Despite its name, only a small portion of Rockaway Community Park is open to the parkgoing community. The bulk of this peninsular park consists of the old Edgemere Landfill (aerial view) — the large grassy hill at right — which "was the longest continuously operating dump in the United States and perhaps the oldest" when it was finally closed in 1991. (Fresh Kills was the only city landfill still in operation when Edgemere shut down.) It sounds like it will still be at least a few more years before the site is opened to the public.

The tide was low when I walked the perimeter of the peninsula today. I saw several old bottles that presumably came from the landfill, but nothing like the profusion of bottles and other garbage — "exponentially more intense than anything found at the breached landfill of Dead Horse Bay" — that Nathan Kensinger encountered when he walked the same area in 2010.

Here's a closer look.

at Rockaway Community Park. This one was not built as sturdily as some other such structures we've come across.

I'm standing at the edge of Rockaway Community Park, looking out across Sommerville Basin at Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary.

An old campaign by the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation

Installed in front of the Queens Supreme Court Building in 1998, this bronze sculpture (zoom in) "tells the narrative of the court process and also includes the tulip and rose design taken from the Queens [Borough] flag. Images include: judge, jury, and notification of jurors."

The quotation found on the wheel — "Danger invites rescue. The cry of distress is the summons to relief" — is taken from Benjamin Cardozo's opinion in Wagner v. International Railway Co., "the paradigmatic case establishing the rescue doctrine".

Dedicated in 1939, this monumental edifice was originally known as the Queens General Court House. At left, in front of the building, stands The Wheel of Justice. Completing the "sculptural ensemble" and "further activat[ing] the plaza" are 18 cylindrical benches inscribed with the names of Queens neighborhoods.

Established by 1668, Prospect Cemetery is said to be the oldest burial ground in Queens.

Along with Prospect Cemetery, First Methodist Church of Jamaica Cemetery, and the facade and bell tower of St. Monica's Church, St. Monica Cemetery, which appears to date back to the mid-1800s, is one of the few survivors from the days before York College came to town and wiped out 50 acres of South Jamaica that had, by the late 1960s, become an impoverished landscape of "tattered old homes, junk yards and parking lots". Compare aerial images from 1951 and 2012 to see how radically the area has been transformed. St. Monica Cemetery is the squarish open space at the southwest corner of Liberty Avenue and 160th Street.

Eggplants, tomatoes, chard, kale, jhandis

at the Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson Community Garden

Don't believe everything you read on a license plate.