Standing on New Dorp Beach, among the sea glass, the tampon applicators, the Gatorade bottles, it is possible to see remnants of the St. John’s Guild Children’s Hospital. Built in the late 19th century as a stationary counterpart to the Floating Hospital that once docked just off-shore, the institution was also known by a more romantic name: Seaside Hospital. There are metal pipes, the bases of columns, cracked bits of foundation, bricks. There is the breeze, recalling the fresh-air initiative that sought to give sick city-dwelling children a respite from their crowded tenements. And there is the sea.

But, abandoned after a brief tenure housing Italian POWs after the Second World War, knocked down to make way for a never-realized Robert Moses highway, the hospital is more ghost than anything.

Trudging across its now-littered footprint onto adjacent Cedar Grove Beach, the sand brightens, the space widens and history draws closer. For nearly one hundred years, generations of families summered in the idyllic bungalows of the Cedar Grove Beach Club until, for the sake of that phantom highway, their property was seized by the city under eminent domain. Rather than return the homes when its plans didn’t materialize, the city turned the bungalows over to the Parks Department. Residents leased them back, caring for the beach and nurturing their summer community, until, for reasons unknown, they were evicted in 2010.

The historic homes languish behind a chain link fence, boarded up, just beyond reach. HBO’s Boardwalk Empire filmed in one, and the beach, untouched by any official parks maintenance, remains clean due only to the efforts of HBO. As the homes begin to be stripped, former residents worry that proper precautions aren’t being taken against asbestos and lead. They remember the sofas, bed-frames and wind-chimes they left behind, the cabins largely emptied of mementos accumulated over decades. They remember the families that had for generations made this place a home together each summer. The former residents of Cedar Grove Beach Club still gather elsewhere for events and celebrations, still hope to win back what’s left of these buildings and rebuild their homes. But it is not hard to imagine that, before long, the well-loved slats, shingles, and beams of these bungalows will follow Seaside Hospital into the Lower Bay, drifting out of time and into memory.

-adapted from information given by Jen Fitzgerald, David Young, Josh Jakob and Eleanor Dugan, Obscura Day 2012.

In the 17th century, Coney Island Creek was a small waterway that ended near what is now Cropsey Avenue. It was then dug into a straight that connected Sheepshead Bay to Gravesend Bay, making Coney Island an actual island. Because it was unnavigable, there was talk of widening it into a canal for shipping, but that never happened—once the five boroughs consolidated in 1898, this area lost its economic importance so there was no reason to turn it into a major shipping area. The creek was broken up by landfills over the years, then, in the 1950s, filled in and closed off for the construction of Shore Parkway—today, it is the two remaining inlets at either end.

It seems fitting that Coney Island Creek, home to an improbable collection of ghost ships, a stranded submarine and other haunting nautical detritus, was once known as Gravesend Creek. Over the years, not only ships have wound up in this watery grave, but many souls as well. In 1900, two women, ejected from a trolley for refusing to pay their fare, were run over on the trestle above the Creek, and fell in, dead. Accident-prone excursionists, strangulation victims, capsized picnickers and the downtrodden elite alike met their ends here. In 1895, a bereft Calvert Vaux, designer of Central Park, went for a walk along the water and was later found floating. Was it accident or suicide? We’ll never know.

Coney Island Creek has been the site of not only ghostly, but earthly sordid activity, as well. During Prohibition, Rum Row was a flotilla of schooners sitting off shore from Atlantic City up to Martha’s Vineyard, full of liquor from Canada, the Caribbean and Europe. It was brought into the city by big time mafia bootleggers like Frank Castello, head of Luciano crime family, and Big Bill Dwyer, who owned, among other sports teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers football team and controlled all rum-running in New York. Frankie Yale—the Undertaker—who owned a Coney Island dive at the waters’ edge where Al Capone had his first job, assisted the rum runners and was later gunned down by a rival on Crospey Ave. Many small time operators made rum-runs, too, with the same boats they used for fishing expeditions, helping liquor disperse into Long Island before it ever made it to the rest of the city. In the 1920s, we could have stood on this shore and watched rum-runners speed by being chased by the Coast Guard or hijackers.

