Mike and his dog Duke were making their way through Brookdale Park when a stranger a few yards down the fitness loop caught Duke’s attention. The man was wearing a hat marking his service in Operation Iraqi Freedom. His name was Michael Jackson. Within a few minutes of small talk, Mike and Jackson realized they had something in common that neither of them could have guessed standing in a park on a Saturday morning.
It’s the kind of encounter that only happens because someone stopped to talk to a stranger in a park, and it’s what Farnoosh meant when she called it “kind of amazing” while introducing The Pod’s new series. Saturdays in the Park will walk through the more than dozen green spaces scattered across town, one at a time, looking at what’s there, who’s there and how each one got built. It starts at Brookdale, 121 acres split between Montclair and Bloomfield, where Mike has lived a block from the entrance for 17 years, long enough to teach his daughter Rea to ride a bike in the park.
What Duke Loved and What He Skipped
The dog park was one stop Duke skipped entirely that day. He’d had a bath that morning, and Mike wasn’t about to undo it. “It is a good place for people to take their dogs and let them be off leash in a completely controlled environment,” he said. “It’s not great for training, though. There’s a lot of distraction.” It opened in 2007, as one of the few off-leash areas in the entire Essex County park system, with separate fenced sections for large and small dogs.
Duke had better luck near the park’s wooded section, where a storm had brought down a tree that someone had already started picking apart for wood. Duke was obsessed with it. “They’ll probably be making some cool stuff out of this,” Mike guessed, giving Duke a few minutes before moving on.
A Bent Bar That Was Never Fixed
Elsewhere on the walk, one landmark stops people cold. Brookdale’s fitness course runs 18 stations along the mile and a half perimeter loop, pull-up bars, balance beams, ab stations, the kind of amenity that becomes invisible through familiarity until something forces a second look. One of the bars near the loop is bent. “Several years ago some kids were driving way too fast and crashed into this tree, I believe,” Mike said, pointing it out. “This was bent and they’ve left it the same.”
On January 15, 2023, a single car crash on the downhill bend of West Circuit Drive killed 16-year-old Nathan Latifi, a Glen Ridge High School junior. Three other minors in the car were hurt. The bar has never been replaced. Circuit Drive, which runs alongside the fitness path, used to be one continuous loop; Mike’s uncle Walter remembers bike races there before late-night car racing made the old configuration dangerous enough for the county to split it into one-way northbound and southbound lanes.
The Coincidence
Not everything on this walk carries weight of that kind, some of it is simply strange in a good way. Jackson wanted to say hi to Duke first; Mike wanted to say hi to Jackson, whose hat gave away his service before either of them said a word. They started talking, and the ship came up almost by accident. Mike had toured that carrier years earlier as a kid, brought aboard by an uncle who served as an officer on it. He’s held onto a flag from that same ship since his bar mitzvah. Of every vessel in the Navy, it was that one.
Jackson walks the loop every day now. “Every day above ground is a good day,” he said. He started walking after surviving six strokes, and he hasn’t stopped since.
From the Courts to the Rose Garden
The tennis and pickleball courts, run by Elite Tennis Academy since 1982, are one of the livelier corners of the park. A 2019 renovation added eight dedicated pickleball courts, the first in the Essex County park system, and on a Saturday morning the sound of it carries across half the park.
From the courts, the path opens toward the Rose Garden, added in 1959 to dress up a flagpole that was otherwise just standing there on its own. It was never part of the park’s original design. Today it holds 29 beds and 1,500 bushes across nearly 100 varieties, maintained by Essex County Master Gardeners since 1997. June and September are peak bloom.
How Brookdale Came to Be
None of this existed a hundred years ago. Before Dutch settlers arrived in the late 1600s and named the land Stonehouse Plains, it belonged to the Lenape, who used it for planting and seasonal gathering. The name changed again in the late 1800s when the area got its own post office and Stonehouse Plains proved too long for a return address. Essex County began buying the land in 1928 and had assembled all 121 acres by 1931, hiring the Olmsted Brothers firm, run by Frederick Law Olmsted’s sons, to design it. Construction slowed when the Depression hit, and the Works Progress Administration, the federal jobs program that put Americans to work building public infrastructure during the 1930s, eventually provided most of the labor and funding to finish the job. The park opened in December 1936. A planned dancing pavilion was never built.
What all that work produced is still visible today. In the park’s northwest corner, the Bloomfield Archers have run Sunday shoots open to the public since the 1930s. A permanent bandstand hosts free concerts all summer, plus Fourth of July fireworks and a rotating calendar of craft fairs. The park also holds four baseball diamonds and a large meadow used for youth and adult soccer year round.
Plan Your Visit
Brookdale is accessible off Watchung Avenue, Grove Street and Bellevue Avenue, from either the Montclair or the Bloomfield side. Court reservations for pickleball and tennis run through Elite Tennis Academy. Everything else, the fitness loop, the dog park, the walking paths, the rose garden, is open daily with no reservation required.
Saturdays in the Park continues over the course of a year, one green space at a time. Follow the Montclair Pod to get the next installment as soon as it’s out, and if you’ve got a park story of your own, chance encounter or otherwise, send it to hello@montclairpod.com. It might end up in a future piece.
Image credit: Essex County Parks
