By Keith Doherty
Largely invisible today as a result of construction and development over the years, Scheckler’s Brook runs through the heart of Hastings and was a central feature of the village’s landscape and daily life for centuries.
The Route
Originating deep inside Hillside Park, it currently flows below Reynolds Field and the Five Corners intersection into town along the north side of Main Street, beneath what is now the Foodtown parking lot and Citibank.
From there it veers left and passes under Main and into the Ravine behind the Community Center, where it eventually merges with the Hudson under the commuter parking lot and the train tracks. Further upstream, by contrast, long stretches of it remain above ground at places like the Hillside Sugar Pond and along Chemka Pool Road and the upper part of Farlane Drive (a.k.a. Scary Street, Long Dark Road or the dirt road).
Also referred to variously in the sources as Troublesome Creek, Ravine Brook, Factory Brook, and Three Islands Brook (depending on what part of it one was referencing), the section of Sheckler’s Brook that flowed through town was quite beautiful, gathering into a number of man-made ponds at intervals. Our best source for the original location of these in the downtown area is an 1834 map of Hastings that was concerned specifically with the village’s hydrology.
The brook was especially picturesque just south of Main Street at the location of today’s James V. Harmon Community Center, where it formed a dramatic cascade before dropping into the Ravine.
Scheckler’s Brook served a variety of vital functions in the downtown area. It was especially important in the area of the Ravine to the south of today’s Main Street, where it is joined by a major tributary that originates in the area of the Burke Estate. Although a formal archaeological survey of the area proposed in the 1990s never came to pass, village old-timers recall finding arrowheads and other American Indian artifacts here, suggesting that the brook’s junction with the Hudson was an important locus for indigenous peoples long before Europeans came to Hastings. This is extremely likely given the discovery of similar remains at the mouths of other nearby Hudson tributaries (e.g., the Saw Mill River in Yonkers and Wicker’s Creek in Dobbs Ferry).
Industry
By the 1830s the brook had come to serve important commercial purposes in the Ravine. Before the Hudson River Railroad was built in the 1840s, the brook seems to have been navigable to a degree by small craft carrying goods coming off the Hudson. It powered early factory machinery (waterwheels for the first industries in the Ravine) and was dammed into a few ponds that were used for various purposes by the industries operating there at this time. The lower and larger of these was the original Sugar Pond, so named because it was adjacent to the Hudson River Sugar Refinery, which operated on the waterfront until 1875 (the current Sugar Pond behind today’s Hillside Elementary School was created in the 1940s). The brook and pond were restored during the Newington-Cropsey Foundation’s redevelopment of the area in the 1990s and are again visible (much beautified) today.
Village real estate records from 1834 also mention the use of a waterwheel and a second pond by William Saunders’ Patent Axle Brass and Turning Factory, which was located in the upper part of the Ravine where it is entered by the brook. Accordingly, the 1834 hydrological map shows a second, small body of water in this area of the ravine beside the Saunders factory. In an 1891 watercolor by renowned artist Jasper Cropsey we see a large retaining basin in this location with a sluice gate and flume that may have powered the waterwheel in Saunders’ factory.
Further up Scheckler’s formed watering holes at a few spots for farm animals and horses. The main one of these seems to have been in the vicinity of Citibank and the Fire Department on Main (also visible in the 1834 map). Another large one was in the current Reynolds Field, where the eponymous Scheckler owned a farm.
watering hole and animals grazing (George Sackett).
Watering Holes, Swimming Holes
Kids also swam in the brook in various places. In a great 1929 article in the Hastings Press an old-timer recalls swimming in the brook as a boy where it was bridged over Broadway. In the late-1800s he and his friends encountered elephants there from a traveling circus that would pass through town once a year. Being too heavy to cross the bridge, these obliging pachyderms had to bypass it and wade through the water, taking the opportunity to have a drink and spray the kids.
The long series of pipes that now channel the brook underground were installed gradually during a series of construction projects that took place throughout the 20th century. The most ambitious of these was at Reynolds Field, where it was sent deep underground when the large upper terrace that now supports the running track and football field was created beginning in the 1930s.
