Untapped Mailbag: Staircase to Nowhere in Riverside Park, Harlem

We got a tip in the Untapped Mailbag about a “staircase that leads to nowhere” in Riverside Park so we went to check it out. “It’s located near a pair of train tracks,” the reader wrote, “On the other side, there’s a functioning staircase that connects Riverside Drive to the park, and when we went down to the water, we couldn’t believe how dirty the park was. There was tons of litter and trash everywhere, people grilling and setting up camp in tents. It was completely different from Riverside Park below 125th Street.”

Also nearby is the graffiti-hotspot the Freedom Tunnel, an active MTA railroad track that runs underneath Riverside Park opens out at the north end of the park. Read a follow-up mailbag, where a reader asked us what came first–the railroad tracks or the park?

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