Barren Island, Brooklyn
Barren Island is a peninsula and former island on the southeast shore of Brooklyn in New York City. Located on Jamaica Bay, it was geographically part of the Outer Barrier island group on the South Shore of Long Island. The island was occupied by the Lenape Native Americans prior to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th century. Its name is a corruption of Beeren Eylandt, the Dutch-language term for "Bears' Island".
Barren Island remained sparsely inhabited before the 19th century, mainly because of its relative isolation from the rest of the city. Starting in the 1850s, the island was developed as an industrial complex with fish rendering plants and other industries, and also as an ethnically diverse community of up to 1,500 residents. Between the mid-19th century and 1934, the island housed industrial plants that processed the carcasses of the city's dead horses, converting them into a variety of industrial products. This activity led to the still-extant waterbody on the island's western shore becoming nicknamed "Dead Horse Bay". A garbage incinerator, which became the subject of numerous complaints because of its odor, operated on the island from the 1890s to 1921.
The Barren Island community became known as South Flatlands during its final years. By the 1920s, most of the industrial activity had tapered off, and landfill was used to unite the island with the rest of Brooklyn. While most residents were evicted in the late 1920s for the construction of Floyd Bennett Field, some were permitted to stay until 1942, when the airfield was expanded as a wartime base of the United States Navy. No trace remains of the former island's industrial use. Since 1972, Floyd Bennett Field has been part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service.
Geography and ecology
Barren Island was originally part of an estuary at the mouth of Jamaica Bay and acted as a barrier island for the larger Long Island, located to Barren Island's north. The bay, in turn, was created during the end of the Wisconsin glaciation. The edge of the glacier had been in the middle of Long Island, creating a series of hills across the island. The water from the melting glacier ran downhill toward a low-lying delta that adjoined the Atlantic Ocean, which later became Jamaica Bay. A body of water called Rockaway Inlet, located south of the island, connected the bay with the ocean. By the late 17th century, Barren Island had of salt meadows and of uplands, as well as cedar forests. Salt, reed grasses, and hay served as food for early settlers' livestock.File:Gateway National Recreation Area Jamaica Bay Unit map.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|left|alt=Map of the Gateway National Recreation Area's Jamaica Bay unit, with Barren Island depicted in the lower left corner as "Floyd Bennett Field"|Map of the Gateway National Recreation Area's Jamaica Bay unit; Barren Island was located near where Floyd Bennett Field is now
Barren Island's geography was significantly altered by shifting tides and storms in the 19th century. Originally, it was part of the Outer Barrier, a series of barrier islands on Long Island's southern shore. Barren Island, the Rockaways, Pelican Beach, and Plumb Beach were separate barrier islands protecting Jamaica Bay. In an 1818 survey of Long Island, Barren Island was described as having dunes and scattered trees. By 1839, Barren Island, Plumb Beach, and Pelican Beach were a single island, separated from Coney Island to the west by Plumb Beach Inlet. By the end of the century, Gerritsen Inlet had formed, separating Barren Island from Plumb and Pelican Beaches.
The neighboring island of Rockaway Beach also had a large impact on Barren Island's geography. Originally, Rockaway was located to Barren's east, and the two islands' southern tips were aligned. From the mid-19th century, Rockaway Beach was extended more than to the southwest after several jetties were built to protect manmade developments there. This caused changes to Barren Island's ecology, because during the early 20th century, it had contained sand dunes on the coasts and salt marshes inland. As a result of the extension of Rockaway Beach, Barren Island was no longer a barrier island and its beach was washed away.
By the late 1920s, industrial development on Barren Island's eastern side had transformed that area, with a small patch of dunes remaining. The western side of the island, containing dunes, woods, and wetlands, was largely untouched. The southern coast contained a tidal creek stretching into the center of the island, where the tidal wetlands remained mostly intact. The wetlands were abutted by the human-made Mill Basin to the north. Tidal creeks also stretched across the island's marshes, although one of these creeks was bisected by the construction of Flatbush Avenue in 1925. In addition, the water adjoining the northern and western coasts had become heavily polluted. The entirety of the former island, covering, was converted to a peninsula during the 1920s. It is occupied by Floyd Bennett Field, which in turn is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.
Name
The Barren Island area was originally the homeland of the Canarsee, a group of Lenape Native Americans, who referred to the archipelago of islands near it by a name alternatively transcribed as "Equandito", "Equendito", or "Equindito", which means "Broken Lands". This name also applied to several smaller islands in the area, such as Mill Island. Throughout its existence, Barren Island has also been referred to as "Broken Lands" in English, as well as "Bearn Island", "Barn Island", and "Bear's Island". The name "Barren Island" is a corruption of the Dutch Beeren Eylandt; it does not relate to the English word describing the geography of the island.Settlement
A State University of New York study stated that the indigenous Canarsee likely used Barren Island to fish. In 1636, as New Netherland was expanding outward from present-day Manhattan, Dutch settlers founded the town of Achtervelt and purchased around Jamaica Bay north of Barren Island. Amersfoort was centered around the present-day intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Flatlands Avenue, approximately northwest of Barren Island. In 1664, New Netherland became the English Province of New York, and Amersfoort was renamed Flatlands. The island, as well as nearby Mill Basin, was sold to John Tilton Jr. and Samuel Spicer that year.Canarsee leaders had signed 22 land agreements with Dutch settlers by 1684, which handed ownership of much of their historic land, including Barren Island, to the Dutch. Barren Island was one of the first barrier islands to be settled because it was easily accessible. At low tide, people on mainland Brooklyn could walk across a shallow stream, while at high tide, small craft could access the northern coast and larger craft could dock on the southern coast.
