Satellite view of Great Kills Park (borders outlined in yellow)
Great Kills Park is the southernmost section of the Staten Island Unit of Gateway National Recreation Area. It became part of the park in 1972 when New York City transferred the land to the National Park Service. Unlike the Fort Wadsworth and Miller Field sections, Great Kills Park has no military history and is for recreational purposes only. It has the only swimming beach with lifeguards at the Staten Island Unit, a multi-use path (MUP) for bikers and hikers that runs the entire length of the park, plenty of places to go fishing, and a marina and boat ramp located in Great Kills Harbor.
There is only one problem with Great Kills Park: half of it is closed due to radioactive contamination. In the mid-1940s, the City of New York Department of Parks set out to develop Great Kills Harbor into a recreation area. To do so, waste was used as landfill to build the marshland into a solid foundation. This area of the park became home to a model airplane field and various sport fields. In 2005, the New York City Police Department recorded high levels of radiation when creating a radiological map to monitor radioactivity within the city.
Radium-226 was found to be the cause. Up until the late 1960s and early 1970s, radium-226 was used in self-luminous paints that were applied to clocks, dials, watches, aircraft, and anything else that needed to glow in the dark. It was also used in industrial instruments and medical devices. The radium at Great Kills Park came from discarded medical devices and needles used in the chemotherapy process. However, the radium is buried in the ground and can only be detected a few feet from the source, so it’s not like the park is hazardous. The true danger comes if you were to dig in the dirt and find some of these old devices—and we all know that people going to a park always bring their shovels with them so they can dig holes. The truth is that people have lived and played in the area for decades and there has never been any unusual outbreaks of cancer, but since everyone is lawsuit happy these days, the National Park Service closed the area. It’s been over a decade since the radium problem was discovered, and other than studies and the erection of fences to keep people out, nothing has been done to clean up the place. But as one New Yorker on a review site wrote, “It could be worse. I could be New Jersey.”
See the following web pages for more information on activities at Great Kills Park:
Crooke’s Point (Hiking Trails)
Directions and Contact Information
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Last updated on May 25, 2020
