If you have lived in Little Neck for more than a few years, you probably think you know Udalls Cove. You have walked the path off Little Neck Parkway, maybe watched an osprey work the shallows near Aurora Pond, maybe cut through the Ravine on your way to the train. What you may not know is that the cove's trail system has never actually been finished. Parts of it are still being built right now, by teenagers, and the piece that would finally close the gap is scheduled to go in sometime in 2026.
That is not a metaphor about neighborhood change. It is a literal, ongoing construction project, tracked in linear feet, phase by phase, by a volunteer group that has been at this since 1969.
What you can already walk
The existing network is bigger than most residents realize, and it is entirely free and open right now. From the Little Neck side, the main entry points are:
- Virginia Point, reached from the northern end of Little Neck Parkway or from the intersection of Little Neck Parkway and 34th Avenue, where the White and Red Trails wind through wooded upland out to the salt marsh, with views across the cove and a scattering of old wooden pilings, remnants of the marinas that operated here until the 1960s.
- Aurora Pond Trail, just north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks, with entrances on Sandhill Road (known locally as the Back Road) and off Little Neck Road, also called 38th Drive.
- North Ravine Trail, which connects Douglaston and Little Neck. On the Little Neck side it begins at 40th Avenue and 247th Street, then crosses Gabler's Creek just before the creek disappears into a cobblestone-lined culvert under the railroad tracks, a structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
- South Ravine Trail, accessible off Northern Boulevard between the TD Bank and the 7-Eleven, opposite St. Anastasia's Church, continuing north to 244th Street and Church Street beside the Douglaston Firehouse.
Separately, and often confused with the cove trails, Joe Michael's Mile runs along Little Neck Bay itself, connecting into the Cross Island Parkway Greenway for a waterfront walk of roughly two and a half miles each way between Northern Boulevard and Fort Totten. It is a different path with a different feel, more exercise loop than nature preserve, but it is the other half of what makes this stretch of the neighborhood genuinely walkable to the water.
All of this sits inside a preserve that stretches more than a mile across the Queens and Nassau county line, through marsh, pond, and wooded ravine, home to egrets, herons, muskrat, and the occasional coyote. None of it required a car to reach if you already live in Little Neck.
The half-mile that's still under construction
What is new, and what most longtime residents have not caught up on, is what has been happening on the Nassau County side since the spring of 2024.
The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee, the same volunteer group that has managed this preserve for more than fifty years, proposed a walking trail along the edge of the Udalls Cove marsh to the leadership of the Village of Great Neck Estates. The idea was to link the southeastern end of Mirrielees Circle all the way to the Udalls Cove shoreline, passing through two existing park parcels, Pond Park near Laurel Drive and a smaller park at the foot of Juniper Drive. The Village Board of Trustees approved it that spring, and instead of hiring a contractor, the committee turned to Eagle Scout candidates from Troop 71, working under its supervision one project at a time.
The first phase went in that December. Eagle Scout Nick Tonorezos built roughly 600 feet of new trail at the southeastern end of Mirrielees Circle. By the following spring, two more Scouts had picked up where he left off: Chris Katsoulis added another 400 feet parallel to the circle along with a wooden footbridge over a stream, and Nic Katsoulis extended the path another 400 feet from Pond Park toward Pine Drive, adding wooden stairs on two steep sections and stabilizing the trail bed near the pond. By fall of 2025, a fourth Scout, Max Tonorezos, had pushed the trail another 400-plus feet from Pine Drive toward Juniper Drive and installed a split-rail fence along a stretch that runs close to a private residence.
Four phases, four different teenagers, one continuous stretch of trail. Together they add up to close to 2,000 linear feet built in under a year, all of it under the guidance of Walter Mugdan, the committee's current president and a former deputy regional administrator with the EPA's Region 2 office.
One phase remains. The final segment, expected to run roughly 700 feet from Pine Drive down to the foot of Laurel Drive, is what actually finishes the job. Village project documents describe it as the piece that will finally give Mirrielees Circle an unbroken connection to the Udalls Cove shoreline trail, bringing the whole route to about three-fifths of a mile end to end. It is currently on the calendar for 2026.
Why this took sixty years
None of this should feel rushed, because almost nothing about Udalls Cove has moved quickly. The preservation committee exists because during the 1950s and 1960s, as houses filled in around the cove, the Village of Great Neck Estates drew up plans to fill the remaining wetlands for a golf course.
A Douglaston resident named Aurora Gareiss, whose own home looked out on the cove, decided that was not going to happen. In late 1969 she founded the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee with a handful of neighbors. On the first Earth Day, in April 1970, a group from Douglaston, Little Neck, and Great Neck gathered at the Back Road behind the Little Neck train station and committed to saving what was left of the watershed. New York City designated the corridor north of the railroad as Udalls Cove Park and Preserve in 1972. The Ravine section, the narrower stretch between the railroad and Northern Boulevard, was not added until six years after that. Some of the land inside the preserve's official boundary is still privately held today, more than fifty years later.
That history matters here because it explains the pace. This has never been a single grant-funded build. It has been a decades-long accumulation of small wins, one parcel and one Scout project at a time, and the Mirrielees Circle Trail is simply the latest chapter of a pattern that goes back to the 1970s.
What actually changes this year
The village has not been quiet about the work either. At a Great Neck Estates board meeting in January 2026, Environmental Committee member Matt Klein gave an update that made clear this is still active, not finished business.
"Trails are continuing to be improved upon, most recently at Udall's Cove Park Preserve."
Klein noted the village is currently adding railing to make the existing trails more accessible, and that the committee is working with ReWild Long Island on native plantings along the corridor. That is separate from the Scout-built segments, but it tells you the same volunteer-and-village partnership that built the trail is now maintaining and improving it, which is not always true of amenities like this once the ribbon-cutting happens.
When the fifth phase goes in, whenever in 2026 that turns out to be, it will be the first time in the preserve's history that someone could walk from Mirrielees Circle straight down to the Udalls Cove shoreline without leaving the trail system. That is a small thing to most people passing through. To anyone who has tried to piece together this walk from memory over the past year, watching the segments appear one at a time, it is the moment fifty-plus years of incremental work actually resolves into a single finished route.
Walking it this fall
None of the existing trails require planning beyond good shoes and, depending on the season, insect repellent near the marsh sections. The Virginia Point and Aurora Pond trails are flat and short enough for an easy loop with a dog. The North and South Ravine trails have more grade and tree cover, which makes them the better pick on a hot September afternoon. If you want the full waterfront stretch, Joe Michael's Mile is the one to bring a bike for.
A lot of residents treat this as a pre-dinner walk before heading to Northern Boulevard. Il Toscano, a Northern Italian spot that has been serving the neighborhood for close to three decades, sits close enough to the South Ravine entrance that it works as a natural stop before or after. However you route it, the point stands: this is not a finished museum piece of a park. It is a living project with a construction schedule, run by people who live here, and the last piece of it is due this year.
If you are weighing what a neighborhood like this is actually worth, beyond the numbers on a listing, this is the kind of detail that tends to matter more over time than square footage. A place where volunteers have spent fifty years fighting to keep a marsh from becoming a parking lot, and where the newest chapter of that fight is being built by local teenagers a few hundred feet at a time, tells you something about how residents here feel about where they live.
If you are thinking about buying, selling, or just want a clearer read on what a specific block or block group in Little Neck is actually worth this fall, Amy Liu offers a free home valuation and staging consultation, built on the same kind of block-by-block local knowledge that goes into a piece like this one.
