Wednesday mornings at Christopher Morley Park still start the same way they have for close to two decades. Vendor trucks pull into the lot off Searingtown Road before seven, tables go up, and by eight the smell of fresh bread and roasted coffee is competing with whatever's growing at the produce stands. Dog owners cut through on their way to the run at the north end of the lot, the way they have for years. None of that changed in 2026.
What changed is what's on either side of that familiar walk. Past the dog run, a cabin that's been locked more often than not for most of the last decade had its door propped open again this summer, staffed, with a schedule of free programs. Across the park, in the shell of a skating rink nobody had used in years, four glass-walled courts appeared and started running games most of the neighborhood had never heard of a season earlier.
Neither of these is a new building. That's the actual story. Christopher Morley Park didn't get bigger this year. It got two dead corners put back to work, and the way each one happened says something different about how this park keeps functioning at 98 acres without ever really expanding.
The Rink That Used to Just Sit There
The old outdoor skating rink at Christopher Morley Park had been sitting empty long enough that most regulars stopped noticing it. Long Island Press reported that Roslyn Padel opened a four court pop-up inside that shell on June 28, 2026, introducing padel, the fast-growing racquet sport that blends tennis footwork with squash-style wall play, to a part of Long Island that had no dedicated courts for it before.
This isn't a permanent installation. It's a bridge. Roslyn Padel's real project is a 40,000 square foot indoor club going up on an adjacent site, with 10 courts under 34 foot ceilings, plus a sauna, cold plunge, yoga studio and cafe, targeted for a fall 2027 opening. Construction on that building was expected to begin later in the summer of 2026, and the outdoor pop-up in the old rink is meant to hold the community's attention until it's ready. Those four courts are expected to stay open through mid-October, weather permitting, according to reporting from Long Island Press, and may return again next summer if construction runs longer than planned.
As Long Island Press reported, managing partner Scott Johns pointed to geography as the reason the club chose this particular park over anywhere else on the North Shore.
"Roslyn is kind of central to the Gold Coast of Long Island."
The same report also quoted partner Seth Kislin, who framed the pop-up less as a business test and more as a way of building interest before the real investment lands.
"We really wanted to get everyone excited about the sport and the community before we build the main facility."
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and Legislator Mazi Pilip both played on the courts on opening day, and the grand opening pulled a crowd Long Island Press put at 250 to 300 people, more foot traffic through that corner of the park than the old rink had probably seen in years. Court time runs a flat $160 an hour with no peak pricing, open play sessions are $65 for 90 minutes, and clinics are $60 a session, with membership discounts available for anyone who wants to make it a regular habit through the fall.
The Cabin Behind the Dog Run
The other reopening has been more than ninety years in the making. The Knothole is a one-room pine cabin that writer and editor Christopher Morley built with his own hands in 1934 on his Roslyn Estates property, which he called Green Escape. He needed somewhere to work once his family had grown to four children, and the cabin held built-in bookshelves, a fireplace, a bunkbed, and eventually a bathroom that became more famous than the rest of the building combined: a one-piece prefabricated unit designed in 1936 by Morley's friend Buckminster Fuller, known ever since as the "dymaxion" bathroom.
After Morley's death in 1957, his house faced demolition, and a group of friends and neighbors formed the Christopher Morley Knothole Association to save the cabin itself. They arranged to have it moved to what's now Christopher Morley Park in 1966, dedicated the following year, and renovated it in 2006 with new siding, roofing, and a handicapped accessible ramp. Since then it's mostly sat by the dog run, open occasionally for public programs and closed the rest of the time.
That changed on June 7, 2026, when the Knothole reopened with a ribbon cutting and a full slate of free summer programs, as reported by Long Island Press. The Association built the schedule around Morley's actual life and friendships rather than generic historic house tours. On June 21, visitors got free seeds and starter soil tied to "Christopher Morley's Vegetable Garden." On July 12, a program built around Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which Morley edited in both 1937 and 1948, paired his favorite quotes with free artwork. July 26 brought a geodesic dome building session using marshmallows and toothpicks, a nod to Fuller's influence on the cabin's design. August 9 was Sherlock Holmes Day, with lessons in observation and secret writing, and August 23 closed the summer out with Poetry Day, featuring readings of Morley's own work alongside a chance for visitors to write their own.
The Association has said it plans to keep staffing the cabin on open dates going forward, which is the part that matters more than any single event on the calendar. For most of the last several years, the Knothole's most reliable audience was whoever happened to be reading the sign outside it while their dog sniffed the fence line. That's no longer the default.
Same Park, Two Different Kinds of Idle Space
| What changed | Where in the park | 2026 status |
|---|---|---|
| Padel courts | Former outdoor skating rink | Open through mid-October, weather permitting; permanent 40,000 sq ft indoor club planned adjacent, targeting fall 2027 |
| The Knothole | By the dog run, north lot | Reopened June 7; free programs ran through August; Association plans continued staffed open dates |
| Wednesday market | Main parking lot | Runs 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays, beginning June 3, 2026 |
The market is the constant that makes the other two changes legible. It's run by the Long Island Growers Market, founded by Ethel Terry, whose family farm in Orient Point dates back more than 400 years, alongside Ellen Rossi. Last year's season marked the market's 18th year at this location, which puts the current run in its 19th, all of it operating under a standing contract between the group and Nassau County. Terry has said the choice of Wednesday, an unconventional market day, was deliberate. In its report, Long Island Press quoted her saying:
"Markets only thrive if you don't overload them with too many vendors selling the same thing."
That's the same logic, in a way, behind what happened with the rink and the cabin this year. Nassau County didn't add acreage to Christopher Morley Park, and neither the padel club nor the Knothole Association needed it to. They took two pieces of already-owned ground that had gone quiet, one a defunct rink, one a locked writer's studio, and put a use back into each of them without touching the other 90-odd acres that were already working fine. If you've lived near this park long enough to have a favorite market vendor, this is the year the two corners you'd stopped looking at started giving you a reason to look again.
Christopher Morley Park sits at 500 Searingtown Road in Roslyn, just off Exit 36 of the Long Island Expressway, technically inside the Village of North Hills but close enough to East Hills and Roslyn that it functions as the default county park for both. The dog run is open year round. The trails, about 30 acres of them, aren't going anywhere. What's different this year is that two of the park's oldest structures finally have something happening inside them again.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like East Hills actually offers day to day, beyond the school district and the drive time, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. The Farber Locke Team spends as much time tracking what's actually changing on the ground in these towns as we do tracking comparable sales, because the two aren't as separate as they look on paper. If you're curious what else is shifting in East Hills or the surrounding North Shore towns, reach out and we'll walk you through it.
