Before being acquired from Nassau County by the Town of North Hempstead in 2007, Manhasset Valley Park had only a small youth baseball field and antiquated site infrastructure.
The park, which borders a freshwater stream and pond, was overgrown with trees and vegetation and prone to flooding. However, in 2013, six years after its acquisition, the Town completed the park’s $3.1 million transformation. As part of the transformation, the Town retained H2M to provide land surveying, site planning, civil engineering and electrical engineering services.
The Town reconstructed the nine-acre eastern portion of the park into a multi-purpose athletic field complex with state-of-the-art enhancements. These enhancements include a synthetic turf baseball and softball field; a synthetic turf multi-purpose field for soccer, lacrosse and field hockey; and 50,000 square feet of lawn area for passive recreation. The park improvements also include a new 68-stall parking field with LED site lighting throughout, as well as water and electric utilities for a future comfort station and sports lighting. The park, which was originally in a community with a severe deficit in recreational and athletic field space, is now fully utilized by the Town’s residents.
The design of the park, which was in an environmentally sensitive area, required that the athletic fields and other facilities be strategically placed on the site to minimize the amount of land disturbance within 100 feet of the adjacent wetland area. Despite the constraints, the design resulted in stream bank and pond edge restoration planting for approximately 1,000 feet of shoreline, walkways along the stream and pond corridor, and an infiltration drainage system sized for a five-inch rainfall event that reduces sediment-laden runoff to the adjoining stream and pond.
