Powell's Cove Park

11 Ave. bet. 130 St., Powell's Cove Blvd. and 138 Pl., 9 Ave.

Queens, 11356, 11357

This text is part of Parks’ Historical Signs Project and can be found posted within the park.

Powell’s Cove, an environmental waterfront park completed in 1999, is a bay with sizable wetlands and filled, undeveloped uplands in the College Point section of Queens. Probably named for the Powell family, who owned land in the vicinity as late as 1873, this parkland was envisaged as a waterfront park to protect tidal wetlands and the natural environment of the marshland region.

College Point, originally the Tues Neck territory of the Matinecoc tribe, was first acquired by English settlers in the 1640s. The area remained the preserve of large landowners, and in 1838 Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg, rector of St. George Episcopal Church in Flushing, founded St. Paul’s College in the area. In the 1850s a German immigrant named Conrad Poppenhusen (1818-1883) arrived in College Point and changed the face of the neighborhood with his introduction of a rubber factory.