Photo Essay - the Recreation at Wall's (Hall's) Pond of Yesteryear

The following collection of photos below tell the story of a bygone era when kids from West Hempstead and its environs would frequent Wall's Pond year-round for an array of recreation opportunities, from swimming and boating in the summer, to skating and sledding in the winter.  All photos (with the exception of the above photo, courtesy of the WH Historical Society) come from the pages of the now defunct Nassau Daily Review-Star between the mid '30s and early '50s, the paper of record for all local news in Central-Southern Nassau County during that period.  As can be seen in the photos, Wall's Pond got alot of heavy use in those days as a favorite watering hole for youngsters looking for a good pastime activity, and they highlight just how rural our community was back then. In 1961, Nassau County purchased the land surrounding what was then called Wall's Pond and developed a park that they named Hall's Pond Park, to honor the family of an early owner of the property, Martin V. W. Hall.  The irony contained in the County's purchase and development is that it marked a turning point for Hall's Pond Park when it was no longer used for the activities illustrated below, but was instead converted into a "passive park".  A separate post is needed to explain (i.e. complain about) how that ended up happening.  For now, step back into yesteryear and enjoy the photos. As a frame of reference, I left in the photo captions included in the newspaper for better explanation.  BTW - virtually all references to the pond at that time had it as "Wall's Pond", not "Hall's Pond".



1) The old Boy Scout rhyme about ice-pond safety went something like this: 1 inch - stay away, 2 inches - one may, 3 inches - small groups, 4 inches - O.K.  The photo below shows that back in the 1930s, winters were cold enough for a sufficiently long time to freeze over Wall's Pond and make it safe for any kind of winter activity.

2) In the summer of 1935, a 12 year-old boy named Walter Frederick, who lived just down the road from Wall's Pond on Hawthorne St, got a nasty bite on his leg while swimming at the north side of the pond.  A year later, he got his revenge when his attacker was caught, a 35lb turtle who would angrily fend off anyone who dared invade his habitat.  The photo below (which unfortunately got overexposed when converted to .pdf) shows the police officers in the process of corralling the turtle, to be later transported to a menagerie that State troopers maintained at Belmont Lake State Park.

3) Below is a scene that would be utterly unimaginable today; on an unusually hot spring day in April 1938, a group of four boys took the opportunity to raft out on the pond on a makeshift boat made by cutting an oil tank in two.

4) Here's another great shot from late June, 1939 of a boy paddling out with an acquaintance on a home-made boat that he christened the H.M.S. Foo.

5) June, 1940.  Apparently at least some of the shoreline of Wall's Pond was sufficiently deep enough for brave divers to jump headlong into the water.  Bottom image, on the shore, a sunbather smiles for the photo.

6) Most people today who would catch the scene depicted below would undoubtedly call the police - two boys, ages 9 and 8 on their skiff, getting their rods ready for a day of fishing on Wall's Pond.  In 1949, it was a common sight.

7) As late as the summer of 1951, much of West Hempstead was still rural farmland.  A favorite pastime of the young farmhands of the area, such as Christian Limbach, below, whose family ran a farm down the road in Lakeview, was fishing.  The Daily Review-Star photographer caught the young boy napping, while holding onto his rod.

8) In 1937, the Nassau Daily Review-Star ran a contest called the "Lucky Circle" where they would publish a photo of a crowd engaged in some activity somewhere in Nassau County, and circle one face in the crowd.  If the person circled in the photo would then call up the newspaper's office and correctly identify themselves, they would win a prize.  The grand prize for the lucky winners? A whopping $2 (no small sum during the Depression).  The photo below showing a group of ice skaters on Wall's Pond appeared on the front page of the Dec. 14, 1937 edition of the Daily Review-Star.  Two days later Eileen Dillon of Rockville Centre correctly identified herself and claimed her prize.

9) Below is a photo of two girls lacing up their ice skates at Wall's Pond during a late winter cold spell in early 1950.  From the newspaper's masthead, which I have included, it looked as though the snow would turn to rain the following day

10) The old conventional wisdom states that back in those days, Pine Brook, which flowed into Wall's Pond, ran clear as a mountain stream and provided swimmers with clean and sanitary conditions in the pond.  The photo and article below from the summer of 1941 showed that this was not always the case.  Pollutants from the Garden City waste transfer station on Cherry Valley Ave further upstream, as well as dangerous contaminants from Nassau Hospital (forerunner to Winthrop University Hospital) in Mineola further north, got into the water and forced health officials to close down Walls Pond to swimming, much to the chagrin of the young bathers shown in the bottom photo.  The top photo shows the lillies that used to blanket part of the pond.

11) Finally, the terrific photo below taken at the southern end of Wall's Pond in June 1939, shows a group of young swimmers along the shore.  In those days, County policemen would be stationed to protect the youngsters from traffic on Hempstead Avenue and, if needed, also assume the role of lifeguard.  The photo also contains an old relic that no longer exists - the concrete and steel of the northern wall of the old bridge that carried Hempstead Avenue traffic over Pine Stream.  The bottom photo puts some NCPD humor on display with a deliberately misspelled sign pointing to the Wall's Pond Swimmin' Hole

John A Schwarz Furniture

The postcard above depicts the John A. Schwarz, Inc. furniture store at One Fulton Avenue, probably not long after their opening at that location in 1949.  Actually the history of this firm begins long before that.  Karen E. Wagner at My Old NY Just Ain't What She Used to Be blog has some great information about the original John A Schwarz and his furniture business. He was born in NY in the 1850s to German immigrants and clerked in a furniture store before he opened his own store in 1876 at 838-840 Broadway in Brooklyn. By the 1920s, his three sons opened an additional three locations, two more in Brooklyn and one in Jamaica.  By the 1940s, they sold off their stores in NYC to another firm and moved out to Long Island where in 1949, they opened the store you see above as their only store.  (A few years later they also opened a store in Centereach).

