Search "Twin Lakes Park" from a phone parked on California Road and half the results that come back are filed under a different town. Reviews describing the same lake, the same horse stables, the same flat lakeside trail, sitting on a Tripadvisor page that lists the address as Bronxville. If you have walked this loop for years and always assumed you were standing in Eastchester, you were right. The internet just has not caught up.
The mix-up is not really Google's fault. It is a byproduct of how this corner of Westchester is drawn. Bronxville and Tuckahoe are each their own incorporated villages sitting inside the Town of Eastchester, and a piece of land can carry a postal address from one village while its deed and its town services belong to another. A crawler indexing address data will happily attach a park to whichever village name shows up first. The land does not move. The label just depends on which record the search engine happened to grab.
One Park, Two Parcels, One Parkway Between Them
The naming confusion is the smaller surprise. The bigger one is that the park you think you are visiting is actually two separate parcels, and they are not even continuous. Westchester County's own listing for the property describes Twin Lakes Park in Eastchester and Nature Study Woods in New Rochelle as two land parcels split by the Hutchinson River Parkway. You are not walking one park with two names. You are walking two adjoining properties that happen to share a lake system and a parking lot habit, with a six-lane parkway physically cutting them apart.
That split matters for anyone actually trying to get there. Access to Nature Study Woods runs through Webster Road in New Rochelle. Access to the Eastchester side, including the horse farm, runs through California Road. Show up at the wrong entrance expecting the other parcel's trailhead and you will spend ten minutes back in the car figuring out where the Parkway crossing actually is.
| If you want | Use this entrance | What you'll find |
|---|---|---|
| The lakeside walking loop and horse farm views | California Road, Eastchester | Twin Lakes Farm, the main lake, Reservoir Number Three |
| The wooded, quieter side of the property | Webster Road, New Rochelle | Nature Study Woods, denser tree cover |
The Horse Farm Most Walkers Don't Know They're Passing
Anyone who has driven California Road has seen the fencing and the riding rings without necessarily clocking what they are looking at. Twin Lakes Farm, spread across two campuses inside the park, is described by the county as Westchester's largest and most diverse equestrian center. It runs a boarding operation and a full riding academy, private and group lessons, more than 100 stalls, two indoor arenas, four outdoor arenas, and its own network of trails layered into the same acreage the public uses for walking. The show team competes regularly at local shows and at national finals, which is a different scale of operation than the average person strolling past with a dog leash would guess.
It is worth sitting with what that means for the property as a whole. The public walking loop most people associate with Twin Lakes Park, a flat 1.8-mile route known locally as Reservoir Number Three, is one thread inside a property the county lists at 125.2 acres. A meaningful share of that acreage is working horse farm, not open trail. The park reads as a modest neighborhood pond loop from the parking lot, but the deed covers something closer to a small campus.
What Changes This Week
If you are planning to walk it in the next few days, there is a real, dated wrinkle. The county's own page for the property currently flags a closure of the roadway section between Virginia Road and Fischer Lane, beginning Monday, September 21, right at the edge of the park. It is not a full shutdown of the trail system, but it is exactly the kind of thing that turns a familiar five-minute drive into a ten-minute detour if you have not checked ahead. Anyone who has a standing Sunday-morning loop here should build in the extra few minutes or approach from California Road instead of assuming the usual route in.
The Walk Itself, Right Now
Late September is close to the ideal window for this property. The county notes spring and fall as the best seasons to walk it, and the flat grade on Reservoir Number Three means there is no elevation gain to fight, just a straightforward 1.8-mile loop rated easy, roughly 4,000 steps if you are tracking that sort of thing. The lake draws swans and turtles along the edges, with deer, squirrels, and a rotating cast of bird species further back in the tree line, the kind of wildlife mix that shows up reliably enough that regulars know where to look without trying.
None of this requires equipment or a plan. It requires knowing which entrance gets you to the loop you actually want, which is the whole point of untangling the naming confusion in the first place.
Pairing It With a Sunday
If a weekend morning at the lake is part of your routine, there is a natural second stop close by. The Village of Tuckahoe, another incorporated village inside the Town of Eastchester, runs its Farm and Maker Market at Depot Square, the parking lot next to the Tuckahoe train station, every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. through November 22, 2026. It is a weekly market rather than a seasonal one-off, built around local farmers, food producers, and makers selling produce, flowers, and specialty goods, and it sits close enough to the park that the two make an easy same-morning pairing before the market closes at one.
That proximity is not a coincidence worth overstating, but it is a useful piece of local logistics. The market runs on a fixed weekly schedule through late fall, which means the Sunday loop, lake first, market second, has a real shelf life left this season rather than a vague "check before you go" caveat.
Why the Confusion Is Worth Untangling
None of this changes what the park is. It changes how confidently you can talk about it, which is a different kind of value if you already live here. Knowing that the lake photos under a Bronxville tag and the ones tagged Eastchester are the same water, knowing that the horse farm you drive past is a working competitive facility and not just decorative fencing, knowing which road gets you to which half of a property split by a parkway, that is the difference between visiting a park and actually knowing one.
It is also, in a smaller way, the same kind of local literacy that matters when you are trying to understand any Eastchester property, not just a public one. Addresses, boundaries, and village lines in this part of Westchester rarely match the mental map most people carry around, and the gap between the two is where confusion tends to live. Untangling it here is a small example of a habit worth having anywhere in town.
If you are weighing a move within Eastchester, or trying to make sense of how a specific address lines up with the village, school, and service lines around it, that is exactly the kind of groundwork Land O Listings does before a single showing happens. Reach out to Anthony Lando for a conversation grounded in how this town is actually laid out, not just how the map app happens to have filed it.
