Drive the intersection of New Hyde Park Road and Marcus Avenue on a Saturday morning and you will see the same green sign every Manhasset Hills resident has passed a thousand times: Clinton G. Martin Park. What that sign does not tell you is that the park carries the name of the whole hamlet, but the boundary that decides who can actually join it runs straight down the middle of that road, not around it.
Clinton G. Martin Park sits inside Manhasset Hills, a hamlet in the Town of North Hempstead bordered by Herricks, North Hills, North New Hyde Park, and Lake Success. The park itself is not a town-wide amenity. It belongs to the New Hyde Park Special Park District, a town-run district with its own membership rules, and the district's own boundary description only names the hamlet of Manhasset Hills that lies east of New Hyde Park Road. If your house sits on the other side of that road, the same official boundary language simply does not include you in this particular district.
That single fact reframes almost everything else worth knowing about the park this year.
One Address, Two Very Different Rulebooks
The pool, tennis courts, platform tennis courts, and pickleball courts inside Clinton G. Martin Park are not open to the general public. They belong to district residents and their guests, and getting in requires proof: a driver's license, a non-driver ID, a school ID, or a library card for kids, with separate documentation paths for Medicare recipients, volunteers, and veterans. A resident member can bring non-resident guests for a $14-per-person fee, capped at six guests per household per day, but daily resident admissions cannot bring guests at all. None of this is unusual for a special park district. What is worth knowing is how narrowly the district is drawn around a hamlet that shares its name with the park.
Membership itself splits into categories built for different households: Family, Couple, Individual, Senior, Youth, Disabled and Volunteer and Veteran, and Caregiver. Each has its own early-bird and regular pricing window, which means the cost of getting your family into the pool depends less on what you'd guess from the outside and more on which category and which week you sign up.
What Actually Changed at the Park This Year
If you already hold a resident card, 2026 brought two real changes, not cosmetic ones. Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jennifer DeSena announced that two of the park's tennis courts would be converted into dedicated pickleball courts, and the current facility list reflects that: five lighted tennis courts and two pickleball courts, alongside two lighted platform tennis courts for winter paddle play. Anyone who used to book a tennis court without checking availability first will notice the smaller number.
The other fix solved a problem that had been quietly draining the district's budget for years. The kiddie pool's liner had been leaking since installation and was patched every year at an average cost of about $17,000, a recurring line item that never actually solved anything. This year's project replaced the liner outright rather than patching around it again. The pool complex, which includes a 50-yard family pool with diving boards and a water slide, ran its regular season through August 16 at extended hours before shifting to a shorter Labor Day-week schedule that closed for the year on September 2.
If you are inside the district, both of those changes touched your summer directly. If you are on the west side of New Hyde Park Road, they were simply municipal news that never reached your gate.
The Layer Inside the Same Fence That Doesn't Ask for ID
Here is where the park stops behaving like a single gated amenity and starts behaving like two different institutions sharing an address. Alongside the membership economy for swimming and racket sports, Clinton G. Martin Park runs a free Friday-night summer concert series at 7:30 p.m., described simply as free of charge with a rain-location line through the town's 311 system. No membership language attaches to the concerts the way it does to pool and court access.
The park's community center building operates on a similar public logic. The Art League of Nassau County holds its general meetings at the Clinton G. Martin Community Center, 1601 Marcus Avenue, on the fourth Friday of the month from September through May, skipping December. A countywide arts organization does not typically build its meeting calendar around a facility that only serves one hamlet's resident card holders, which suggests the meeting rooms and auditorium function on a different access model than the pool gate fifty yards away.
So the same footprint on Marcus Avenue runs a strict residency check for anyone who wants to swim laps or play pickleball, and a much looser, walk-up model for anyone who wants to hear a Friday concert or sit in on an art league meeting. Most people who live nearby only ever test one side of that split.
The Farmhouse That Predates the Boundary
Tucked inside the park grounds is the Cornell-Van Nostrand House, also known as the Schumacher House, a landmark building listed on town, state, and national registries. The house sits on land that once belonged to Fred Schumacher Jr., a local farmer who in 1952 physically moved the structure to its current spot on what would eventually become parkland. Decades before anyone drew a Special Park District boundary along New Hyde Park Road, this was working farmland with a single owner and no line running through the middle of it.
The house is a small detail, but it is the kind of detail that explains why the boundary feels arbitrary to residents today. It was never drawn around a neighborhood's natural shape. It followed a road that happened to bisect land that used to belong to one farm, and the district rules simply inherited that geometry.
What This Means If You Live Here
If your address falls east of New Hyde Park Road, you already have access to a genuinely well-equipped facility, and this year gave you two tangible upgrades: a fixed kiddie pool and two new pickleball courts. It's worth checking which membership category actually fits your household before assuming the standard family rate is your only option, since early-bird pricing windows exist for a reason.
If you're west of that line, the free programming, the Friday concerts and the community center's meeting rooms, appears to run on a more open basis than the pool and courts do, worth confirming directly with the town before assuming the whole park is off-limits.
Either way, the next time you drive past that sign at New Hyde Park Road and Marcus Avenue, you'll know it's not describing one amenity. It's describing two different systems that happen to share a fence line, a name, and a farmhouse that was here before either of them existed.
Local details like this are the kind of thing you only pick up by paying close attention to a neighborhood over years, not by pulling a listing sheet. That's the same attention Singh's Team brings to every Manhasset Hills conversation, whether you're asking about a park boundary or wondering what your own home is worth in today's market. If it's the latter, get your free home valuation and see where you stand.
