NY1 wraps up its week-long series of looking back at the history of Staten Island with an unobstructed view of how some of the borough's parks have been captured on film, looking much the way they did hundreds of years ago. NY1's Amanda Farinacci filed the following report.

There are few places in New York City where you'll find a more tranquil, more calming, more natural setting than Staten Island's Wolfe's Pond Park.

The sprawling 340 acre park on the island's South Shore is one of the most ecologically diverse parks in the entire city with marshes, swamps, woods, ponds and the shoreline. It's the kind of place that makes you feel like you're not in New York City.

"Wolfe's Pond Park is one of those places where the mix of the pond and the woods and the hiking trails and then over there, a hundred yards away, is basically the entrance to the ocean -- the vastness of it really meant a lot to me," said photographer Joel Meyerowitz.

Meyerowitz was commissioned by the Parks Department back in 2006 to take photos of all of the city's parks. It's something that hasn't been done since the 1930s, when Robert Moses was Parks Commissioner and more than 20,000 pictures were taken to document the city's open spaces.

To do his job, Meyerowitz has visited parks all over the city in every season taking thousands of photos. And while every one didn't make the cut for his book, "Legacy," the photos have been added to the city's archive collection.

"We were slogging through the woods [at High Rock Park] and we came upon this pond and the mist was rising and the silence was incredible and we both stood in that kind of awe of like, 'Wow, look at this,'" Meyerowitz said. "When you step out on the edge [at Conference House Park] you're at the southernmost point in New York. Beyond that it seems like the rest of the country spreads out."

The city purchased Wolfe's Pond Park for parks space in 1929 after years of protest by fishermen that it was being used as an immigrant quarantine station.

Today, it is a popular recreation spot with bike paths, playgrounds and tennis courts and a ton of secret, quiet places that make you forget you're in New York at all.

"When you have a chance to leave the suburban feeling and enter a place in which something unexpected could happen to you, you'll hear something, you'll see something, or the light will be fractured in a way that makes you feel in a way suddenly like, 'Oh, it's spring time. I'm here,'" Meyerowitz said.