Secret Passages

By Kyle Smith

Secret passages! They have always excited the imagination and sometimes they have affected history. Who hasn't dreamed of a secret passage from your house or room that only you knew about. Or who hasn't thought that the barely recognizable path you have taken wasn't known but to a select few.

At Thermopylae in the Greek-Persian Wars, that famous pass and its 1,400 defenders, to include the ever memorized 300 Spartans, was reduced by a turncoat leading the Persians to its summit from the rear. Using, of course, a secret path! Some historians have pointed to the wilderness as the penultimate battle of America's Civil War and it swung on a secret passage.

Whilst the battle unfolded in its two-day horror, with many units trained in what was Garden City (Camp Winfield Scott), the critical points arrived when Lee's trusted War Horse, General Longstreet, launched an attack on Grant's flank by utilizing a secret (at least to the Union commanders) unfinished railroad passage through the wilderness. The catacombs, too were, in part, secret passages and for the Warsaw uprising, the sewers served a similar purpose.

Less dramatic area Garden City's secret (or at least less well known) passages. There are several different types of these interspersed through the Village, such as driveways that seem to disappear but are, in reality, passages to flag properties off the actual street. (More on flag properties in a later column.)

Some are purely pedestrian and easy to miss. One of our parks is approachable by a secluded passage. This short footpath route is public and known to residents in local proximity to the park; however, I bet that the average driver goes past it without realizing its presence. It is even easy for a less than sharp-eyed walker to miss it.

One of the most seen but not seen "secret ways" provides pedestrian passage from one of the busiest roads in all of Garden City to a very secluded section of the village. A journey of several hundred feet takes one from hustle and bustle to quiet and calmness. It goes from a wide open area, very reminscent of the Hempstead Plains that Garden City once was, to a leafy residential hideaway area. It is a paved sidewalk, well maintained by the village and not really secret at all. Yet who among our readers can find it?

Any pedestrian could easily use it and yet almost none do. This is very interesting since the main road serves as one of the principal walking-around spots that the village has. Yet, most of the walkers and joggers using this major loop walk right past this "secret passage" without recognizing it. (Actually, isn't the best secret one that hides itself in plain sight!)