Barren Island, as well as nearby Mill Island and Bergen Island, were part of the Town of Flatlands. By the 1670s, all three islands were leased by a settler named Elbert Elbertse. Records from 1679 indicate that Elbertse had complained that other settlers were going to Barren Island to let their horses graze on his land. The settler William Moore started digging sand from the island in the 1740s. Moore characterized the island as "vacant and unoccupied" in 1762, and it remained as such until the end of that century, being used mainly as a grazing field. Even during the first half of the 19th century, the island had few residents. Circa 1800, a man named Nicholas Dooley established an inn and entertainment venue for fishermen and hunters on the east side of Barren Island; the house's ownership later passed to the Johnson family. Two more residences were built on the island before 1860, for the Skidmore and Cherry families. Maps from that time do not show any other human-made structures on Barren Island.
The National Park Service states that the pirate Charles Gibbs buried Mexican silver on the island. According to an 1839 account, some of the treasure was later recovered. A handbook from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle states that a portion of the treasure was retrieved in 1842, while the remainder was never found.
Fish-oil and fertilizer plants
The naturally deep Rockaway Inlet, combined with the remoteness of Barren Island from the rest of the developed city, made the island suitable for industrial uses. An isolated settlement on the island was developed in the late 19th century. From 1859 to 1934, approximately 26 industries had opened facilities on Barren Island, mostly on the eastern and southern coasts. Few industrial sectors were enticed to move to Barren Island, precisely because of its isolation: there were no direct land routes to the rest of the city. Waste management was the sole industry for which Barren Island was an ideal location, and became its main industry.The island's first main industrial use was for fish rendering plants, as well as for fertilizer plants that processed offal products. The fish rendering plants processed schools of menhaden, a type of fish that was caught off the coast of Long Island, and turned them into fish oil or scraps. Meanwhile, the fertilizer plants turned horse bones into glue, as well as fertilizer, buttons, and materials for refining gold and sugar. The plants processed almost 20,000 horse corpses annually at their peak, leading to the nickname "Dead Horse Bay" for the still-extant water body on the island's western shore, since the waste processors on the island would simply dump the processed waste into that bay. By the late 1850s, two plants had been built on the island. The plant on the eastern shore was operated by Lefferts R. Cornell and processed animal carcases; after the facility was destroyed by fire in 1859, Cornell moved his factory to Flatbush. The other corpse-processing plant, on the western shore, was operated by William B. Reynolds and ceased operations during the 1860s. These fertilizer factories were the first buildings on Barren Island for which the town of Flatlands imposed property taxes.
Ownership of part of the island passed in 1861 to Francis Swift. No new factories were developed until at least 1868, when Smith & Co. opened a fish-processing factory. Steinfield and Company operated a factory from 1869 to 1873, but its purpose is unknown. A person named Simpson opened a factory on Barren Island in 1870, which closed two years later. Swift and E. P. White also created their own fertilizer factory in 1872, which operated until the 1930s. A factory belonging to the Products Manufacturing Company, located where Flatbush Avenue is now, was reportedly the world's largest carcass-processing plant. Through the 1870s, eight more factories opened on the island, of which two operated only briefly. Barren Island's factories, which were vulnerable to landslides, fires, or waves from high-tide, typically lasted for fleeting periods of time. White's factory burned down in 1878 and was soon rebuilt. By 1883, the island's oil factories hired a combined 350 men and collectively used 10 steamships.
The waste-processing factories on Barren Island supported a small but thriving community, which was clustered on the island's southeastern coast. In a census conducted by the town of Flatlands in 1870, it was noted than 24 people, all single men who had immigrated from Europe, lived in a single residence and likely worked at an oil factory on Barren Island. A subsequent census in 1880 counted six households that were entirely composed of single men, as well as 17 families, and found that 309 people resided on the island. That same year, it was recorded that the island had three fish oil factories and four fertilizer plants. The development of Barren Island continued in tandem with the population growth: in 1878, there were six large structures on the island's southern and eastern coasts, in contrast to the single hotel that had been reported in the 1852 map. By 1884, five hundred people worked on the island. The 1892 New York state census recorded four large "clusters" of laborers, from the same countries as the 1880 census, who resided in the same households on Barren Island.
The Rockaway Park Improvement Company complained in 1891 that the "offensive" smells from Barren Island were ruining the quality of life for vacationers in the Rockaways, located across the Rockaway Inlet from Barren Island. The New York State Health Board composed a report about the status of the industries on Barren Island. Subsequently, New York Governor David B. Hill declared four companies to be "public nuisances", ordering twice-weekly inspections of their factories to ensure that the companies complied with health regulations.