Drive down Merrick Road past the Meadowbrook Parkway and you'll catch it out of the corner of your eye: a chain-link fence, a hill that seems too tall for this flat stretch of the South Shore, and if you time it right, a small herd of goats grazing along the slope like they own the place. Most people who live in Merrick have passed this spot hundreds of times without stopping. Fewer know what's actually underneath their feet if they do.
That hill is Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve, and it is not a park that happens to sit near an old landfill. It is the landfill. Every feature that makes it charming, the goats, the windmill, the elevation you can't find anywhere else nearby, exists because Hempstead needed a cheaper way to permanently seal 34 years of buried trash, and someone figured out that a park could do the job better than a concrete cap ever could.
A $57 Million Problem With a $15 Million Answer
When the Merrick landfill closed, New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation required the town to cap and close the site, a standard engineering job that Hempstead was told would run about $57 million. The town went a different direction. It hired the engineering firm Lockwood, Kessler and Bartlett to design a park instead, using vegetation, grading, and a managed ecosystem to do the containment work that concrete usually does. The finished plan cost about $15 million.
| Cost | Required by | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard capping closure | $57 million | NYS Department of Environmental Conservation |
| Levy Park conversion | $15 million | Town of Hempstead |
That difference, more than $42 million, is why the park looks the way it does. Every design choice you notice on a walk through Levy Park is doing double duty as both a public amenity and a piece of environmental infrastructure sitting on top of decades of buried waste.
Why the Goats Can't Come Home With You
The goats are not there for you to pet, even though most visitors treat them that way. They're Nigerian Dwarf goats, and they've grazed the hillside for close to two decades, kept on staff specifically to eat back the weeds and brush that would otherwise overrun the capped slopes. A flock of guinea fowl works alongside them, deployed as a pesticide-free way to keep the tick population down on a site where spraying chemicals into a capped landfill carries obvious risk.
In 2023, the town added to the crew, introducing sheep named Socks and Boots along with goats Clay, Priscilla, Mia, Sweetie, and Latte at a news conference on the grounds. Town Supervisor Don Clavin was there to make the introductions.
"We've had Nigerian goats for a while, and people love them, they've adopted them."
That affection is real, and so is the job description. It's also the reason the park bans pets outright, not out of a general park-rules impulse, but because the entire vegetation-management system depends on a controlled grazing pattern that a loose dog would disrupt in about thirty seconds.
The Pier Had to Survive a Landfill Too
At the water's edge, the 500-foot fishing pier stretching into Merrick Bay is built from Cumaru, a dense hardwood harvested in South America that resists splintering and needs no chemical preservatives. That last detail matters more here than it would at an ordinary marina. A structure this size, anchored into reclaimed land, benefits from wood that won't need regular chemical treatment leaching into the same soil the town spent $15 million capping in the first place. The material choice is aesthetic in the same way the goats are decorative: convenient, but not the reason it was picked.
The Kayak Launch Only Works Twice a Day
Meadow Brook, the tidal creek that empties into Merrick Bay, runs a launch point where visitors can bring their own kayaks. It sounds like a simple amenity until you check the fine print: the brook is only safely navigable for about three hours on either side of high tide. Paddle outside that window and you're fighting exposed mud instead of water. The town posts tide tables in brochure boxes at the entrance and outside the ranger station for exactly this reason. It's a small logistical detail, but it's the kind of thing that separates a resident who's actually used the launch from someone who's only seen it from the trail.
What's Actually Worth Doing There This Fall
The preserve's highest point sits somewhere between 120 and 155 feet, depending on whether you trust the town's own facility page or the trail-tracking sites that measure it slightly lower. Either way, it's the tallest natural-feeling elevation on this stretch of the South Shore, topped with a windmill that aerates two man-made ponds and a sundial that most visitors stumble onto without expecting it.
A few things worth knowing before a fall visit:
- The park is open daily from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with the entrance gate closing 30 minutes before that.
- No pets are permitted, on a leash or otherwise, for the grazing reasons above.
- Fall is a strong window for birding. The marsh sections draw wading birds and waterfowl while the grassland stretches keep their songbirds and raptors, and the osprey nests on the platform poles are still active before the birds head south for the season.
- The kayak launch into Meadow Brook only works within roughly three hours of high tide, so check the posted tables before loading a boat.
- The climb to the summit is mostly paved and gentle, closer to a long ramp than a hike, but the payoff is a clear shot of the Manhattan skyline on a good day, along with views toward Jones Beach.
None of this requires a special occasion. It's the kind of place you fold into a Saturday morning the same way you'd swing by the farmers market or walk the dog somewhere else nearby, since the dog can't come here.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
Merrick spends real civic energy on a piece of land most towns would have quietly capped and fenced off. The goat-naming ceremony that brought out the town supervisor and the full board wasn't a one-off publicity stunt, it was the same instinct that chose a $15 million park over a $57 million concrete lid: a preference for spaces that keep doing something, rather than spaces that just sit there being contained.
That instinct is part of what makes Merrick feel the way it does day to day, and it's the same texture I try to capture whenever I write about this neighborhood, whether the subject is a park, a street fair, or the mechanics of a home sale. If you've lived here a while and are curious what a house near a piece of civic history like Levy Park is actually worth in today's market, Robyn Goldowski puts together an instant home valuation that takes the guesswork out of the first question most owners eventually ask.
