KIPS BAY — Here’s something to ponder.
No visible hints remain of its existence, but the area around East 31st Street and Park Avenue South was once the site of a small pond about the size of a city block, named for the native sunfish that populated it.
Sunfish Pond and other soggy and forgotten parts of the city are the subject of “Hidden Waters of New York City,” a new book by Parks Department employee and historian Sergey Kadinsky, which was released in March.
The source of Sunfish Pond was a stream, which flowed out of a natural spring near what is now Times Square and ran roughly parallel to Broadway. On the other side the pond drained into the East River through a small brook, according to Kadinsky, who published the book in March.
At one point the pond served as a resting point for travelers, and prominent New Yorkers, like the Kips and the Murrays, whose names still mark the area, settled in farmhouses nearby when the area was still bucolic countryside.
But as the street grid marched north, the expanding city began to swallow Sunfish Pond. The industrialist Peter Cooper, who had previously operated farther downtown, set up a new glue factory on the banks of the pond, and before long it was choked with runoff from the factory and other litter, Kadinsky said.
“In its first three centuries, the idea of preserving waterways in New York was not on anyone’s minds,” said Kadinsky, an analyst and researcher for the Parks Department and an adjunct professor of history at Touro College. “People did not take care of the pond.”
By the end of its existence, the pond was little more than a puddle of mud. In a 1838 fire at a home for wayward children located near what is now Madison Square Park, firefighters hosed in water from Sunfish Pond and the pond was drained after a few meager gallons, Kadinsky said.
Before long, as the area continued to develop, the pond was drained, filled, and eventually built over.
“No park or pavement marker commemorates Sunfish Pond, Kadinsky wrote in a recent blog post. “When standing at the corner of Park Avenue South and East 31st Street, fishing and ice skating could not be further from one’s mind.”
But the moisture of the low-lying area of the former pond remain, and continue to vex developers and engineers. When the tubes that carry LIRR and Amtrak trains into Penn Station were built, the sections of tunnel near 31st Street and Park Avenue South reportedly had to be reinforced to keep water from dripping in from former pond, according to Kadinsky.
Kadinsky, who moved to New York from Latvia in second grade, said he embarked on the book project out of a desire to get New Yorkers better acquainted with their history, and more involved in their neighborhoods.
Since his childhood in Riga, and later in New York, he said he has been fascinated by how natural landscape shapes modern cities, and hopes his exploration of New York’s forgotten streams and ponds gets people thinking like that as well.
“By reminding how certain places got their names, like Collect Pond downtown, it gets people more invested, more involved,” he said. “My hope is that by becoming more knowledgeable people will be more connected.”
