A whistleblower says Staten Island families have been boating and fishing through raw sewage at Clove Lake Park for more than two decades, with city and state officials fully aware.
The source, described as well-placed, told The Post that a broken sewer line from The Stone House, a wedding venue and steakhouse inside the 198-acre park, has been dumping human waste into the lake since before the current vendor took over in 2014. A city dye test performed Tuesday finally confirmed the contamination, sending glowing green and red chemicals straight into the water from the restaurant’s toilets and the connected sewer main.
Both dyes surfaced in the lake, indicating the sewer had collapsed at multiple points, the source explained. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation confirmed to The Post that it is investigating “a potential sewage discharge into Clove Lakes Park,” though a spokesperson noted the agency does not comment on pending investigations. The city Department of Environmental Protection, which conducted the test, said lake management falls under the city Parks Department and declared the pollution matter a state issue.
“I don’t know how the bosses can sleep at night, knowing that kids are fishing and families are rowing boats through sewage,” the whistleblower said.
The restaurant building is city-owned but operated by a private vendor. The Stone House’s 2022 licensing agreement with the city required $200,000 for repairs to “drainage structures, plumbing and utilities,” and mandated that “two failing manholes” be fixed within the first year, according to documents reviewed by The Post. An amendment signed this July by the vendor and a Parks Department official acknowledged that both parties were aware “a sewer line collapsed.”
The source said the broken line was an “open secret” for years, with the vendor paying dramatically reduced rent in exchange for covering the repair work. The same source alleged that former Staten Island Parks Department Borough Chief Lynda Ricciardone and her deputy-turned-successor Joseph Homsey knew about the toxic conditions but failed to act.
“The people at Parks should be embarrassed that the sewage spill is happening a stone’s throw away from their borough headquarters,” the source added.
A plumber who worked at the restaurant twenty years ago, before the current operators, said the pipes were chronically problematic. “They had lots and lots of stoppages, every time you turned around they were calling, their dishwasher was always stopping up, our snakes would pull up mud, we didn’t know where it came from,” the plumber recalled.
The restaurant allegedly continued renting paddle boats to unsuspecting visitors throughout the contamination. The source claimed fixing the lake would likely require completely draining it unless a dam could be constructed.
Neither the DEC nor the DEP provided test results for fecal coliform in the lake, and it remains unclear whether bacteria testing for human waste has ever been conducted. The DEC’s public water quality portal contains no data for the site.
This marks the second sewage-related incident at the park in recent months. City Parks Department toilets were previously found to have polluted a creek there during an earlier dye test that left the water glowing radioactive green, reports said in March.
The vendor, Homsey, Ricciardone and the Parks Department did not respond to requests for comment.