Adult fitness area and skate park coming to Seton Park

Seton Park has a playground, a basketball court, a soccer field, two soccer fields, and six tennis courts. Now an adult fitness area and skate park is coming. Construction started mid-September and is projected to finish by next September.

“We’re pleased to begin construction on upgrades that will bring a new skate park and adult fitness center to Seton Park,” stated NYC Parks Bronx Borough Commissioner Jessenia Aponte. “Our Parks capital projects continue to enhance essential recreational spaces in the Bronx to offer more amenities for the community.”

The construction will add new seating space, drainage and water supply systems, park security lighting, landscaping and federal Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility. The $4.59 million project was funded by Bronx borough president Vanessa Gibson, City Council, Mayor Eric Adam’s office and New York state. According to a September Community Board 8 Board meeting, the restroom in the area will be closed for approximately 12 to 24 months.

While construction has only recently begun, the project has been in the works since 2020. It was in the design phase from November 2020 to March 2022. Procurement began March 2022 and finished last June.

Katerine Borrome, director of capital projects in the Bronx and liaison to the project, told The Riverdale Press construction is moving steadily and is still anticipated to finish next fall. She said the adult fitness area would most likely include weight lifting and cardio machines, though she said she did not have the plans.

“There are many upgrades to the community,’ Borrome said. “We’re going to be upgrading the amenities available in that area currently. The fitness center, the skate park, were something advocated for by the community. We’re trying to fulfill that promise as much as possible.”

The new skate park offers a closer location for Riverdale residents who don’t live near Van Cortlandt Skatepark. Seton Park once had a request to transform its six tennis courts into pickleball courts, but was turned down because of the amount of tennis players who use it.

Seton Park is located between Palisade and Independence avenues and West 232nd and West 235th streets. The park was named in honor of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton who was born in 1774 and died in 1821.

The Staten Island born woman was a daughter to prominent physician Richard Bayley and was known to friends as Mother Seton. Her involvement with social work inspired her to found the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Children in 1797, according to a historical sign at the park.

Two years after her husband’s death, Seton converted from Episcopalian to Roman Catholic, a move that resulted in her being ostracized by her Protestant family and friends. She took her five children to Baltimore and opened a school for girls in 1808. She took her vows before Maryland’s Bishop Carroll, then formed the American Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, the first Roman Catholic religious order in the U.S. She is commemorated as the first native-born American saint of the Roman Catholic Church, beatified in 1963 and canonized in 1976. While Seton never moved back to New York, the Sisters of Charity opened the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum in New York City four years after she died.

Seton Park was not the only park or place to be named in her honor. Her grandparents’ estate in Edenwald Maryland was named Seton Falls in her honor. In addition Bayley Seton Hospital in Staten Island, Seton Falls Park and the Elizabeth Seton Campus of Iona College in the Bronx, Seton Hall University in New Jersey and Riverdale’s former Seton Hospital, which stood in Seton Park’s place, were all named in her honor.

Seton Hospital was left vacant for several years until the Department of Hospitals relinquished jurisdiction of the land to the Board of Estimate in 1958. It was then transferred to NYC Parks in 1959 and in the late 1960s the parks department came up with a plan for a substantial recreational facility on the property. The park finally opened in 1976.

The park has gone through a number of changes in the years since. In 1996, Councilwoman June Eisland funded more than $33,000 reconstruction of the fences and in 1998 Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided more than $31,000 to refurbish the sidewalks and pavement.

In April 2019, former Bronx Borough Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa joined then 11th district Councilman Andrew Cohen, CB8 Chair Rosemary Ginty, and present Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz in announcing a $1.9 million transformation of Seton Park’s ballfields.

There are currently eight skate parks in the Bronx and Seton Park will soon be the ninth.

For more information about the park’s history you can visit nycgovparks.org/parks/seton-park/history.