Though the park is about 900 feet from the riverfront, it was at the water’s edge in the 19th century, when the great civil engineer John B. Jervis set out to find the straightest and most level route between the railroad’s terminus in Lower Manhattan and the town of Greenbush, across the Hudson from Albany.

At that time, the edges of Manhattan were pockmarked with bays, inlets and coves. Tracks could not be made to bend at each and every dimple, so Mr. Jervis had to conquer nature where he could. The 63rd Street lagoon was one such place.

In October 1851, the first passenger train ran to Greenbush.

“On, on the iron horse sped,” The New-York Daily Times reported in its first month of publication, “now winding around the rocky base of some rugged hill, then breaking the stillness of the quiet vale — now following the shore of the noble stream, and again, rushing over its late domain, upon the narrow causeway which had subverted its long maintained supremacy.”

By “sped,” The Times meant 40 miles an hour.

The line made passenger travel faster and more reliable. It also spurred the “intensive commercialization and industrialization of the river corridor on the West Side,” Carl W. Condit wrote in his magisterial history, “The Port of New York.”