Valley Stream State Park is a day-use facility, convenient to the Southern State Parkway (exit 15A). The park offers a nature trail, cross-country skiing, a playground and playing fields, horseshoe, volleyball, basketball, and bocce ball courts, picnic tables and pavilions, fireplaces and grills, and recreation programs. Pets are not permitted.[2]
This park opened in 1928 together with Southern State Parkway, Hempstead Lake State Park, Belmont Lake State Park, and Heckscher State Park. Initially the park included Cornell's Pond, which had a freshwater beach that charged an admission fee of 10 cents. Crowded and unsanitary conditions led local residents to lobby for its closing in 1947. In 1958, the state to transferred the park's southern portion with this pond to the Village of Valley Stream. It reopened as the village-operated Arthur J. Hendrickson Park.[3]
^"Section O: Environmental Conservation and Recreation, Table O-9". 2014 New York State Statistical Yearbook(PDF). The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. 2014. p. 674. Archived from the original(PDF) on September 16, 2015. Retrieved April 2, 2016.