The first pamphlet of the year covers Floyd Bennett and Dead Horse Bay, and I hope will be a decent introduction to Jamaica Bay in general. A. Many have gone in the mail already, and more are about to go out soon enough. From the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth, this was the remote area of town where New York City shipped its garbage, to be transformed through a process known as waste reduction. An entire community lived out here, isolated from the rest of Brooklyn, working in the factories that dealt with the inevitable by-products of city living. Next Sunday, May 21st I’m going to do a walking tour of Dead Horse Bay and Floyd Bennett Field. We’ll look at some old airplanes and listen to the glass tinkle. The remaining bones were chopped up and dumped into the nearby water, hence the name Dead Horse Bay. Dead Horse Bay is a small water body off Barren Island, between the Gerritsen Inlet and Rockaway Inlet in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. They still wash up, too. The end was nigh, however: The last horse-rendering plant closed in 1921, a victim of the automobile, and the planning czar Robert Moses condemned most of the former island in 1936 to build what’s now known as the Gil Hodges-Marine Parkway Bridge. Luckily, new pamphlets are here, just in time to answer all your lingering waste reduction questions. 24 reviews of Dead Horse Bay "There's a hidden beach at Dead Horse Bay. History washes up on this shoreline every single day. [4] [5] How the trucking company got its name remains in dispute. But just a few decades later, trash was spewing into the ocean and washing ashore. But these water-worn vertebrae and dislocated sockets aren’t some quirk of the ecosystem. The island reached its peak of activity during World War I thanks to the military’s need for explosive nitroglycerin, derived in part from boiled garbage. A. You can hear the tinkling of glass as the water laps the shoreline. Dead Horse Bay is a beach in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn. Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn has a beach with thousands of bottles and pieces of sea glass. Email me at sarah at sarah nicholls dot com to RSVP so I know that you’re coming. Another find from Dead Horse Bay. Their bones were thrown into the bay. Dead Horse Bay had a Dutch tide mill in the 17th century for making flour. But don't come here with a picnic blanket and open-toed shoes. The most cited theory appears to be that the area takes its name from a local business prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s, the "Dead Horse Haulers" trucking company. Learn how your comment data is processed. Well it used to be the site of the rendering plants for NYC carriage horses in the late 1800s/early 1900s. They’ve caught the eyes of visitors and have sparked work from writers and artists. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Back in the 19th century, a substantial portion of the city's oysters and other seafood came from these waters. On the upside, most families could brag of owning expensive items they had salvaged from the trash; jewelers’ representatives were known to visit the island to buy particularly valuable accessories. Researching. Feral dogs roamed the island; domesticated pigs and cows feasted at the community’s refuse heap. Because of this, the water that surrounded the island was called Dead Horse Bay. Dead Horse Bay sits at the western edge of a marshland once dotted by more than two dozen horse-rendering plants, fish oil factories and garbage incinerators. That is my understanding as to why it is called Dead Horse Point. What was then a marshy landmass called “Barren Island” was filled in with garbage and connected to mainland Brooklyn. Join me as I sift through the sand to find remnants of the past. In the 1950s, Moses used garbage to further expand the area’s land, but for some reason covered it … Are you curious as to why the spot is called Dead Horse Bay? A soccer ball, broken bottles and other trash wash ashore at Dead Horse Bay. The bay was given its name sometime in the 1850s, when horse-rendering plants still surrounded the beach. Dead Horse Bay refers to the dead animals brought here on barges to Jamaica Bay to be boiled down into new industrial products. Bay A bay is a red(ish) horse with a Black mane and tail and also black lower legs. Come instead with a sense of adventure and an appreciation for history. Dead Horse Bay is known for the items that have washed ashore, including numerous glass bottles and other lost treasures. The small bay and uplands (138.8 acres) directly across Flatbush Avenue from the main entrance to Gateway National Recreation Area and Floyd Bennett Field, is Dead Horse Bay.The bay has the reputation of attracting disoriented birds, such as Red-necked Grebe and Surf and White-winged Scoters, from late autumn through winter. The black areas of a bay horse are referred to a "points". The island was the site of Dutch tidal mills in the 17th century, and its industrial period began with two horse-rendering plants in the late 1850s. It is named, prosaically, for