The Parish Behind Laurel Hollow's December Music Is Also Repairing Its Pond

At the southern tip of Inner Cold Spring Harbor, where Route 25A bends around the water, a white shingled church stands above a pond. Its address reads 1670 Route 25A, Cold Spring Harbor. A 2024 grant document from the Long Island Sound Resilience Planning Support Program puts it more precisely. St. John's Episcopal Church is "located in the Village of Laurel Hollow, NY on the border of Nassau and Suffolk Counties," and it "has owned several acres of high marsh and a 14-acre pond for nearly a century."

The same parish runs most of the evenings on Laurel Hollow's December calendar. It has also paid for a $250,000 reconstruction of the pond's edge, and the next repair, to the spillway weir and dam, is still ahead of it.

A December calendar that runs through one building

Here is the season at St. John's from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve, along with the one nearby stop that keeps its own calendar.

Only the two concerts are ticketed. The Messiah Sing has free admission, and the caroling is open to anyone who wants to sing along.

The concert series started with the organ

Concerts by the Pond began as organ recitals celebrating the restoration of St. John's pipe organ, and it grew into a chamber music series from there. According to a church history of the series, a committee of parishioners, the organist and the music director founded it after the church was renovated and the organ installed. Centerbrook Architects lists its renovation of the meeting-house-style church, whose core dates to the 1830s, as completed in 2013.

The series is now in its thirteenth season, and the two December dates sit in the middle of a run that goes from October to May.

December 5, Trio Mediæval. This Grammy-nominated vocal trio from Norway and Sweden brings a program called Yule, which mixes medieval carols and Scandinavian folk traditions with contemporary pieces. Tickets are $75 general admission and $60 for students.

December 12, Holiday Swing II. Pianist Konrad Paszkudzki, known for his work at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, brings his trio back with vocalist April Varner, who won the 2023 Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Vocal Competition. The program draws on the Great American Songbook, holiday standards and jazz. The concert page lists $45 general admission and $30 for students.

The series' Visit page covers the practical details:

• The church seats about 200, and seating is generally open.
• Doors usually open 30 to 45 minutes before the concert.
• Parking on the church campus is free, with accessible spaces and wheelchair-accessible entrances.
• There is no dress code.
• Photography and recording are generally not allowed unless announced.

The rest of the season runs into spring. Adam W. Sadberry plays January 18, Nathan Amaral February 13, Rupert Boyd March 6, the Telegraph Quartet April 18 and The Westerlies May 15.

The free half of the season

The Sunday between the two concerts may be the most participatory event of the month. The 4th Annual Community Messiah Sing on December 6 at 3 p.m. performs the Christmas portion of Handel's Messiah with a chamber orchestra and professional soloists, and the audience serves as the choir. You can bring your own score or borrow one at the door, or simply listen. Admission is free, a free-will offering goes to St. Matthias, and a reception follows.

On December 19 the parish takes the music down the road. Caroling with a brass quartet starts at 1 p.m. at the Cold Spring Harbor Firehouse Museum, then moves to the front porch at Pashley, and the church invites anyone to sing along in Santa hats. At 3 p.m. everyone comes back to Route 25A for the annual Greening of the Church, with singing and Christmas cookies.

Christmas Eve has three services:

1. 4 p.m., Christmas Pageant and Hymn Sing
2. 6 p.m., Holy Eucharist with harp and the Chancel Choir
3. 10 p.m., a late service with harp and vocal soloists

The pond behind the parking lot

Every one of those evenings ends with a walk to cars parked beside the water. The church's 14-acre pond sits at the head of the harbor, next to a marsh that a 2023 regional plan identified as the six-acre Saint John's Marsh, within its Lower Cold Spring Harbor focal area. In 2024, St. John's received a $72,040 planning award to develop a conservation and restoration plan for the marsh and pond, with GEI as contractor.

That work now has its own organization. The St. John's Pond Watershed Alliance describes a three-phase restoration strategy built with GEI Consultants, its limnologists and ecologists, and Verdantas, the civil engineers leading repair of the dam and weir.

Phase 1 is finished. The alliance says the pond's earthen edge had been eroding and failing in several places, which threatened the pond and sped up nutrient runoff into the water. St. John's paid for a $250,000 reconstruction of the edge. Community volunteers, working on an Eagle Scout project, then planted 200 linear feet of native riparian buffer along the western shoreline, using eight native species chosen to catch runoff before it reaches the pond.

Phase 2 is the urgent one. The alliance budgets another $250,000 for spillway weir repair and dam engineering and labels it an urgent need. Its September 1, 2026 engineering update reports that the construction team met at the weir on August 25 to work through delays in responding to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The holdup involved the temporary dam needed to dewater the work area. Posillico, Verdantas's construction partner, confirmed that its small three-ton excavator could reach the site from the rectory yard. Engineers probing the pond bottom found that the whole area between the wing walls sits on a concrete pad, and Verdantas said it had what it needed to prepare its response to the DEC.

So on the night of the December concerts, the pond outside has a rebuilt edge and a weir whose repair was still waiting on the engineers' response to the DEC as of the alliance's September update.

Walking the woods before a concert

The other way into this corner of Laurel Hollow is on foot. The Nature Conservancy's St. John's Pond Preserve covers 14 acres behind the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery and is open to the public. The Conservancy describes the woods as some of the oldest forest on Long Island, spared from repeated cutting because the slopes were too steep to farm. The trail climbs and then drops to the pond, past giant tulip trees, oaks and groves of mountain laurel. One December detail from the Conservancy: a river otter was photographed at the preserve in December 2008, eating a fish from the pond's icy water.

To find the trailhead, the Conservancy's directions are:

1. From Route 25A, turn into the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery entrance.
2. Drive past the Hatchery toward St. John's Church.
3. Bear right into the upper parking lot.
4. The entrance path is at the left end of that lot, which holds about 10 cars.

The Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery & Aquarium is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closes on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is $7 general, $6 for visitors 65 and older, $5 for children 3 to 12, and free for children two and under and for members. Its Thanksgiving Craft on November 27 runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the day after the St. John's Thanksgiving service. Hours and access can change in winter, so check the Hatchery and Conservancy pages before you go.

The preserve trail and the concerts share the same entrance off Route 25A. For more on daily life around the village, see our Laurel Hollow neighborhood page and the Cold Spring Harbor guide next door.

At Batul Morbi, we've spent more than 30 years following how places like St. John's and its pond shape everyday life at the head of the harbor. If you own a home in Laurel Hollow and want to know what it's worth this season, we'll prepare a careful, confidential valuation for you. Request a Home Valuation.