Seven Gables Playground

210 St., Oceania St. bet. the Long Island Exwy. and 64 Ave.

Queens

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

American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is the namesake of nearby J.H.S. 74, so Parks named this playground after one of his best known books. Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, just one year after The Scarlet Letter. The author notes in a short preface to the novel that it is “a romance.” Hawthorne wishes his readers to dispense with the constraints of realism so that he might employ the fantastic and the improbable to address abstract truths about human existence. The relationship between the past and the present is a central concern in Seven Gables as Hawthorne relates the unusual history of one house and its inhabitants.

Park Information

Lost and Found Information

Directions to Seven Gables Playground