since, the area had come to look like a wilderness, although signs of the old boatyards remained for those who fought their way through the brambles and thickets.

Indeed, the increasing inaccessibility of the Virginia Point area was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because it allowed nature a free hand to reclaim the area and a curse because neighbors - if they thought of it at all - tended to view the area as just a vacant lot, rather than a park and nature preserve. 

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In 2009, the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee decided to start changing that perception, debuting its Virginia Point Restoration Project as a complement to its ongoing restoration work in the Aurora Pond and ravine areas, which have been described in previous columns.  

The preservation committee’s first step was to clean up and demarcate the park boundary and entrance at the intersection of Little Neck Parkway and 34th Avenue. A young Eagle Scout candidate, William Choi, took on the project under the committee’s supervision. His team of scouts, parents and friends spent days clearing away decades of leaf mold, weeds and litter from an entirely obscured section of sidewalk, and then installed more than 100 feet of split rail fencing along the street boundaries. 

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The fencing is not only attractive, but also encourages people to think of the area as an accessible park, and not just an empty space into which to toss their litter.

The next step came in November 2009 as a team organized by another Eagle Scout candidate, Alex Yee, started work on a trail system that would allow visitors to access the remarkable and diverse interior of the Virginia Point tract. His crew laid out an estimated 300 linear feet of trail, starting at the intersection where William had completed his cleanup work and continuing west parallel to 34th Avenue.

After vegetation was cut away, the new trail was covered with a thick layer of wood chips. 

The parcel of land where Alex was working had, up until the early 1990s, been the home of the Petersen family, who were owners of one of the boatyards. 

The decrepit old house had been torn down after the city acquired the parcel as part of the park. Alex’s trail winds among a number of young trees planted by the city Parks Department in a spot that had once been the Peterson’s front yard. The preservation committee had proposed these plantings a couple of years before as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “million trees” initiative.

Alex’s crew cleared the trail as far as the area that had been Mrs. Peterson’s backyard, where progress was blocked by the ruins of an old garage that had burned down years earlier.  

Everything from chain link fencing and old shingles to a couple of truck bodies and an engine block were strewn about. The area was completely engulfed by impenetrable tangles of invasive wisteria vine. 

This debris field brought Alex’s work to a halt, but he had accomplished a great deal. His work was the essential first part of the preservation committee’s plan for a trail system that would link this area to Virginia Point, where the organization was engaged in an ambitious restoration project, but more about that next time.

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