Volunteers clean up parkway woodlands

Chaz Murray, 54, grew up in Merrick bounding through the woods near his home. He became a Boy Scout and went on to camp in the wild. He moved away when he turned 24 and returned seven years ago. On Sunday, he said he was horrified to see the derelict state into which Merrick’s forests off the Meadowbrook Parkway have fallen.

Murray, a New York City paramedic, was one of 52 volunteers who came to the woods between Sunrise Highway and Meadowbrook Road in Merrick to clean up debris that had washed from farther north into the forest via the Meadow Brook or had been strewn there by vandals. He said he learned about the cleanup by reading the Merrick Herald Life.

“To see [the woods] in such bad shape is a shame,” said Murray, who attended the cleanup with his 8-year-old son, Aidan, who is a Cub Scout.

Merrick environmental activist Bob Young organized the two-hour, all-volunteer effort, which took place from 10 a.m. to noon. Young is working to revive a more than decade-long campaign to protect and preserve the fragile woodlands that line the Meadowbrook Parkway.

Young, who wants to see the forests preserved as a “passive recreation area,” is looking to form a nonprofit group, likely to be called the Friends of the Meadowbrook Parkway Woodlands, to lobby for the forests’ long-term preservation. He added that he would like to see a bicycling and walking path that would connect the Town of Hempstead’s Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve with the Meadowbrook woodlands to create one long “green corridor.”

Young said he saw Sunday’s cleanup as an important first step toward reviving the preservation campaign. “It was a great day for all of the volunteers and the preserves and the Meadowbrook Parkway corridor,” he said. “We accomplished our objective of revitalizing the Meadowbrook woodlands campaign.”

Historic woodlands threatened