Another major stream diversion took place when the A&P (now Foodtown) and its parking lot were built atop the beautiful Chrystie Estate in the late 1950s. The commuter lot in the Ravine was created in installments in the late 1920s and early 1930s, atop what had by then become by then a rather desolate space torn up by a century of industrial activity.
The Brook in Hillside
The brook has a storied past closer to its origins in Hillside Park as well, where large stretches of it still remain above ground. It originates in a marshy area near Children’s Village on the Dobbs-Hastings border, where a manmade body, now only dimly recognizable, known as Three Islands Pond once existed. This was used for swimming by the kids at Children’s Village, among other things (a 1975 Hastings Historical Society newsletter article mentions that “Venetian-style wooden bridges connected the islands adorned with gleaming white statues”!). The “new” Sugar Pond behind Hillside Elementary just south of this was created in the 1940s.
There was also another now drained but very sizable pond further south located in what is today’s parking area for Chemka Pool. Apparently created by a beaver dam, this body of water may have had the distinction of being the only non-manmade pond along the brook’s course. Duck Pond was the primary swimming hole in town for many years. It began to stagnate in the 1940s, however, and despite preservation efforts, it eventually was condemned by the County Health Department and had to be drained (a tragedy that lead to the creation of the Chemka Pool in the 1960s). For many years after the area was paved over, the brook continued to make its presence known by causing portions of the pool tennis courts to collapse, disrupting many a match.
This is a great article! When was a young(er) mother, my children would play in that brook by the Zinnser playground. I often found pieces of old pottery in the brook, including part of a lovely sculpted clay pipe.
Very cool article Keith. You did a lot of hard investigative work to document all of this. My grandmother came to Hastings, originally from Sweden around 1905 and met her husband at the Christie estate. It’s likely she worked there also so I’m sure she saw the stream. They subsequently lived in the Spite House – 37 Villard and also 73 Washington Ave where my mother and five siblings grew up. Libby Copeland’s children are the 5th generation of our family living part of their lives in Hastings.
What a neat piece of history, as a young boy in the 1950’s playing and exploring that waterway was so much fun.the research on this was really thorough,as kids we used to crawl through the tunnels by the community center on the main street then we walked through Christie’s estate And through that tunnel up to Reynold’s field !!
NIce going ,Keith. Worth noting that HastingsOnHudson is laced with numerous brooks that are mostly underground. Next time anyone is out for a walk, just look and listen at the local sewer grate.
Great article Keith. I have such fond memories of Hastings and love discovering new facts
I remember this from before anything was built on the grocery store site as well as the stream behind the community center. We played there – and looked for bottles to cash in too.
Love this article of the under and over waterways of Hastings!
A very well done piece of research. I really enjoyed it as it told a lot about the Hastings on the river that attracted my grandfather, Fredrick W. Schaefer, to purchase a large lot at the top of Ravine Drive in 1929. He loved the outdoors, nature, and Hastings was of course on the water (he was a champion oarsman), so Hastings clearly offered all the right features.
When I was a kid (during the early 1940’s), every spring, I used to join him in clearing the underbrush and weeds from the “lot” in Hastings. The family was always going to build on that “lot” and look south to Manhattan from a high perch. Depression, WWII, and family relocations intervened. Early in the1960’s my grandfather died and we sold the property (now occupied by two houses), as we were “never” likely to live in Hastings. Well in 1969, with kids and seeking open space, the family moved to Hastings and now 50 years later, happy to view the Hudson from Circle Drive, we still pine for the big house never built atop Ravine Drive. As an aside, old timers might remember Mr. Kinnard (sp?), then an immediate neighbor on Ravine Dr. – he gave me, as a ten year old, an exotic French racing bike during one Spring clearing visit – I rode it until I left for college and never forgot that gentlemen.
There was another brook in the woods above to top end of Donald Drive, before the 1970s residential neighborhood was built on the eastward extension of that street. In the area with Hastings addresses, but in the Unincorporated Town of Greenburgh.
The open portion of the brook ended into a catch basin where Donald Drive ended, just east of Mendham Avenue. Then, it ran in a storm sewer, down the hill, and into the Saw Mill River.