1898

1898 is the year Jorgen Knudsen identifies as the beginning of the park’s planned transformation in Queens: land was purchased and design work began. In his account, the date marks a meeting point between urban development and the older, wooded terrain that remains important to the story’s hidden history.

The park takes shape

Jorgen places the purchase in a landscape that had been farmland, with thousands of acres of forest and open ground. By 1898, the land for the park as it existed in his time had been bought, and plans for it were under way, including golf courses and hiking paths. The change was not simply from countryside to city; the new park preserved a varied, hilly terrain within the developing borough.

Development and concealment

The park’s designed paths and recreational spaces did not eliminate its less accessible features. Jorgen stresses that the country remained hilly, with pockets and caves where something large could hide. That contrast gives 1898 its particular narrative importance: the date signals organized human alteration of the land, while the landscape’s folds continue to offer shelter to the supernatural creature in Jorgen’s account. The park’s development therefore makes the terrain more legible and usable without making it entirely knowable or safe.

A date within layered histories

Jorgen’s reference to 1898 sits within a much longer chronology. He first describes a glacier that covered the future New York City area for thousands of years, then recounts the arrival of Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter in Queens after their voyage from Norway. The land later acquired for the park was, in his telling, a place where the troll could settle because forests and mountains were its natural habitat. The year thus links geological change and immigration to the later remaking of the landscape, rather than standing as an isolated civic milestone.

Elsewhere, Apollo’s reflections on Jamaica give this kind of local history a broader form: the modern station, remembered older platforms, Indigenous trails, and traces of still earlier landscapes coexist as successive versions of one place. Against that layered account, 1898 is a marker of revision, not a clean break. Park planning changed how people used the land, but the older terrain—and the history Jorgen associates with it—remained present beneath the designed surface.