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History

AURORA GAREISS AND THE FOUNDING OF
THE UDALLS COVE PRESERVATION COMMITTEE

Developers’ Dreams & “The Swamp Lady”

Excerpted from This Salubrious Spot: The First 100 Years at Douglas Manor 1906-2006, copyright 2006 by Douglas Manor Association, Inc., pages 59-60 (copied by permission).

By the 1950's Long Island had changed dramatically. Older suburbs – places like Douglas Manor – were largely forsaken for tonier post-World War II developments farther out on Long Island where the vast Gold Coast estates of the turn-of-the-century robber barons were being split up into two-acre lots.

Despite the exodus out east, the Manor remained desirable and never slipped into a wholesale decline like other older City neighborhoods.

Developers began eyeing the wetlands flanking the Manor anew, reviving plans to build housing there that dated back to the 1920's. The filling of the wetlands began in earnest in the late 1950's and new developments were started in Little Neck and Douglaston. The pressure increased to fill in all the remaining wetlands.

By the mid-1960's, most of the remaining wetlands on the east side of the Manor between Little Neck and the Manor, north to Memorial Field, were purchased by several different developers, and each had his own plan. If the developers had their way, the winding creek at Udalls Cove [Gabler’s Creek] would have long ago been filled in and replaced by proposals ranging from single-family houses, to apartments, to a marina, to a marina and apartments.

In 1967, Carl Papa, a Manor resident and developer, began filling in an eight-acre parcel he owned with a partner south of Memorial Field between Warwick Avenue and Richmond Road for a single-family housing development. For a year straight, huge dump trucks came to the site every day, roaring down Manor streets and dumping dirt, concrete and enormous tree trunks into the wetlands and a tidal pond that was there. This quickly created a mini ecological disaster, with mud waves mushrooming out from the landfill and closing down the creek.

At the same time, Great Neck Estates started filling in its wetlands at Udalls Cove for a golf course and for a commuter parking lot near the Long Island Railroad station at Little Neck. A constant stream of dump trucks with unending loads of debris became a daily sight on the edges of Udalls Cove, in Great Neck, Little Neck and in the Manor. A handful of Manor residents were outraged about the landfills and the loss of wildlife, but it seemed that little could be done.

Until Aurora Gareiss came along. She and her husband Herbert had lived at 31-07 Douglas Road, a small Tudor cottage on more than an acre between Douglas Road and the creek, since 1939. An upside-down boat rudder stuck into the garden outside their front door marked the address of their house and the name they gave it – “Bit o’ Bay” – signaling their love for this unique spot.

Their property was a quarter mile south of the Papa site, and also faced the wetlands in Great Neck estates where the golf course was being built. Soon, the sixty-ish Gareiss was out every day with binoculars taking license-plate numbers of trucks dumping fill in Great Neck and confronting truck drivers in the Manor, trying to trace where the fill was coming from.

With her silver-white hair tied into a bun, colorful, artfully-placed scarves, outsize jewelry and perfect theater diction, Gareiss cut a striking figure rapping on truck drivers’ doors with a hand-carved cane, demanding information. So armed, she started filing complaints against the dumpers, and also began calling every politician she knew, as well as the State conservation agencies. But her efforts had little effect.

Soon she took another tack. She enlisted the aid of other incensed Manor residents, gathering them at her house for meetings. She shared with them reams of articles and information on the value of salt marshes, and also on the dumpers and the developers.

Having build a consensus among her neighbors about saving the wetlands on both sides of the Nassau-Queens County line, she and this core group formed the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee in 1969. It was the year before the first Earth Day.

The Committee decided to take to the streets – literally – to blockade the dumping, and went to the press. Hundreds of protesters showed up for an arms-linked blockade in the path of the bulldozers and garnered substantial TV and newspaper publicity.

Next, Audubon Magazine published a cover-story article on the salt marshes and their value. A Manor resident offered to buy 1,200 copies of the magazine, drove into New York, went to Audubon and packed them into her Peugeot station wagon. She and other volunteers hand-delivered them to all the residents of Great Neck Estates with a letter urging resident to vote “no” on the proposed golf-course referendum that was coming up.

The golf course would have filled all of Great Neck’s wetlands up to the Belgrave sewage plant’s pipeline, totaling about 50 acres in Nassau County. The golf course was handily defeated.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, 300 volunteers showed up at the Back Road for a clean-up organized by the Committee. With the New York City Sanitation Department assisting, 17 abandoned cars were removed, along with 20 dumpsters of garbage and debris. The volunteers built a fence of telephone poles donated by Con Edison, to keep out the dumpers.

