Merrick's Highest Point Was a Landfill, and It Still Looks Like One
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
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 that stopped doing its job years ago, 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 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.
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, and it's more honest than most parks built on old fill ever bother to be.
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 put the windmill closer to a decade and a half of spinning for show than of doing its stated job. The town hasn't posted a public repair timeline, so treat that as visitor testimony rather than settled fact. But enough people have flagged it independently that it's become something like local shorthand: if you're at the top of Levy Park, that windmill probably isn't the one pumping anything.
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. It's just one more piece of infrastructure at Levy Park that shows its age instead of hiding it, which by now is the pattern.
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. Town Supervisor Don Clavin, announcing the additions, put their job plainly: 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.
Here's the detail that most write-ups of Levy Park skip past. The Town of Hempstead's own 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. Nobody has reconciled the gap publicly, and it's a minor enough discrepancy that it's easy to miss unless you're reading more than one source. But it fits the larger pattern here: a park built from an engineering compromise, on a timeline extended by permitting and redevelopment work, with a landmark feature that no longer performs its stated function and a summit whose exact height depends on which town document you're holding. Levy Park doesn't present itself as a finished, polished space. It presents itself as what it is, which is a former landfill that got a second use instead of a permanent cap, with all the rough edges that decision left behind.
None of this is a reason to avoid the park. It's a reason to time the visit differently than the summer crowd does. A few practical things worth knowing before you go this fall:
Once the kayak lot empties out, the hill, the pier, and the goats are still there, with fewer people between you and the view. That's the actual case for Levy Park in the fall. Not that it's hiding something better than the summer version. It's that the summer version was never the whole park to begin with.
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.
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