New York City's Forgotten Island
Barren Island once served a vital industry and was home to a small immigrant community
Good Morning and Happy Friday Everyone! Welcome back to Circles in Space.
Today we’re focusing on a forgotten island that was once an integral part of New York City.
We begin this story of forgotten New York City history on a sandy, marshy island known to the Canarsie as Equendito or ‘broken lands’ located in today’s Jamaica Bay between Brooklyn and the Rockaway peninsula. The Canarsie fished and hunted on the island but likely didn’t have a permanent settlement there - the island frequently changed size and shape due to changing tides, currents, storms and wind. On May 13, 1664, a deed was signed transferring ‘ownership’ of Equendito from the Canarsie to Dutch settlers. The Dutch named the island Beeren Eylant, meaning Bears Island, the name later modified to English as Barren Island.
Miriam Sicherman in her book Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History describes the island’s essential role in New York City’s history and the self-sufficient community of immigrants and African-Americans who worked there. But ask any New Yorker to locate Barren Island on a map and they may be unable to do so. The island doesn’t exist anymore. In 1936 infamous power broker Robert Moses evicted the last islanders and the island was filled in and connected to mainland Brooklyn during the construction of the Marine Parkway Bridge. From the 1850s to the 1930s, Barren Island’s remote yet not-too-distant location was the perfect place for two industries which served the growing metropolitan - first, garbage processing and animal rendering facilities and later, Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport.
Barren Island’s Forgotten History
Images and credits at MiriamSicherman.com
Location
Barren Island was only accessible by boat until the Flatbush Avenue extension was completed in 1926. Poor weather including fog and ice made the island completely unreachable at times. There are stories of buildings suddenly being swallowed by the bay, quicksand, sandstorms and at least one person froze to death while trying to walk across the icy bay. Workers had no choice but to live on the island. Teachers at PS 120 lived in a house beside the school during the week and returned to their homes in Brooklyn on the weekend. There was no police station, firehouse, or hospital. No electricity. No roads. No water system. Most islanders rarely if ever visited other parts of the city and New Yorkers rarely visited the island either. Barren Island was a place unto its own - inside city boundaries but far enough away that city officials often neglected the island and the people who lived there.
Industry
In the 1850s, industrious entrepreneurs saw the island as the perfect place to open garbage processing and animal rendering facilities. Recent city health and sanitation reforms emphasized cleaning up the streets and finding a solution about what to do with garbage and dead horses and other animals. These reforms also moved ‘nuisance’ industries (named because of the smell) away from densely populated areas. At the time people thought that smell alone could cause disease. Barren Island became the center of the city’s waste management. Three facilities operated on the island. Garbage from Manhattan and Brooklyn arrived on barge to facilities which pressed and boiled garbage down into grease to be sold to other companies for soap, fertilizer and nitroglycerin during World War I. Horse and animal rendering facilities processed dead animals and sold the remainder to companies for glue, buttons and mattress stuffing. A fish facility also created fertilizer. These ‘nuisance’ industries were an essential part of the city’s health and waste management, recycling garbage and dead animals into useful products. When the garbage plants were inoperable, usually due to fire, the city had no other option than to dump garbage into the ocean. Until the garbage facility closed in 1919 and the horse factory in 1934, these industries and the workers who served them were the center of the Barren Island community.
Smell
Search Barren Island in city newspaper archives and you’ll likely read about the ‘pestilential’ smell. Neighboring communities and beachgoers in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island complained endlessly to city and state officials about the smell wafting across the bay and wreaking havoc on their lives. In 1879 a Barren Islander was thrown off a Brooklyn train because he reportedly smelled so bad. Since the islanders rarely remarked on the smell, reporters deduced that they must have gotten to used to it or ‘have absolutely no sense of smell’. Indeed, garbage and dead animals proliferated on the island and, to make matters worse, the New York Sanitary Utilization Company incinerated the remainder of the garbage after processing.
