To everyone who made our 2025 year possible - you deserve a big thank you!

Friends of McGolrick added more pickers and new buckets to help our 111 volunteers during our monthly park cleanups.  Together, this year, we removed 360 pounds of trash from McGolrick. Thanks to the DSNY Sanitation Foundation, we won a NYC Trash Academy grant that provided our park with much-needed supplies, including a first-aid kit, trash bags and new garbage pickers.

During nine plein air sessions, our local neighbors got creative with new sketchbooks, conte pencils, pastels, and other supplies purchased this year through a NYC Green Fund Grassroots Grant.

We invested $1,000 in additional Nikon Prostaff binoculars for participants to use during the year-round weekly bird walks. 

This fall, we launched a new McGolrick Meditations series, building on a previous Shirin-yoku forest-bathing nature walk we held last year.  Led by a longtime Greenpointer, these guided meditation sessions took advantage of the early-morning calm in McGolrick.  Our participants also used meditation journals, pencils, and watercolors provided by Friends of McGolrick.

Almost 200 neighbors joined five Nature Walks this year.  We welcomed back educator Jay Holmes from the American Museum of Natural History to talk about bees and other pollinators, Birder Loyan Beausoleil from Local Nature Lab for a family-friendly bird walk and NYC Parks Arborist John Kilcullen for our first nighttime Cold Moon tree walk.  Whitney Lewis from Bartlett Tree Experts also gave an arborist walk and provided 500 free trees to our neighbors. Lastly, women-owned gardening firm Our Temenos helped the community better understand composting.

We celebrated Earth Day with local partners from the Greenpoint Public Library, NBK Compost, Big Reuse, Meeker Ave CAG, and Councilmember Lincoln Restler.  The lineup included a bird walk, art club plein air session, City Nature Challenge spot-that-species bingo, park cleanup, storytime, yarn circle, kids clothing swap, bilingual English-Polish Earth Day walk, and more.

Our first International Children’s Day event was a huge hit.  We celebrated children in our community with free art sessions, Spanish and English storytime, soccer, a multilingual English-Polish-French sing-along, journaling, a park cleanup and a book swap.  A huge thanks to our partners: Artudio, Stay Small Art Club, author Erica Marcano, Williamsburg Soccer Club, Ana Hawkins, Poet Carson Jordan and DD Duet who helped make this inclusive, free celebration possible.

The Third Annual McGhoulrick Halloween was full of playful frights, community fun, and Halloween magic with enchanting decor created by Greenpoint Art Circle.  There were treat giveaways by Maison Jar and Friends of McGolrick, tarot by Mack Huenke, a dance party with The Dance Space, D&D with Last Place on Earth, skateboarding with Broken Bones Skate Club, art with Artudio and storytimes with the Greenpoint Public Library, and author Erica Marcano made for a spooktackular day of fun for trick-or-treaters of all ages. We also activated a ton of new volunteers, excited to help out! 

A dedicated team of volunteers took care of the McGolrick Bird Garden, making sure it was watered, weeded, and looked after.  300 new plants were added thanks to generous donations from the NYC Parks Department and Lentol Garden.  We also expanded into another bird-favorite garden near the center of the park, lovingly nicknamed the “Magic Bushes”.  Thank you to the NYC Parks Department for helping install 100 feet of fencing we purchased this year to protect the space.

Our neighbors added 500 new daffodils to the lawns of McGolrick during fall planting sessions. These will complement those planted in previous years when they bloom next Spring.