Crestwood Lake, Allendale, New Jersey

Features:

✯ Park
✯ Playground
✯ 9/11 memorial
✯ Within walking distance of James Comey’s former high school

If you enter Allendale, New Jersey, into Google Maps, you’ll find yourself at Crestwood Lake, which is no lake in the off-season, only a pit dug into soft dirt. Every summer it fills with water, chlorine, and children. Here is where I learned to swim in the ’80s, dog-paddling my way to the four-foot dock, blowing bubbles underwater, playing Marco Polo by the ropes and poles that separated the wading area from the deeper water. My friend Heather drew sunscreen hearts on her thighs around the initials of her crush, leaving perfect pale stencils in the middle of blaring sunburn. I never wore sunscreen, because I never burned.

In spring the lake is a crater, surrounded by a park and playground. Allendale’s high school and elementary school are a few blocks away in one direction, its post office, pizzerias, and grocery store several blocks in the other. Behind a strip mall, you can catch the train to New York City, twenty miles away—fifty minutes by train, thirty by car, depending on traffic. On weekdays the commuter lot is full. Across the street is a bar and grill that Giants and Yankees players, the town’s most prominent residents, have been known to frequent. Downtown is deserted by nightfall.

One hundred years ago, this was a weekend destination for rich New Yorkers. In the late 1920s, local developers bought the land where the lake is now, intending to build residential homes. Then the Depression hit, so they turned it into a park and charged the public to come and swim there. In 1971, with the population booming from urban exodus, the town snapped up the lake and its surrounding acres to preserve them for recreational use. New homes sprang up; excess farmland was sculpted into cul-de-sacs and split-levels.

If you follow the path past the shuttered snack stand (King Cones, Chipwiches, Fun Dip, Pixy Stix full of dyed sugar), you will arrive at the playground, with its shiny, primary-colored equipment, its curved and smoothed edges (remember the plywood-and-tires contraption, how its ridges dug into your bare knees; the slide where the boy fell and broke his arm). Today there’s a structure painted to look like a fire truck: Allendale Fire and Rescue, it reads.

Local kids valorize cops and firefighters. The town values tradition, the hazy American kind, and yearns for an idealized, bygone time that never truly existed, or existed only for a select few. The lake is a real estate selling point, a draw for upwardly mobile suburbanites picturing family Saturdays, picnics, barbecues. On the Fourth of July there are fireworks, and...