
OWLS Head Park is Bay Ridge’s largest public park, stretching between the Belt Parkway, Colonial Road and 68th Street, and its high hill provides a prime viewing spot during Brooklyn’s occasional tall ship parades. The park was created from the estate of Eliphalet W. Bliss (1836-1903). In 1867 he founded the machine shops that became the E. W. Bliss Company and the United States Projectile Company, concerns which at his death employed 1,300 men.
Bliss’s interests developed along two lines: the manufacture of tools, presses, and dies for use in sheet metal work, and the manufacture of shells and projectiles. His estate, Owl’s Head, possibly named because the promontory on which it was located resembled an owl’s head (or because there may have been stone owls’ heads on the gateposts), featured an observatory known as the Bayard Tower. Bliss had purchased the estate from US State Senator, US Representative, Mayor of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Eagle founder Henry Murphy (1810-1882). Bliss willed the estate to NYC provided it be used for parkland. The park, still known by old-timers as Bliss Park, has been in use by local residents since the 1920s; Robert Moses redesigned it in the 1930s. The mansion and tower were razed in 1940. Senator Street is named for Murphy, while one-block Bliss Terrace was named for the industrialist.
Rosebank in Staten Island has its very own version: Von Briesen Park, 10.1 acres of parkland at the south end of Bay Street at School Road, just north of Fort Wadsworth, itself now mostly public parkland. The park is built on former estate of Arthur Von Briesen (1843-1920). Von Briesen, a German immigrant, served as sergeant of Company B, First New York Volunteers and became an attorney after the war. In 1876 he founded and later served as president of the German Legal Aid Society, which provided free legal services to poor German immigrants in New York; the organization continues today as the Legal Aid Society.
Von Briesen purchased the property in 1901 and constructed residences, greenhouses, stables and offices. Interestingly the property also featured a trolley turnaround serving Bay Street cars. After his death in 1920 the property was unused until 1945 when it was converted into a public park. Parks czar Robert Moses tore down the deteriorating structures, and it has remained purely a quiet oasis since with views of the Verrazzano Bridge (after 1964). several attempts to add recreational facilities and playgrounds have thankfully been thwarted; the John E. White Playground is nearby on Lyman Avenue.
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6/25/25
3 comments
Any relation to the Blissville neighborhood in Qns?
Von Briesen is one of those out-of-the-way parks that most folks either pass by or are unaware of. Which is great for the locals. My Mom lives a few blocks away and this is one of the cleanest, quietest parks in NYC, with stunning views of the V-Z Bridge, the Narrows, and Bay Ridge. If you crane your neck northeastward, you can also see Lower Manhattan and Jersey City.
Went there on Sunday drives and watched them build the V-N Bridge. Used to refer to Battery Weed in Fort Wadsworth as “Davy Crockett’s Fort”.