Why Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve Merrick Uses Goats

"They're an eco-friendly alternative to lawn-mowing."

That line comes from Herald Community Newspapers, which quoted Town of Hempstead park ranger Phil Gold describing the herd of Nigerian dwarf goats that spends its mornings weaving through joggers at the Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve, the 52-acre hill locals call Merrick Mountain. It's a good line. It's also incomplete. The goats aren't at Levy Preserve because someone thought hoofed animals would look nice on a nature walk. They're there because the hill they're grazing on is a capped municipal landfill, and running mowing equipment or digging irrigation lines across that cap risks something a lot more serious than an uneven lawn.

Once you know that, almost everything else about the park starts to make sense: why it's the Sanitation Department that runs it instead of Parks and Recreation, why the rules only ever mentioned hiking, exercising, fishing, and canoeing or kayaking, and why it closed on its own separate timeline during Covid while the rest of Hempstead's parks stayed open. This is a post about goats and foxes and a pier, but the thread connecting all of it is what's buried underneath.

A Landfill With a Second Career

The site opened as a landfill in 1950 and stopped taking waste in 1984. For over a decade it sat capped and mostly forgotten, a 115-foot mound of trash between the Merrick Road Golf Course and the Meadowbrook Parkway. The Town of Hempstead dedicated it in June 1998 in honor of Norman J. Levy, the Merrick state senator who spent much of his career on environmental issues and died that same year. It opened to the public in October 2000.

The engineering behind the conversion gets less attention than the goats, but it's the more interesting part. According to the Town of Hempstead's own facilities page, the $15 million park plan came in well under the $57 million the state originally required for a standard landfill-capping closure, saving taxpayers more than $42 million. Getting there wasn't simple. A 2015 Herald Community Newspapers report quoted Paul Lappano, the environmental engineer who designed the preserve, calling methane gas one of the biggest hurdles the project had to solve. That's the same methane risk that rules out lawnmowers and sprinkler trenches decades later, and the same reason the site is officially classified as a "passive park," limited from day one to hiking, exercising, fishing, and canoeing or kayaking. Nothing that breaks ground. Nothing that disturbs the cap.

That classification also explains a wrinkle a lot of regulars never think about: the preserve answers to Hempstead's Department of Sanitation, not its Parks Department, because sanitation is the agency responsible for landfill closures. In March 2020, that jurisdictional split showed up in real time. According to Herald Community Newspapers, the Town closed Levy Preserve by order of the Department of Health while other Hempstead parks, run by Parks and Recreation, stayed open, a distinction the town's medical director attributed directly to crowd density on a site sanitation still maintains. A follow-up Herald Community Newspapers report said the preserve reopened that May with masking and distancing rules layered on top of the usual passive-park limits.

Here's a quick timeline of how a dump became a destination:

Merrick Mountain, By the Numbers That Don't Quite Agree

The hill's actual height depends on which piece of town literature you're reading. The 2000 dedication coverage described a "115-foot-tall former landfill," and a 2015 Herald piece repeated that figure almost word for word. The Town's current facilities page, by contrast, puts the preserve's highest point at 155 feet. Nobody re-measured the hill in between. It's just one of those small inconsistencies that never gets reconciled because nobody's filing a correction on a decades-old press release. Either way, it's the only real elevation change most people driving through the South Shore will ever get, and on a clear day the payoff is the Manhattan skyline, along with views of the Jones Beach Tower and Merrick Bay.

At the base of that view is a 500-foot fishing pier built from Cumaru, a dense Peruvian hardwood chosen for its resistance to splintering, running out into Merrick Bay. Just off it sits a kayak and canoe launch into the original Meadow Brook, one of the only spots in the immediate area where you can put a boat in the water without driving to Freeport or Wantagh first. There's also a windmill on the north side of the property, built to circulate water through two man-made ponds. Long-time visitors have noted for years, in reviews going back well over a decade, that the blades turn but the ponds don't always show it. Nobody at the Town has ever made a public issue of fixing it, and the goats and the foxes don't seem to mind either way.

Why the Goats Have Names and the Mowers Never Show Up

The Town bought its first five goats in 2009, and by 2017 the herd had grown to two dozen. A Herald Community Newspapers report described how attached the rangers had become to individual animals. Ranger Susan Nurmi had been walking the herd through the preserve twice a day since they arrived and could identify every one by name and personality. Ranger Scott Devine put it simply: you come to know all of their personalities. One goat, nicknamed Elvis, was bottle-fed by rangers after his mother rejected him at birth and reportedly still thinks he's human. Another, called Bashful, has Dalmatian-patterned fur and limps behind the herd because of arthritis.

Guinea fowl handle a second job at the preserve, patrolling the trails to keep the tick population down, since the same restrictions that rule out mowers also rule out most standard pest control. None of this is decorative. It's the maintenance plan for a piece of land that can't be dug into, sprayed, or mowed the way any other town park could be.

The Foxes Are Just Part of the Route Now

According to Herald Community Newspapers, a half-dozen or more red foxes have taken up residence in the thick underbrush that lines the trail. For people who walk or run there regularly, they've become part of the scenery rather than a novelty. Lori Belbol, a Merrick resident and English teacher who runs the preserve four times a week, said she's come to enjoy having them around, saying she's always looking for them now during her runs. She once spotted one standing in the middle of a busy stretch of path near the golf course while a mother with a stroller walked past without breaking stride.

That's the real difference between how a first-time visitor experiences Levy Preserve and how a regular does. Reviews written by out-of-towners tend to treat the goats and the wildlife as an attraction. People who actually live in Merrick treat them the way you'd treat a familiar dog on your block: worth a glance, not worth stopping for.

Getting There

The main trailhead sits at 1600 Merrick Road, with a small parking lot on site and some additional street parking nearby. Admission is free, there's no ticketed area anywhere on the property, and the Town's facilities page lists the gates opening at 7 a.m. daily year-round, with closing time shifting by season, so it's worth a quick check of the Town of Hempstead's park page before a late-day visit. The full loop runs close to 3 miles with exercise stations spaced along the way, more elevation change than almost anywhere else on this stretch of the South Shore, and an ending that still surprises people who've lived in Merrick their whole lives: a skyline view from the top of what used to be a garbage dump.

Knowing a place well enough to explain why its rules look the way they do, not just what the rules are, is the kind of thing that comes from paying attention to a neighborhood over years, not weeks. That's the same lens The Newsom Team brings to Merrick and the rest of Long Island, whether the conversation is about a Saturday morning at the preserve or a decision about where to buy next.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.