Joseph Rodman Drake Park

Joseph Rodman Drake Park is a 2.6-acre park in Hunts Point containing a historic cemetery and memorial to the poet Joseph Rodman Drake, a Romantic-era American writer who died of tuberculosis at age 25 in 1820. Drake's most famous poem, 'The Culprit Fay,' was a pioneering work of American fantasy literature.

The Drake Cemetery within the park is one of the oldest burial grounds in the Bronx, containing the graves of Drake and members of the Hunt and Leggett families who owned the land that gave the Hunts Point neighborhood its name. The cemetery's headstones date to the 18th and 19th centuries.

Drake lived in a Bronx farmhouse near this site and was buried here after his early death. His friend Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote a famous elegy for Drake that became one of the most quoted poems in 19th-century America. The cemetery's preservation within a public park ensures that Drake's grave remains accessible to visitors.

The park features a playground and recreation areas alongside the cemetery grounds. The juxtaposition of an active playground with a historic burial ground creates an unusual but characteristically New York combination of past and present in a single public space.

Joseph Rodman Drake Park connects the industrial neighborhood of Hunts Point to its pastoral past, when the area was a country retreat of farms, estates, and poets rather than the food distribution center it has become. Drake's grave is a reminder that even the most heavily industrialized neighborhoods contain layers of history beneath their modern surface.