Owl's Head Park

The site was settled first by the Canarsee people and then by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century. Henry C. Murphy acquired the property in 1856 and built an estate; the industrialist Eliphalet Williams Bliss expanded it, and after Bliss died in 1903 his will let the city acquire it cheaply. The city purchased it in 1928, the estate structures were gone by 1940, and waterfront portions were later lost to a wastewater treatment plant built in 1952.