While these events were great successes, the battle for the Papa site and the remaining parcels in Udalls Cove continued – for decades. It took Gareiss and her cohort, Virginia Dent, who lived a few houses away from her farther up the creek, along with the unstinting efforts of the dedicated members of the Committee, a full 22 years before New York City would buy the Papa land and acquire other parcels in Udalls Cove for a 33-acre public park. The Udalls Cove Park and Preserve was finally dedicated in 1990, and includes the wetlands on both sides of the Queens-Nassau County line, and parts of the ravine between the LIRR tracks and Northern Boulevard.

It is clear that without the preservation of the Cove and this wildlife area, the Manor would be a very different place. In the 1990's, the pond at the Back Road was named Aurora Pond for Gareiss who died in 2000; at the same time Virginia Point, which overlooks the Cove at the end of Little Neck Parkway, was named for Dent, who died in 2005.

The following historical information is from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation:

UDALLS COVE PARK PRESERVE                      

According to local Native American lore, there once lived on the shores of Long Island Sound two tribes of giants. When they were at war with each other, the tribe on the Connecticut side would break off pieces of their mountains and hurl them at the giants on Long Island. The Long Island giants, because they had no mountains, would reciprocate by hurling boulders—a strategy that proved successful. The Long Island tribe’s victory explains why Connecticut is strewn with boulders for many miles inland, while Long Island has boulders along its northern shore.

Geologists however, offer a different explanation. At various times over the past million years, global cooling caused massive glaciers to form over much of the northern United States. These ice sheets surged southward from Hudson Bay in Canada, collecting boulders, cobbles, gravel, and soil on the way. As temperatures began to rise 15,000 years ago, the last glacier receded from Long Island. As the ice melted, the debris was deposited throughout the landscape. On Long Island, it created the range of hills along the North Shore called the Harbor Hill Terminal Moraine. North of these hills other flat-topped hills formed that now project into the Long Island Sound. These are the peninsulas of Great Neck, Bayside, and Douglaston that flank the river valley of Little Neck Bay and Udalls Cove. As the glacier continued to melt, runoff formed streams that cut into the landscape, creating ravines.

Here at Udalls Cove, the streams carried sand and silt, which formed shallow intertidal flats that now collect water from throughout the area. The first plants to colonize these flats were a species of salt-tolerant grass called saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora).  Where the grass thrived, the current slowed, causing more sedimentary accumulation. The cove’s bottom continued to rise, and more plant species were able to take hold. 

The earliest human inhabitants of this area probably arrived about 4,000 years ago, when a deciduous forest first appeared here. The people came during the warmer months, hunting whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and game birds such as wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) that lived in the forest.  Later visitors came to harvest the water’s clams and oysters that came once the salt marsh and stabilized.  In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano (1480-1528) made contact and established trade with these Long Island natives.  Over the next century and a half, the Native Americans built more permanent settlements throughout the island, and Europeans acquired more land for themselves.  In 1645, the Dutch established the town of Flushing, and land in Little Neck was granted to settlers such as Thomas Hicks and Richard Cornell.  The Mattinecock Indians, led by Chief Tackapousha (d. 1694) disputed these claims, and brought the issue before Governor Thomas Dongan (1634-1715).  Tackapousha was at first able to delay white settlement, but after a few years, Thomas Hicks led a force of Europeans in a raid against the Indian settlement, and forcibly took the land. Thus began the decline of Queens’s native population. 

In 1833, Richard Udall, for whom the cove is named, bought a mill formerly owned by the Allen family on the eastern side of the cove. The mill, now called the Saddle Rock Mill, remained in the Udall family until 1950, when it was donated to the Nassau County Historical Society. During the 1830s, a shellfishing community developed around the docks at Oldhouse Landing Road (now Little Neck Parkway) and Sand Hill Road.  The industry thrived as the demand for oysters and Little Neck Clams (Venus mercenaria) grew.  But by 1893, the local shellfishing industry was finished; overharvesting, poaching, and pollution had destroyed it. [Additional note from UCPC: starting in the first half of the 20^th century and continuing until the late 1960's there  were two boat yards at the north end of Little Neck Parkway, serving the recreational boating community of Little Neck Bay.]  Today, the stanchions and bulkheads at the end of Little Neck Parkway are all that remain of the bygone era. 

The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee initiated the acquisition of Udalls Park Preserve.  The group of local residents organized in 1969 in order to prevent development of the land and promote public ownership. Udalls Cove was first mapped as a New York City park on December 7, 1972, but many subsequent additions have increased the size of the park.

October, 2001