Alley Pond Park Alley Pond Park This park is the second largest
in Queens. The site is named for The Alley, an 18th century
commercial and manufacturing center formerly located here. The
origin of that center’s name is the subject of some debate. One
theory is that “alley” refers to the shape of the glacier-made
valley. Another holds that colonial travelers, who passed
through the valley to Brooklyn, en route to the Manhattan
ferries, named it “the alley.” The well-traveled passage is
believed to have been the route George Washington (1732-1799)
took while touring Long Island in 1790. The park lies on a
glacier-formed moraine, a ridge of sand and rock that formed
15,000 years ago, marking the southern terminus of the Minnesota
Ice Sheet. The glacier dropped the boulders that sit on the
hillsides of the southern end of the park and left buried chunks
of ice that melted and formed the ponds dispersed throughout the
valley. Geologists call these “Kettle Ponds.” Fresh water drains
into the valley from the hills a