John A Schwarz furniture was a mainstay business in Hempstead for the next three decades.  Their building offered full frontage on Hempstead Turnpike/ Fulton Ave with large showcase windows to display their wares.  The building also offered plenty of floor space and lots of parking.

In the 1970s, John A Schwarz felt the squeeze from competing firms, coupled with a downturn in the economy, and on Sunday February 1, 1981, after 105 years in business, they closed their doors for good.

Shortly thereafter the site became home to the Nassau School for Medical and Dental Assistants.  For a while, the local offices of Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy was also located there.  Today, the building is called Nassau Plaza and houses medical offices, including an OB/GYN office affiliated with Winthrop University Hospital.  The presence of Winthrop is ironic, because it happens to be very near the original site of Nassau Hospital, forerunner to Winthrop.  Nassau Hospital opened on an estate at that location as western Long Island's first full service hospital in 1897 before moving to Mineola in 1900. I guess you can say they've come full circle.

Below is a "now" shot of the picture above.

Nassau Hospital Part II - Onderdonk Estate

Below is a sketch from the same Brooklyn Eagle article of the estate of the late Henry M. Onderdonk. Onderdonk was a prominent local citizen who was publisher and editor of the Hempstead Inquirer, and had once served in the Senate when he lived in Ohio. The house was built in the 1840s for Adrian V. Cortelyou, a veteran of the War of 1812. Onderdonk pruchased the home sometime around 1870. He died in 1885 and his widow, Catherine, occupied the house until she, too, died in 1898. When the Nassau Hospital ran out of room at the Bedell House, the recently vacated Onderdonk home across the street (at the western corner of Hempstead Ave and Hempstead Tpke) provided a golden opportunity to handle the overflow of patients.

Though the Onderdonk house itself was at the eastern corner of the property, as per the Chester Wolverton Atlas of 1891, the estate comprised the entire 19 acre triangle bounded by Hempstead Ave, Hempstead Turnpike and Westminster Rd. Soon thereafter, LIRR President Austin Corbin purchased most of the property to lay a new rail line from Valley Stream to Mineola.

Since I didn't know at what angle the sketch was drawn, I had to resort to the Fowler & Bulger birdseye view of Hempstead below from 1876 to recreate the "now" photo.

The birdseye view above shows both the Bedell and Onderdonk houses, with the present-day Hempstead Tpke-Front St. running NW-SE and Hempstead Ave-Fulton St. running SW-NE. The Bedell House is just right of center while the Onderdonk House is at the far left. From the sketch, a porch exists on the near side of the Onderdonk House, while the far side of the house is obscured. The rear of the house has an extension that runs lengthwise, so it can't be that the Brooklyn Eagle sketch was rendered from the rear of the house. It's clear then, that the near porch in the birdseye view is the porch on the left side of the sketch, which was drawn from the street corner facing west - hence the angle provided in the "now" photo. As you can see below, the stately home of Henry M. Onderdonk has been replaced by a different sort of "castle".

Nassau Hospital Part I - A K Bedell Estate

The sketch below is taken from a feature article in the Oct. 2, 1898 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle about the Nassau Hospital, Nassau County’s first full service medical facility. The hospital was opened in July 1897 at the home of Abner K. Bedell, a wealthy silver and china import merchant from NYC who spent his summers in Hempstead. Prior to its opening, residents of the townships of Oyster Bay, Hempstead & North Hempstead in need of hospital services would have had to travel all the way to Brooklyn or Long Island City, a considerable distance at the time.

In 1898, the Hospital was instrumental in treating the sick soldiers of nearby Camp Black. By 1900, the hospital relocated to Mineola and became the forerunner of Winthrop University Hospital. The house was located on the north side of Fulton street, near the intersection with Front street, and is testimony to the grandeur of the stately homes that lined Fulton Ave at the turn of the 20th Century.

The expansive porch of this house was emblematic of its use as a summer retreat, and its Mansard roof as the main feature of its architecture was a popular style for many homes of the area (including the "Apostle Houses" of Garden City). A K Bedell died in 1912 and left his million-dollar estate to a daughter and a son, Daniel Bedell, who had once served as a NYC Alderman. At some point after Daniel Bedell died in 1922, the property was sold off and platted (the E. Belcher Hyde map of 1927 still shows the Bedell estate as a contiguous property, so it's fair to assume the earliest date the sale could have taken place was not too much before 1927). The Bedell name survives at the former property in Bedell Ave which runs north-south along the Hempstead-Cathedral Gardens border. In place of the home above was built the current structure, the Lutheran Church of the Epiphany. According to the Nassau County property records, the church was completed in 1931. Below is a recent picture, approximate to the location of the where the above house used to stand.