Mill Rock Park

Mill Rock Park is a quiet, uninhabited island sitting about one thousand feet off the shoreline of East Ninety-sixth Street. While it appears as a single patch of green today, it was originally two separate rocky outcrops known as Great Mill Rock and Little Mill Rock. In the early eighteenth century, a man named John Marsh constructed a tidal mill on the larger rock, an endeavor that provided the name still used for the island today. Although it now serves as a serene bird sanctuary, the site spent centuries as a volatile, human-occupied outpost caught between the currents of the East River.