Friends of Rye Town Park is a nonprofit volunteer citizens’ group, formed in 1991 by local residents to beautify and preserve the park. It works independently, but cooperates with the Rye Town Park Commission, the municipal body that governs, manages, and operates the park and beach.
The Friends recently announced that they will receive a challenge grant of $200,000 from the foundation of Ed and Sue Wachenheim, if the group is able to raise at least the same amount by the end of June. “The iconic tower building has fallen into grave disrepair as a result of decades of neglect, and donations have already begun pouring in,” said Diana Page, president of the Friends of Rye Town Park.
This park, including Oakland Beach, is one of 12 sites in the city of Rye that have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was originally designed in 1909 and includes the bathing pavilion, with its twin towers designed in the mission revival style, a restaurant, the spring house, and the women›s bath house.
In the late 1700s, the property was acquired by Ezekiel Halsted. Around 1880, Ezekiel’s descendants began to develop the land along Oakland Beach as a summer resort and built an inn near there as well as a ferry pier at the end of Dearborn Avenue. People came for day trips or vacations, many on the daily ferries that crossed the sound between Oyster Bay and Rye.
The Halsteds then started allowing people to build summer bungalows on the property, charging rent from $60 to $90 a season. This quickly grew to over 200 bungalows bustling with residents and day trippers. J. Henry Halsted, the proprietor of the bungalow community, installed lamps along the beach for evening swimming as well as bath houses and canoe rentals.
Turning the Halsted property into a public park was first proposed around 1900, but there was no progress until the Village of Rye received its own charter in 1904, separating it governmentally from the Town of Rye. There were heated debates over losing the Halsted land from the tax rolls, but with mounting support, a proposition for creation of a town park was passed in 1907, with all election districts in the Villages of Rye and Port Chester and the Town of Rye approving the proposition.
J. Mayhew Wainwright, a prominent Rye resident and state legislator, introduced legislation to establish the park, which was signed into law in 1908. Construction of the park, which required the removal of the shanty structures built by Halstead, was begun that year, and the park opened in 1910. The initial cost of land acquisition and construction was nearly $500,000 (roughly $17 million today).
The park contains 28 acres of land and 34 acres of beach, half of which is underwater at high tide. The twin-towered pavilion housed locker rooms for bathers to change before they walked through tunnels so they would not be seen in their bathing suits by other park visitors.
However, an article in The New York Tribune on May 21, 1913, reported: “Tommy Byrnes told his fellow Rye Village trustees that motorists driving past Rye Beach often eyed the feminine bathing suits, and a serious accident might occur there some day. Village Board President Theodore Fremd said he would appoint Tommy a committee of one to curb the bathing suits or do whatever might be necessary. Tommy said there was too much work for one man inspecting bathing suits at Rye Beach. Then Mr. Fremd appointed Si Buckley to the committee. Si did not make any objection.”
Indicating changing views, a headline in The Tribune on Aug. 30, 1920, read: “Rye Beach Will Adopt Standard Bathing Suit; V-Shaped Backs, Bare Legs, One-Piece Clingers, and Baby-Blue Socks Ordered Off Strand by Shocked Board of Town Commissioners.”
The article quoted a local judge’s admonition to 62 people who were arrested at the beach for “wandering around with insufficient covering… there is not complete agreement among the commissioners, but all agree that the clinging, one-piece suit has to go.”
A trolley line that ran from town made the park more accessible for those traveling by train or transferring from other trolleys. There were also jail cells in the pavilion to hold disorderly park visitors before they could be transported to the Rye police station.
At some point after 1909 a formal, oval-shaped reflecting pond was created. Photos of the pond show that it was used in winter for informal ice-skating and ice hockey. In the 1980’s, the Rye Town Park Commission decided to “shrink” the pond to create additional space for overflow parking.
Unfortunately, the outcome was that the rainwater continued to drain downhill, making the proposed parking area too damp and muddy for that use. The condition of the pond was one of the main reasons for the formation of the Friends of Rye Town Park in 1991.
Since then, the Friends organization has done a great deal each year to restore and upgrade the park’s facilities and grounds as described in its website https://www.friendsofrtp.org/.
