Start at the North Hempstead Town Dock on a Saturday morning and head north along the water, and you'll eventually hit a stretch that feels like someone finished it. Wide pavement built for both feet and bike tires. Old-style lighting. A pier with a resting float. Three kinetic sculptures that turn slowly in the wind off Manhasset Bay. That stretch has a name, the Manhasset BayWalk, and most people who use it assume it runs the same way for its entire 1.7 miles, all the way from downtown Port Washington to Manorhaven Beach Park.
It doesn't, not yet. Knowing where the finished part ends helps explain how the waterfront route developed.
What "1.7 Miles" Is Describing
The Town of North Hempstead's Manhasset BayWalk is a walking and biking promenade that, on paper, connects the North Hempstead Town Dock in Port Washington to Manorhaven Beach Park in the Village of Manorhaven, a full 1.7 miles along the shore. The plan for that connected route goes back to around 2003, when the Town of North Hempstead, working with the villages of Baxter Estates, Manorhaven, and Port Washington North, established the route between the two endpoints.
The best-built piece of it sits inside the Village of Port Washington North, along the west side of Shore Road. It's called Bay Walk Park, and it's smaller than the number suggests: 1.7 acres, not 1.7 miles. That overlap in the numbers is a coincidence, but it's a useful one, because it's easy to mistake the finished 1.7-acre park for the whole 1.7-mile promenade. They're not the same thing. One is a destination. The other is still, in places, a plan.
The Finished Segment: Bay Walk Park and the Nautical Art Museum
Walk into Bay Walk Park itself and the difference is obvious. This is the segment that got the full treatment: a village-owned pier with a fishing dock and a float and gangway, a kayak launch, picnic areas with sun shades, a phone-charging station, a flagpole dedicated to veterans, and an outdoor Nautical Art Museum built specifically to tell the story of the water it sits beside.
The museum's centerpiece is a set of three kinetic sculptures by Lyman Whitaker, double-helix sails flanked by two meridians that turn with the wind, paired with a stained-glass sculpture by Aaron Morgan that traces the history of the yacht clubs along Manhasset Bay. It's a small, specific piece of public art, built for a small, specific stretch of shoreline, and it's the kind of detail you only notice if you walk the park slowly instead of jogging through it.
Before any of that existed, a 2011 Patch report quoted Port Washington North Mayor Bob Weitzner describing the area this way: "Shore Road was saddled with shoreline blight and visual pollution," with oil tanks facing a row of struggling marinas and closing storefronts.
That contrast is worth sitting with for a second. The polished promenade, the pier, the sculptures, all of it replaced a working industrial edge that most longtime residents would still recognize.
Fifteen Years for 1.7 Acres
Here's the part that actually matters if you're trying to understand how long waterfront public works take on the North Shore. The Village of Port Washington North bought the first parcel of land for what became Bay Walk Park in 2002. The remaining land, formerly part of an oil transfer station, wasn't acquired until 2004. Groundbreaking didn't happen until 2008. The pier itself was finished in 2009, and the first phase of the park, the promenade, the pier, and the Nautical Art Museum, wasn't dedicated until 2011, backed by more than $4 million in combined grants.
Then it sat at that stage for six more years. Phase two, the parking lot, the picnic area, the kayak launch, the charging station, the informational kiosk, and Thomas J. Pellegrino Waterfront Park, didn't formally open until July 2017, a $1.5 million project designed by Cameron Engineering & Associates and built by Woodstock Construction of Oyster Bay, funded by a combination of New York State's Department of State, its Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Town of North Hempstead, and Nassau County.
Add it up and you get roughly fifteen years from the first land purchase to a fully finished 1.7-acre park. Weitzner made the same point at the ribbon cutting, calling it a fourteen-year effort from steering committee to completion. That timeline provides context for the remaining BayWalk route.
The Remaining Route
The remaining BayWalk segments are at different stages, including the stretch between downtown and Bay Walk Park. The segment north of Bay Walk Park, toward Manorhaven Beach Park, follows the route Port Washington North, Baxter Estates, Manorhaven, and the town agreed on back around 2003. The segment south of Bay Walk Park, the part that would actually connect this finished park to Sunset Park and the North Hempstead Town Dock near Main Street, is still described in the town's own planning record as a project timed to the 2020s, a purpose-built extension that has not yet been folded into the continuous route the name implies.
We're now well past the midpoint of the 2020s. Whether that connector exists by the time you're reading this is worth checking directly with the Town of North Hempstead rather than assuming, because the completed park's roughly fifteen-year timeline offers one local point of comparison.
Practically, that means the walk from downtown Port Washington to the Nautical Art Museum still runs partly along Shore Road itself rather than a dedicated waterfront path the whole way.
If You Want Quiet Instead of Promenade
The BayWalk is built for movement, people, bikes, strollers, the occasional kayak launch. If what you actually want on a given evening is quiet, Port Washington has a handful of smaller, less photographed options that don't require the drive to the water at all.
- Baxter's Pond Park is a straightforward loop around a pond, closer to a still-water walk than a waterfront promenade, and it draws dog walkers looking for something shorter and shadier than Shore Road.
- Manorhaven Preserve sits near the BayWalk's northern end and offers shaded trails rather than open pavement, a different kind of walk from the pier and museum stretch a mile or so south.
- Sunset Park, closer to the Town Dock, is lit at night and wheelchair accessible, with a swimming area that makes it one of the few spots on this list built for more than just walking through.
- North Hempstead Beach Park, formerly known as Bar Beach and Hempstead Harbor Parks, covers 60 acres with a half-mile beachfront and a mile-long jogging course, along with basketball, handball, and paddleball courts for anyone who wants the walk to end somewhere with more to do.
None of these are substitutes for the BayWalk. They're just the quieter alternatives locals already know about, and worth keeping in rotation while the rest of the promenade catches up to the part that's already finished.
The Point of Walking It Slowly
The BayWalk is worth walking end to end at least once, if only to see where the finished stretch gives way to the unfinished one. Fifteen years turned 1.7 acres of former oil-transfer land into a small waterfront park with a fishing pier and a public art collection built around the history of the bay it sits on. The remainder of the 1.7-mile route has not yet reached the same level of completion as the park in Port Washington North.
If you live here, that's useful to know before you plan a walk expecting one continuous path. If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond the market data and the listing photos, it's this kind of slow, patient public investment that tends to define it. Beth Catrone has spent more than two decades watching Port Washington change one project at a time, and if you ever want to talk about what that means for a specific street, a specific home, or a specific stretch of this waterfront, Let's Connect.
