The Larchmont Reservoir Trail Quietly Crosses Into Two Other Towns

Start at the Pine Brook Tennis Courts on a Saturday morning in October, follow the kiosk sign that says "Upper Trail," and climb past the courts into the woods. You're still in Larchmont for about a hundred yards. Then you're not, and nothing on the trail tells you that.

The Larchmont Reservoir, or more precisely the James G. Johnson Jr. Conservancy, is one of those places residents drive past on Weaver Street or Pine Brook Boulevard for years without registering what it actually is. It looks like a single 60-acre patch of woods and water that belongs to the Village. The trail markers are consistent. The paths connect. There is no fence, no sign, nothing that visually announces a border. But the property spans the Town of Mamaroneck and the City of New Rochelle, even though the Village of Larchmont owns it, and the way that arrangement came about is a better story than most people walking it realize.

One Village Owns It, Another Town Runs It

The Village of Larchmont owns the entire 60-acre conservancy. That part is straightforward. What's less obvious is that only 12.76 acres of it physically sit within the Town of Mamaroneck. The rest of the property, the bulk of the acreage, is inside the City of New Rochelle. Day to day maintenance, the actual work of keeping trails passable and buildings standing, falls to the Town of Mamaroneck, operating under the Village of Larchmont's supervision and in cooperation with New Rochelle.

That arrangement explains a few things a regular walker might notice without ever connecting the dots. It explains why the trail signage feels sparser once you cross past the dam. It explains why a property inside Larchmont's own park literature reads differently from Flint Park or Constitution Park, both of which the Village runs directly through its own Recreation Department. The reservoir isn't really a Village park in the way those are. It's a jointly managed conservation area that happens to carry Larchmont's name because Larchmont holds the deed.

None of this makes the place harder to enjoy. The property is open daily from dawn to dusk, same as any other trail system, and nobody is checking passports at the municipal line. But it means the reservoir behaves more like a regional resource than a neighborhood amenity, which is closer to what it was always meant to be.

From Drinking Water to Wildlife Sanctuary

The reservoir did real utility work for most of its history. It supplied Larchmont's drinking water until 1975, when the Village found it cheaper to connect into New York City's Aqueduct system, drawing from a blend of the Catskill and Delaware watersheds instead. Once the water stopped flowing to household taps, the property's original purpose disappeared almost overnight.

For a while it functioned mainly as flood control. The Village, with the reservoir physically detached from the rest of Larchmont and no longer serving its original function, considered selling the land. Walkers and birdwatchers kept using it anyway, informally, even after it stopped being a working utility site.

James G. Johnson Jr., an environmental activist who lived from 1915 to 2011, led Friends of the Reservoir Inc., the local conservation group that pushed to preserve the property rather than see it sold off. The effort succeeded. In October 1984, the Village of Larchmont formally dedicated the property in perpetuity for a specific, named set of purposes: conservation, nature study, wildlife preserve, flood control, and standby water supply. The conservancy now carries Johnson's name on the entrance kiosk, a detail most people walk past without a second look.

What the Trail Actually Feels Like

The Upper Trail, reached from the Pine Brook Tennis Courts entrance, follows red-triangle-on-white blazes past the courts and into the woods. It's not the paved, bench-lined loop some visitors expect from a village-owned property. The terrain includes jumbled boulders and rock slabs, leftover material from the original construction of the reservoir, which makes for a rougher, more physical hike than the manicured feel of Larchmont's in-village parks.

The 2.5-mile route runs along the contour of Sheldrake Lake, reaching the southern end of the Sheldrake Lake Dam before circling around Goodliffe Pond, a quiet spot good for watching wildlife, back to the dam's northern end. From there the trail follows the eastern side of the lake to a long wooden boardwalk crossing at the northern point. That's where the property connects to the Colonial Greenway Trail, which cuts sharply uphill toward Dennis Drive, the same road that marks one of the conservancy's four access points.

The dam itself is worth the walk on its own. It's a substantial structure, a physical reminder that this was engineered infrastructure before it was a nature preserve, and walking alongside the lake past it is one of the more pleasant stretches on the property.

Four Entrances, Four Different Approaches

The conservancy has four points of access, each with its own character and none of them signed as clearly as a formal trailhead in a state park.

Picking an entrance is really picking a different hike. Pine Brook gets you into the rugged upper section fastest. Dennis Drive puts you closer to the boardwalk and the Colonial Greenway connection. Weaver Street and Sheldrake Lane sit closer to the lake itself.

The Center Next Door Isn't Part of the Village Either

Right beside the reservoir sits the Mamaroneck Environmental Resource Center, home to the Sheldrake Environmental Center. This is a separate organization from the Village, running nature programs for both adults and children throughout the year. The center's stated mission is to build community awareness of local natural resources and to help protect and enhance them, and it backs that up with outdoor programming built around whoever shows up, whether that's a school group, a family, or a private gathering:

• Programs for children, run in coordination with area schools
• Family-oriented outdoor sessions
• Adult naturalist programming
• Customized outings for smaller private groups

The Sheldrake Center traces its footprint here to 1999, when the L.I.F.E. Center, short for Local Involvement For Environment, relocated its headquarters next door at the newly established Mamaroneck Environmental Resource Center. Friends of the Reservoir, the same group Johnson led, has functioned as a steward of the site since the early 1980s, working alongside the Town of Mamaroneck and the Village of Larchmont to develop and maintain trails and buildings, and producing educational programming together with the L.I.F.E. Center over the decades since.

None of this shows up on a map. It shows up in the fact that the person who leads a school group along the boardwalk in October and the crew that clears fallen branches off the Upper Trail after a fall storm both answer to organizations that aren't the Village of Larchmont, even though the sign at the entrance says Larchmont's name.

Why the Patchwork Is the Point

A walk through the reservoir in October covers ground that belongs to Larchmont on paper, sits mostly in New Rochelle by geography, gets maintained by Mamaroneck's public works crews, and gets programmed by a nonprofit that answers to none of the three. That's an unusual amount of civic overlap for a single trail loop. The Village dedicated the property in October 1984 for conservation, nature study, wildlife preserve, flood control, and standby water supply, and the entrance kiosk carries James G. Johnson Jr.'s name.

The next fall walk through those woods looks a little different once you know which government is responsible for which fallen branch—and how the reservoir became a conservancy rather than a working utility site.

If the reservoir has you curious about what else in Larchmont tends to hide in plain sight, from the businesses reshaping downtown to how the Village's calendar runs from one season into the next, Jennifer Baldinger keeps track of the details that make this place what it is, not just what's for sale in it.