Birds'-eye view

As promised, pedal boats have returned. Here, two converge near the moored electric boat Independence. Boaters display a range of personal styles; on the left, the "rear deck lounger" allows his buddies to do the work.

At right, an intergenerational mix of fashion, from old-country to jeans, all united by life vests.

 

By the time I reached the lakeside, I'd already been to the summit of Lookout Hill. A lovely Sunday afternoon seemed like a good time to visit this secluded locale, last seen in mid-January. The hill was once reachable by a crushed-rock carriage road, and the peak was a popular tourist attraction in the last century.  Now it is accessed by a network of stone steps.

In the spirit of Forgotten New York, I was curious to see whether the hill would yield any traces of a now-vanished wooden observatory. Here is the structure in an old photo and a woodcut (courtesy of Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture, a wonderful site). I'm not certain in what year it was demolished, but it was long ago.

 

Vaux and Olmsted designed a fantastical structure to replace it, but it never got built. Go figure how this high-Victorian hilarity fit in with their "rustic" vision for the park; it makes one more inclined to accept the proposed new skating rink.

Today, what one finds at the summit of Lookout Hill is...a lumpy open meadow surrounded by a ring of tall trees and a simple paved circular path. A few graffiti'd Belgian blocks are the only indication that anything else might have stood here. An oval meadow a bit further down the hill was apparently once used for carriage parking.

The panoramic view of Brooklyn is now tree-screened and hazy. But the birding is terrific. This gang of birders had spotted a vireo, a magnolia warbler, and some other "good" bird all in the same tree, and generously offered me a pair of binoculars (as did a birder in the Vale of Cashmere last week—nice folks, birders).

These ladies were also birding, but from a prone position, an excellent solution to the springtime ailment known as "warbler neck."

How good is the birding on Lookout Hill? So good that I, a mediocre birder armed with a feeble point-and-shoot, scored this picture of a brazen little black-and-white warbler. Note his crazy feet, made for scrambling around tree trunks like a woodpecker.

What I can't show you is an aural picture of Lookout Hill. Not just birdsong, but the floating strains of African drumming from the grove to the east...a bagpiper to the west...and a saxophone somewhere off to the north, the soundtrack of an urban oasis.