Garden City designates multiple village-owned properties as parkland

Over the past year, Garden City has designated more than a dozen village-owned properties as parkland under New York State law.

Though many of the properties have been used for recreation for decades, the designation adds a layer of protection because now their use cannot be changed without Albany signing off.

"New York has a rule about designating parkland, and once it's designated locally, it can't be undesignated except by the State Legislature," Garden Village Historian William Bellmer said. "The village looked over its various parcels and identified 26 of them as parks that should be and are used for recreation or just passive parks."

When designated parkland is used for a nonpublic purpose, that’s called alienation, and requires a bill to pass the legislature and be signed by the governor.

"Even though most of these [properties] had been deeded to the village as parks in the first place when the village acquired them, the village decided to make sure that ... they couldn't be built on by future people," Bellmer said.

Garden City Mayor Mary Carter Flanagan said preserving parkland has been one of her goals since becoming mayor in 2021. One of the first properties designated as parkland this year was a parcel known as Franklin Mews that the village sold in 2013 but then bought back in 2015.

"It's an area where a lot of kids played and it's like a beautiful little space there that was used, and we lost it and got it back," Flanagan said of the Franklin Mews property. "That is definitely one of the things that got us thinking."

Flanagan said the village’s parks are part of what makes it special.

"There are a lot of spaces that are very well used and people like to know there's an extra layer of protection on them," Flanagan said.

The process of designating the village’s parks as parkland took Bellmer to the Nassau County clerk’s office to determine the boundaries of the land. One challenge was that the village’s section block and lot numbers don’t match the county’s. Older deeds aren’t digitized and had to be found by going through paper volumes, Bellmer said. Some of the properties were deeded to the village, others were acquired by the village, including through eminent domain, according to village records.

"Some of these go back to the 1920s; the village was incorporated in 1919, and quite a few of the properties that we're talking about were given over to the village by the previous owner, which was the Garden City Company," said Bellmer who went through maps in Village Hall and at county offices. "The county also has maps of properties and the deeds refer to maps, and then you can look on the maps and decide from the maps of what the property limits are to give you the description."

Some parks were fairly straightforward, Bellmer said, because the park had been deeded to the village in a single action, but other parks were assembled from multiple properties, which meant more research was needed.

The descriptions of the properties that came out of Bellmer’s research were then used in the village board resolutions that have been adopted by the trustees over many months.

Lisa Ott, president of the North Shore Land Alliance, an organization that works to preserve open space on Long Island, said Garden City’s actions should be applauded.

"For this particular village to go in and set aside all their current parkland as parkland is a really, really big deal," Ott said. "It could be an example for other villages."

Ott said municipalities can’t afford to buy all the open space they might want for their residents but designating what they have as parkland helps preserve land for future generations.

"People need open spaces," Ott said. "They need places to gather and to recreate and to experience nature."