Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick: A Fall Walk

Every June the parking lot at 1600 Merrick Road fills with roof racks and kayak trailers before eight in the morning. Within days it empties out just as fast, once the tidal launch on Meadow Brook closes for the season, as it does this week. Most of what gets written about Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve stops at the water, as if that were the whole reason to go. It isn't. The better reason is a walk uphill past a windmill, over a cap the Town of Hempstead built on purpose, to the highest ground on Long Island's South Shore, standing on three decades of collected trash and looking straight at Manhattan.

That's the part the summer crowd skips, and it's worth going back for now that the lot is quiet.

The Kayak Window Is Closing, Not the Park

The launch into Meadow Brook runs June through August, and it isn't a casual paddle. The brook is tidal, and the town posts navigable windows of three hours on either side of high tide, with the tables kept in brochure boxes at the entrance and outside the ranger station. That's the kind of detail that keeps the kayak crowd small and seasonal. It also means the park's better-known feature is, by design, only usable for a quarter of the year.

The rest of the park doesn't run on a tide schedule. The three miles of trail, the eighteen exercise stations along the way, and the 500-foot fishing pier out into Merrick Bay stay open on the park's regular hours, which in past seasons have run 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. from May through August before narrowing as the year goes on. Once August ends, the kayak story is over for the year. The hill isn't.

The Park's Landfill History

Levy Park sits on a site that operated as the Merrick Landfill from 1950 to 1984. When it closed, state environmental regulators wanted a traditional cap, at a projected cost of roughly $57 million. The Town of Hempstead pushed a different plan instead: an engineered park built over the same mound for about $15 million, saving taxpayers more than $42 million against the original proposal. The redevelopment ran from 1994 to 2001, and the preserve opened to the public on October 22, 2000, named for state senator Norman J. Levy, a Merrick resident who had championed the environmental case for reusing the site rather than sealing it away.

The cap is still doing its job, and it isn't hidden. Small vent pipes for landfill gas sit along stretches of the trail, visible if you're looking for them, a reminder that the ground under the gravel path is engineered infrastructure and not reclaimed wilderness. That's not a flaw. It's the same tradeoff that made the $42 million savings possible in the first place.

The Windmill and the Summit Ponds

The park's most visible symbol, according to the town's own description, is the windmill on the north side of the property, built to circulate water into the two man-made ponds at the summit. For years now, visitors posting on TripAdvisor and Yelp have reported the same thing: the blades still turn, but no water moves. One recent review claims park rangers have acknowledged the pump has been down since around 2012, which would mean the pump had been out of operation for more than a decade. The town hasn't posted a public repair timeline, so treat that as visitor testimony rather than settled fact.

It doesn't ruin the view. The ponds still hold water, ducks still use them, and the summit still delivers the sightline toward the Jones Beach Tower and the Manhattan skyline that draws people up there in the first place.

The Staff That Isn't on a Payroll

The other fixture at the entrance is a herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats, first introduced in 2009 as a low-tech alternative to mowing crews in the areas too steep or too overgrown to maintain conventionally. In May 2023, the Town of Hempstead added five new goats and two sheep, named Clay, Priscilla, Mia, Sweetie, Latte, Socks, and Boots, to join the existing herd, the Long Island Herald reported. Town Supervisor Don Clavin, announcing the additions, said the animals "have a job here" and would be assigned to the overgrown patches that needed clearing. A flock of guinea fowl handles tick control the same way, working the underbrush the goats don't get to.

None of this is decorative. It's municipal groundskeeping that happens to be extremely photogenic, and it's part of why the park draws repeat visits from people who've already seen the skyline view and come back anyway.

The Summit's Reported Heights

The Town of Hempstead's facility page describes the site's highest point as 155 feet. Independent listings, including longisland.com's business directory and the park's Wikipedia entry, put the elevation closer to 115 to 120 feet. The figures have not been reconciled publicly.

What Fall Actually Buys You

For a fall visit, a few practical details are worth knowing:

• No pets are permitted anywhere on the property, including the trails and the pier.
• The entrance gate closes 30 minutes before the posted closing time, so plan the drive back accordingly.
• The park closes entirely on Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Thanksgiving, and is subject to unscheduled closures during bad weather.
• Visitors have described the restrooms as rustic, closer to a composting-toilet setup than a standard park facility, so plan accordingly.
• The kayak launch and any ranger-guided tours run only during the posted operating season, so if you're planning to bring a boat next year, June through August is the window to build around.

Once the kayak lot empties out, the hill, the pier, and the goats are still there, offering a chance to explore more of the park beyond the summer kayak season.

Whether you've walked the Levy Park loop a hundred times or you're still figuring out what daily life in Merrick actually looks like, Kevin Leatherman has spent three decades working this stretch of Nassau County's South Shore and is always glad to talk local. Let's talk.