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Paine Lake (New Rochelle)

Paine Lake is a man-made lake located in the Paine Heights section of central New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York. The lake is situated on Stephenson Brook, a tributary of Pine Brook, in central New Rochelle. It was formed by the construction of the Paine Lake Dam in 1890. The 13 foot high, 250 foot long masonry dam has a maximum discharge of 480 cubic feet per second. The capacity of Paine Lake is 15 acre feet with a normal storage of 4 acre feet. At normal levels it has a surface area of 2 acres. It is owned by the New Rochelle Parks and Recreation Department and is currently used for recreation purposes.

Paine Lake sits north of the culvert that carries Stephenson Brook to Long Island Sound. In 2000, Westchester County, seeking to improve the water quality of the brook, hired an ecological restoration company to introduce introduce an assortment of aquatic plants at Paine Lake to stabilize the shore while filtering out potential pollutants. The plants included waterlilies which take up nitrogen as food. A floating wetland filter was also installed, increasing the wetland area of the lake and helping to improve its pollutant removal capabilities.

Soon after the introduction of waterlilies, homeowners around the lake began to notice the plants were overtaking most of the pond surface. The county never considered providing maintenance money for the lake because it never expected the lilies to grow so aggressively. Such plants rarely grow in water more than six feet deep, and they usually spread slowly but can become invasive in shallower bodies such as Paine Lake. The explosive growth is proof of the nitrogen pollution they have helped avert. It was a lake which was in decline, so from a water-quality perspective, Paine Lake is much improved.