Barren Islanders
In 1909 the city sent a health inspector to investigate reports of wild hogs roaming Barren Island and later dispatched police to eradicate them. Wild pigs were outlawed 50 years earlier. This anecdote is an introduction to the isolated, rural setting for Barren Island’s small community. At it’s height in 1910 the island was home to about 1800 people. Most were European immigrants from Poland, Italy and Germany or African-Americans from the South. Some immigrants arrived at Ellis Island and went straight to work at Barren Island. Islanders swam in the bay, fished, raised animals, and planted gardens - quite the contrast to the typical immigrant experience in crowded Lower East Side tenements. Children collected driftwood to heat homes or sorted through garbage mounds for useful scraps. Islanders built their own homes, roads, wells and rainwater collection tanks. During fires, the islanders formed bucket brigades. Most islanders worked in the factories but a few ran stores, hotels or acted as nurses and doctors, serving the needs of the community since travel to Brooklyn wasn’t always gauraunteed. Due to Barren Island’s location, smell, and immigrant community, city officials and residents neglected and looked down upon the islanders. Sicherman cites dozens of news articles which described the islanders as smelly, disgusting, slow-witted people who lived in shacks and needed to be ‘Americanized’. The islanders performed duties that other Americans wouldn’t and created a multi-cultural community relying upon each other for necessary services.
Aviation
If you search Floyd Bennett Field on Google Maps, the center of the derelict airport still bears the name Barren Island. Following the extension of Flatbush Avenue to Barren Island, the city began searching for sites for the first municipal airport. Barren Island was a possible location since the city already owned the land. In fact, there was already a private airstrip on the island. The city’s aeronautical advisor, pilot Clarence Chamberlin, recommended Barren Island and the decision was made in 1928. Sicherman points out that news accounts described the island as essentially abandoned and a ‘desert wasteland’. On June 26, 1930 Floyd Bennett field opened to much fanfare; Admiral Richard E. Byrd led the ceremony (Floyd Bennett and Admiral Byrd made the first flight to the North Pole together) and Charles Lindberg performed an air show. The airport officially opened in 1931 but wasn’t much of a success. The US Navy took control of the airport in 1941 which remained in use as a Naval Air Reserve station until the 1970s. Floyd Bennett Field became part of Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972.
Once the garbage processing facility shut down in 1919, the future of Barren Island lay in the balance. Many islanders secured jobs elsewhere and moved away. The horse factory finally closed in the 1930s, the last of the ‘nuisance’ industries. After Flatbush Avenue was extended, a pier was built for a ferry to the Rockaways and next the city planned to build a bridge to the beaches. In the mid-1930s the city notified islanders that they could stop paying rent and many of them got the hint and moved. In March 1936, Robert Moses served the remaining islanders with an eviction notice giving them just two weeks to vacate. Jane Shaw, PS 120 principal and a respected leader within the Barren Island community, advocated to postpone the eviction until the end of the school year. The island was filled in with sand and landfill connecting it to mainland Brooklyn and the Marine Parkway Bridge was built. The old garbage factory smokestack, the last remaining vestige of Barren Island history, was destroyed in 1937. The US Navy evicted the remaining islanders who lived on private land until 1942. Today you can find horse bones and landfill on the beaches around Floyd Bennett Field and the Rockaway ferry pier supports are still visible.
Sicherman reminds us of the community of immigrants and African-Americans who created a home on Barren Island. They worked in the island’s ‘smelly’ factories and neglected though they performed essential recycling and waste management services. To demonstrate this point, Sicherman’s cites obviously-biased news articles which reminds us of rhetoric still heard today towards those who are ‘different’, ‘poor’ or ‘un-American’. Another New York City island which has a poor reputation solely because of it’s garbage dump comes to mind. Sicherman points out that New York City really hasn’t gotten much better at waste management; instead of carting it off to Barren or Staten Island, most of it is shipped to out-of-state landfills.
One thing we can learn from Barren Island is that a community is made by the people who live there, not by City Hall.
That’s all for this week! Hope you enjoyed this history of Barren Island.
Until next time,
Keith
Sources
Wow very interesting! Never knew about any of these "Nuisance Industries" lol. I just saw a plaque near Battery Park for Floyd Bennet's ticker tape parade when he returned from the North Pole.
Powerful story, Keith. The resilience shown by people who are willing to endure great hardship to survive life in America is something so important to remember. Thank you for sharing your research.