New Crawford Park Walking Trail

Town to Complete Crawford Park Walking Trail

Crawford Park is one of the largest public open spaces in Rye Town. The Park was the Crawford Family Estate and is named after Edna & Everett Crawford, who donated it to the Town of Rye upon her death in 1973. Today, the Park is a 36 acre pastoral setting with varied terrain, extensive woodlands, brooks, viewscapes, several ball fields, a handicapped assessable picnic pavilion complex, and the Crawford Mansion, which is a distinctive 20th century style house surrounded by mature landscape plantings and over 50,000 flowering spring annuals.

Surrounding the Park is a unique walking trail that is used daily by residents of the Town of Rye. The Town installed the trail so that it circles the perimeter of the Park. This work was paid for with State grant money at no cost to Rye Town taxpayers. The work began last year, and is expected to be completed this year for the enjoyment of all Town residents.

Visitors to the Park will observe that the trail has been beautified with daffodils, English Bluebells, and many other types of flowering shrubs from fragrant viburnum, summer sweet, blueberries and red twig dogwoods in wet areas. Canadian red buds and other flowering trees are set against stately evergreens such as spruce, fir and pine trees.

The planting at the Park has been generously assisted by the Friends of Crawford Park. This non-for-profit organization has been helpful over the years. One of their successful endeavors was the creation of the Sunken Garden located between the Mansion and the playground. This garden is the backdrop to many wedding pictures. The Friends are active making other contributions to the Park from tree plantings to the stonewall garden.  Rye Brook and Port Chester Youth Soccer Assisted.

The current youth soccer field located at Crawford Park will be completely upgraded in the fall of 2007. Part of the funding for the project was received as a $25,000 grant from Westchester County Legislator Martin Rogowsky. This grant was matched by the Town of Rye as part of its 2007 Budget. In meeting with Youth Soccer representatives, it was recommended that the work be performed at the end of the summer after the Youth Soccer season has concluded.