3 MILE MARKER, MIDWOOD

WHEN I lived in Bay Ridge, I would frequently bicycle down Ocean Parkway from Church Avenue to Coney Island. It boasts a world-class bike path and it’s flat as a pancake…you can make good time even if you’re going against the wind. Just past Avenue P, I’d notice this little stone with a beveled edge up against the roadway. I must have gone past it hundreds of times in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Looks like a small gravestone, doesn’t it? Yet, I never thought it was a gravestone, unless it was an original plot that Ocean Parkway went through when it was first built. I had something else in mind. And, upon further investigation, my suspicions were confirmed.

It is a mile marker dating back to the early days of Ocean Parkway. This one, marked 3M, marks the third mile from Ocean Parkway’s northern terminus at Prospect Park. Bklyner has more including research by me and by Gravesend’s Joseph Ditta; and Ditta produced a map showing the original locations of the milestones based on research by Richard J. Koke. 

When renowned city planners Frederick Olmstead and Calvert Vaux built Ocean Parkway between 1874 and 1876, they envisioned a six-mile long extension of their earlier creation, Prospect Park, which some say is even better than their masterpiece, Central Park. When first laid out, Ocean Parkway was a direct route for pedestrians and mounted traffic, as well as buggies and wagons, to get to the Coney Island shore from Prospect Park. Even the bicycle wasn’t yet invented when the parkway first appeared.

These days, of course, Ocean Parkway is a pedal to the metal speedway, with synchronized stoplights. Occasionally you can hit the jackpot and never hit a red light while driving from the Belt Parkway to Prospect Park.

Ocean Parkway milestones were placed at half-mile marks along the route. Only this one, by some stroke of fate, remains.

Milestones were a common method of marking private routes beginning in the colonial era and lasting until the start of the 20th Century. Relatively few NYC thoroughfares boasted them, although the old Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) in upper Manhattan had them, as well as Jackson Avenue (now Northern Boulevard) in Queens.

Until about 15-20 years ago, the 5-mile marker was located at Ocean Parkway and Neptune Avenue. that one, though, was located right on the corner, and when the Department of Transportation installed new crosswalks, they didn’t know what a historic artifact they had, and unceremoniously trashed it.

I haven’t been to Midwood lately; usually, you need a reason… but on the internet I discovered that NYC Parks has placed a nifty marker at the 3-mile stone, so you no longer need to go into the middle of Ocean Parkway to see the front of it. Parks has matched the serifed number of the front, so you get a good idea what it looks like.

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2/19/25