the glue factory detritus that littered its shores in the nineteenth century. Things got even worse in 1896, when Barren Island began accepting refuse from Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. We’ll meet at the 2 train station on Flatbush to take the bus down Flatbush together at 11am. Opponents thought the name was too restrictive for a group that represents all of Prudhoe Bay and the Kuparuk oilfields as well. Would you like to know more? And there are streams of people taking old glass bottles and carts of random finds. It harkens back to the 1800s, when dead horses from around New York City were sent to a lonely, remote place called Barren Island to be processed and made into things like glue and fertilizer. The school, which had trouble keeping a teacher for an extended length of time, originally sat in a depression that routinely flooded with every high tide. Oh, and why is Dead Horse Bay called Dead Horse Bay? Welcome to Dead Horse Bay. Proponents cited the color and uniqueness of the name. Dead Horse Bay.Located between the Marine Park and Jamaica Bay in southern Brooklyn sits a 20th-century landfill known as Dead Horse Bay. The name is an evocative, and quite literal, one. Required fields are marked *. This tiny plastic shoe was found washed up on Dead Horse Bay in south Brooklyn, one of the best places in the city to find old things. The southern tip of the new peninsula was used as an active landfill from the 1930s to the early 50s. Dead Horse Bay has one other dubious claim to fame. According to the New York Times, From the 1850’s until the 1930’s, the carcasses of dead horses and other animals from New York City streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer and other products at the site. The immigrant and black populations of the island also appear to have gotten along in a way largely unknown to the rest of the country at the time. Before there was an airport here, this piece of land was a separate island called Barren Island. (It remains a place of eerie pilgrimage, where urban explorers mine the castoff bits of Brooklyn life that time and tide have rendered somehow beautiful. Dead Horse Bay refers to the dead animals brought here on barges to Jamaica Bay to be boiled down into new industrial products. Best place to buy and sell a horse of all breeds and disciplines- Horses for sale Workers would place the horse bodies in large vats and boil them until the fat could be removed for use in fertilizer, glue and oils; they would then chop up the bones and dump them into the nearby water. At its busiest, the island processed nearly 20,000 horse carcasses in a single year. This Randonautica Experience was very Scary.It took me to a dark Abandoned Place.Do not listen to Randonautica app.I was terrified going their alone.This Abandoned Beach was called the Dead Horse Bay. And more importantly, would you like to see these places for yourself? Once that business became defunct, the area was turned into a landfill. Located on the shore of what was once known as Barren Island, it was named for the horse-rendering plants that operated along the coastline from the 1850s until the early 1900s. A recent North Bay Business Journal article on Mare Island’s development found there were more than 3,000 jobs on the peninsula, a far cry from the approximately 10,000 jobs there in … Your email address will not be published. If you look closely through the garbage that carpets Dead Horse Bay, you can actually find equine remains. Dead Horse Bay is a small body of water in between two inlets near Jamaica Bay in South Brooklyn. More Like This. There was – and is – an inlet east of Sheepshead Bay called Dead Horse Bay. Not that anyone seems to be paying attention. Factories on the island basically boiled animal carcasses and other organic materials down into grease, oils, and fertilizer, substances that could be reused. Q. The trail to Dead Horse Bay is easy to overlook, but Gerard Barbot knows the way. So that was Dead Horse Bay. Today scavengers flock to the beach to collect things; they find a small beach covered in old bottles, stockings, leather shoe soles, an engine or two, the occasional boat. It charms because it is a place to sit alone, or to walk over stories, with water, and wildlife and plants, and the knowledge that you are still in New York City. I hope you enjoy them, I think they turned out quite nice. The shores of Dead Horse Bay are strewn with copious amounts of glass bottles, vintage housewares, toys, animal bones, and many other obscure items–all of which were disposed of nearly a century ago. Yet at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, NY garbage is the main attraction. As for the drinking water, one visitor told The Brooklyn Eagle in 1901, “Usually it tastes like oil, though sometimes by way of variation it is flavored much more horribly.”