Forest Park Register

Hi all! My name is Michael De Dora, and I’ve just launched this news blog, the Forest Park Register. For those unaware: Forest Park is a small private lakeside cottage community along Route 5 in Western New York — about an hour south of Buffalo, right on the shores of Lake Erie, just outside of a little town called Westfield.

I should make clear up front I am not from Forest Park, or even Western NY. I’m from Long Island, and I’ve lived in New York City or adjacent to it for most of my life. So what exactly am I doing here?

To put it simply: I married into the Walton family. Members of the Walton family first visited the park back in the 1920s — at times staying in a cottage that has now mostly collapsed into the lake — and over the years descendants have purchased several cottages.

My first visit to the park was in 2017, and I was immediately taken in. As a boy I spent summers with my grandparents in the small towns and backwood of the Poconos. The charming little community of Forest Park brought back memories of those summers past. Kids riding their bikes on safe streets, parents relaxing and chatting in lawn chairs, people from different places and backgrounds socializing at the beach and around late night fires, and the occasional (and often entertaining) small-town drama. It clicked right away for me.

At that time my girlfriend Jean and I were living in Washington, D.C., and I remember thinking I wanted to spend every summer in Westfield. At one point I recall not wanting to miss out on a Sunday at the lake, so I drove back to Washington, D.C. on a Monday morning at 4 a.m. so that I could enjoy Sunday but still make it to work in time.

Fast forward two years to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jean and I felt trapped in our one-bedroom apartment, with a lease renewal approaching. Instead of continuing to pay rent to live in a city we couldn’t enjoy, we decided to put our stuff in storage and move to Forest Park to join the Walton pandemic bubble. Just a few months later, in August 2020 Jean and I were married on the front porch of The Pines, the original Walton cottage which her grandmother purchased in the mid-1960s.

My work being fully remote, I was now living in this new place and thinking of how I could engage with it. Some of that ended up being handyman-type work around the park. But with a career in writing and journalism, I started to realize there was very little in the way of news updates on Forest Park or Westfield NY on the internet. The only newspaper expressly dedicated to the town, the Westfield Republican, doesn’t publish online and barely publishes in print. What people knew of happenings in the area was mostly spread through word of mouth, either through personal interactions or on the What’s Happening, Westfield NY? Facebook page. While the latter is a quite active community information sharing group, I still felt a lot of interesting material was falling through the cracks.

After nearly two years living in the park, in 2022 my wife and I moved back to NYC, but we’ve never stopped spending quality time here (indeed, I’m writing this post from The Pines). I also remain deeply interested in helping to provide updates to the Forest Park and surrounding community. If anything, my interest has grown since I’ve “left.” Maybe because I don’t live here anymore and miss the place so much.

Enter the Forest Park Register. The aim of this blog is to ensure people in the Park, and people who care about the Park but live outside of it, are aware of the latest news and other relevant developments that might impact them. Along the way I’m hoping to tell some deeper stories, too: the history and development of Forest Park, the origins of certain cottages, the radical changes to the natural shoreline, and the future of the park, to name a few. More on that to come.

One last thing: I’m only one person, who only lives in Forest Park on a part-time basis. And like any human, I’m not perfect. So I welcome news tips and suggestions. Got something to add? Got a question? Drop me a line at forestparkregister@gmail.com

See you around the park!

[Pictured: me, in front of the root ball of a tree that washed up on the beach near Forest Park during the winter of 2020]