A whistleblower alleges that a broken sewer line beneath The Stone House, a wedding venue and steakhouse perched on Clove Lake in Staten Island’s Clove Lakes Park, has been spewing raw human waste into the water for years — even as families paddle boats across it and kids cast fishing lines from its banks. The claims center on a city-owned building that has hosted the restaurant since 2014, and on a state investigation now examining whether sewage has been discharging into the lake undetected.
According to the New York Post, which first reported the whistleblower’s account, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is investigating a potential sewage discharge into Clove Lakes Park. The state agency’s involvement follows a dye test conducted by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection this past Tuesday, in which glowing green dye — and, in a separate pour, red dye — was flushed down Stone House toilets and into the sewer main crossing the lake. Per the whistleblower, both colors of dye later emerged in Clove Lake itself, and the dye test revealed the sewer was contaminating the water.
The DEP has said lake management falls under the city’s Parks Department, while characterizing the pollution problem itself as now a state issue. That jurisdictional split sits atop a messier paper trail: a 2022 licensing agreement for the restaurant included repairs to drainage structures, plumbing and utilities, and allocated $200,000 toward that work, with the operator required to fix two failing manholes within the first year. A July 2026 amendment to that licensing agreement reportedly stated that both the vendor and the Parks Department knew a sewer line had collapsed.
A Sewer Problem With a Two-Decade Paper Trail
The whistleblower says parkgoers have used the polluted lake for more than 20 years, and that the restaurant’s plumbing troubles go back nearly that far. A plumber for the restaurant reportedly reported frequent pipe stoppages back in 2006, along with dishwasher blockages and mud pulled from the pipes at that time — details that, if accurate, suggest the sewer’s problems predate the current controversy by two decades…