. Soda bottles, prescription vials, porcelain figures — most in shards, some still intact — and other discarded items now litter “Bottle Beach,” a sight that is particularly spectacular at low tide. How did Dead Horse Bay, just off the edge of southern Brooklyn, get its name? In their article, they explain that this particular area in Brooklyn was once the home of many horse rendering plants (back when we had more horses than cars) and was the resting places of the leftover horse remains, hence the name Dead Horse Bay. And it’s now off-limits, because radiation. The two dozen families who stayed left their clapboard houses in 1942. Recently featured in Atlas Obscura, the bay has become a sort of mecca for those looking for unusual things to do in NYC.The beach is situated next to an old landfill and it is covered with old bottles, old toys, even old bicycles. Toy mouse, Dead Horse Bay Adrian Kinloch This creature’s domain is Dead Horse Bay , a name derived from the thousands of horse carcasses dumped here some 70 years ago . Angry neighbors formed a single-issue group called the Anti-Barren Island League, vowing to back any candidate who would address the nuisance. Though it seems abandoned and neglected, this bit of land is technically under the auspices of the National Park Service, and it is technically illegal to take things from a National Park. The topsoil cap on this landfill burst in the 1950’s, and decades of trash started leaking into the sea. As nauseating as Barren Island was for those downwind, it must have been excruciating for those poor, unfortunate souls who lived and worked there, as many as 2,000 at one time. At its peak, Barren Island was home … In fact there‘s one right next to the big green bottle in the back. “Hundreds of thousands have had an olfactory introduction to Barren Island, though few have ever visited it,” The Times wrote in 1890. The Prudhoe Bay Community Council recently voted to change its name to “Deadhorse Community Council”. In the 1950s, Moses used garbage to further expand the area’s land, but for some reason covered it with only topsoil. After the waste reduction factories were closed to appease communities living upwind, there was still a landfill on the island, a landfill which closed in the thirties when Robert Moses evicted the remaining inhabitants and bulldozed their homes. And, yes, a horse bone shows up from time to time. Jobs at the plants included reducing dead fish into fertilizer, usually considered the least desirable deed, and “rag-picking”: sifting through the garbage with bare hands to rescue valuable cloth materials. You realize that this trash was once just that: Trash, thrown away. The marshy area was filled in with garbage in the 1920s, but at some point, the landfill cap ruptured. Barren Island was selected largely for its location, distant from the main centers of population. It’s these items that attract hundreds of people each week. You realize that there is another sub life carrying on despite you and the millions. "The irony," Golia says, is that Jamaica Bay — the larger body of water where Dead Horse Bay lies — "is one of the more polluted places in the area, but it's still a really abundant and diverse ecosystem." Detached from the rest of New York City, the bay is covered with thousands of broken bottles, shards of glass, and other indecomposable remains. Date of experience: May 2015 The chopped-up, boiled bones were later dumped into the water. The stench depressed property values in the Rockaways and was blamed for illnesses in Brooklyn beach communities. Dead Horse Bay is a small body of water in Brooklyn that got its name from the horse rendering plants that were on the former Barren Island in Jamaica Bay near the shoreline of … The bay horse's body will be the same color as the chestnuts above and can vary to the same degree. Many horses were left there when food and water ran out and as a result many horses died and or jumped off the cliff. Erosion has released much of that trash, which collects on the bay’s eastern shore. Inside Dead Horse Bay, One of America’s Most Polluted National Parks Theodore Roosevelt once called the island a "nuisance of the worst kind." Dead Horse Bay has one other dubious claim to fame. But as more processing facilities came into operation and the metropolitan area sprawled, the island began to attract unwanted attention. Your email address will not be published. I hope you can make it. Connected by fill to the mainland in 1926 to build Floyd Bennett Field, Barren Island was once so wretched, its odor elicited complaints from people living miles away. Across the street from Floyd Bennett Field are the remnants of an earlier piece of history, a bit of beach called Dead Horse Bay. There’s a debate online about whether these people are removing history, taking archaeological items of interest from a National Park, or helping to clean a beach. Today, the shore is covered with old glass bottles and early plastic toys. An entire community lived out here, isolated from the rest of Brooklyn, working in the factories that dealt with the inevitable by-products of city living. They also have black "ear tips" meaning that the very tips of the ears will be black. Well, from dead horses, mostly chopped-up ones, that were processed on adjacent Barren Island. 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