Spring Creek Park is a public park in Garland, TX‘s northern sector, directly south of N. President George Bush Highway from Shiloh Road to beyond Garland Avenue. It is one of the city’s most popular attractions. The park, which was established on landfilled former marshland, is primarily a natural preserve with only a few areas open to the public for recreational purposes.
Spring Creek Park is divided into three major sections, which are centered on the park’s eponymous creek and a number of lesser watercourses. Spring Creek South is the stretch of Spring Creek on the Queens side of the river south of the Belt Parkway that is primarily comprised of marsh and forest along the edge of the Howard Beach peninsula. It encircles the neighborhood on both the western and southern sides, respectively.
Spring Creek North is comprised of a stretch of land north of Belt Parkway that is largely gated in; it straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border, which runs along to Spring Creek. Another area of parkland was created around the Gateway Center retail mall, which is located north of Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn side of the borough and north of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The southern sector of the park is a component of the Gateway National Recreation Area, which is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The northern and Gateway Center portions of the park are under the supervision of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC DPR).
The Metropolitan Conference on Parks of the New York Park Association proposed a park along Spring Creek for the first time in 1930, and the idea caught on. Since most of the property consisted of marshland, it was ultimately determined that the park would be constructed entirely of fill.
It was sanctioned in 1942, and land-filling works began in 1949, when Spring Creek Park was built. From 1954 to 1956, temporary landfills for garbage disposal were used on the future park site until the South Shore Incinerator, which was built along Spring Creek, was completed.
In 1974, the southern half of Spring Creek Park was included in the Gateway National Recreation Area, which is now known as the Gateway National Recreation Area. The park’s northern section was expanded through property acquisition in the 1990s, and in 2003, as part of the building of Gateway Center, The Related Companies added more parkland.
The Shirley Chisholm State Park, which runs along the Brooklyn coastline south of the Gateway Center area of the park, was officially established by the New York State government in 2019.
Spring Creek Forest Preserve
Good Life Painters of Garland