Barrett Park

Barrett Park is an 8-acre park in the West Brighton section of Staten Island's North Shore, best known as the home of the Staten Island Zoo. The park is named for Major Clarence Tynan Barrett (1840-1906), a Civil War officer, landscape architect, and prominent Staten Island civic leader who once operated a plant nursery on the site.

The land was the former estate of Colonel Edward Harden. After Harden's wife, Julia Harden, died in 1930, she willed the property to the City of New York on the conditions that it be named in honor of her brother-in-law, Major Clarence Barrett, and that it not be used as a playground. That bequest established the park that bears Barrett's name to this day.

The Staten Island Zoo opened on June 10, 1936, built during the Great Depression with the help of Civilian Conservation Corps labor. Officially recorded as Barrett Park in the city's planning documents, the site became popularly known as the Staten Island Zoo only in later decades. Former Governor Al Smith presided over the opening ceremonies.

The zoo has long been celebrated for its reptile collection. Its Serpentarium became nationally known as the only one in the country to exhibit all 32 species of rattlesnakes, a distinction tied to the work of longtime reptile curator Carl Kauffeld. Additions from the 1980s and 1990s, including an aquarium, an otter exhibit, a tropical forest, and an African savannah, broadened the collection well beyond its original focus.

Barrett Park gives the North Shore a compact green space organized around one of the city's six zoos, combining wildlife, education, and recreation on the grounds of a former Staten Island estate that a family bequest turned into a public institution.