From the 1890s to the 1950s, Brooklyn Borough Gas produced gas beside Coney Island Creek leeching pollution into it. People would bring their boats here to clean them with the corrosive sludge from the bottom of the creek. When the Verrazano Bridge was being built in the early sixties, excavated debris from the construction was dumped in the Creek. Area locals also remember that time as when the ghost ships started to turn up there. It was an anonymous dumping ground for these ships—some of them are said to be whaling ships—whose owners wanted to be rid of their bones. They’d either leave them to rot or burn them down to the waterline. Although the Army Corps of Engineers has studied ships abandoned in other parts of the city, it hasn’t been profitable to do it here, so these ships remain unidentified. These days, the creek is so polluted that the city is wary of moving the wrecks for fear of unleashing dormant toxins in the sludge around them.

And what of the Creek’s most famous denizen, the yellow submarine? It is one shipwreck begotten by another. In 1956, the ocean liner Andrea Doria collided with a second ship and never made it to the Port of New York, sinking in the Atlantic along with its valuable cargo. A decade later, Brooklyn dreamer and shipyard worker Jerry Bianco set out to claim some of that treasure for himself. Using repurposed material, bargain yellow paint and his maritime know-how, Bianco built a submarine on the banks of Coney Island Creek. Sadly, without enough ballast to keep it level, the submarine tipped and became stuck. After several further attempts, a storm quashed Bianco’s ambitions, tearing the submarine from the shore and lodging it in the mud, where it still sits, forty years later.

Today, gulls nest in the ribs of whalers, blue crabs scuttle in and out of the submarine and, atop of a submerged barge, enough debris has accumulated to form a brand new island. As so often happens in New York City, life perseveres in Coney Island Creek alongside all of the ghosts.

Underwater New York led an exploration of The Ghost Ships of Coney Island Creek for Obscura Day 2011. Documentation of that trip is forthcoming. In the meantime, check outphotographs by UNY’s own Adrian Kinloch, who has long been inspired by the Creek. This recent one of the island growing from a submerged barge at night is particularly stunning. Several historical, and hilarious, articles about Coney Island Creek appear on this site–to hear even more, visit Underwater New York under the Featured tab on Broadcastr.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Coney Island Creek Park.” www.nycgovparks.org. Web 27 March 2011
Lamb, Jonah Owen. “The Ghost Ships of Coney Island Creek.” New York Times. 6 August 2006. Web 27 March 2011.
Moynihan, Colin. “In Coney Island Creek, Hulk of Yellow Submarine Sticks Out.” New York Times. 9 November 2007. Web 27 March 2011.
“Two Women Killed by Car.” New York Times. 22 June 1900. Web 27 March 2011.
“The Yellow Submarine of Coney Island Creek.” forgotten-ny.com. Web 27 March 2011.

Dead Horse Bay marks the site of what once was Barren Island. What is now Floyd Bennett Airfield used to be watery marshland separating a series of small islands from mainland Brooklyn–Barren Island was the largest. Its name comes from a corruption of the Dutch word for bear–only much later did the English meaning of the term come to apply.

From the 1850s until the last residents were evicted in 1936, Barren Island was a community built on trash, home to dozens of factories and rendering plants. At its height during WWI, it took in all of the household trash of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the daily remains of all five borough’s animal dead. This refuse was sorted and rendered and converted to major profits as glycerin, fertilizer and glue by a community of immigrants–mostly Polish, Italian and Irish, with a small population of blacks–who lived on the island and worked its factories. Tasks were sorted according to social rank, with black families getting the worst job, converting daily tons of dead fish to fertilizer. Second to that was the job of rag-pickers, who used their bare hands to feel for and sort out valuable fabric from the garbage; comparatively less horrifying were the jobs of sorting bone and scavenging metal and paper. The smell from the island was so intense that at one point a group on mainland Brooklyn calling itself the Anti-Barren Island League held considerable sway in city politics, continually proposing legislation to close down the island or somehow curb the stench.

Residents of Barren Island were completely separated from mainstream life in the city, and their daily reality was as distinct as if it were another country: at the turn of the last century, the island had no electricity, no post office, no doctors or nurses, four saloons, five factories boiling vats of garbage day and night, and a one-room schoolhouse. School let out early so children could help their parents sort garbage. After 91 other teachers turned the post down, in 1918, “Lady Jane,” “the Angel of Barren Island,” came to teach. She lived in downtown Brooklyn, and taught children and families in Barren Island piano, dance, etc.

In that same year, the city stopped sending garbage there, and all but one factory, a horse rendering plant, closed. Chemical compounds were replacing natural materials for cleaning and the automobile had cut way down on the number of horses needed, and therefore dying, in the city. In 1926, the waters around Barren Island were filled in with garbage, sand and coal to make what’s now Floyd Bennett Field. In 1936, Robert Moses ordered evacuation of residents to build Marine Park Bridge, the island’s cottages were bulldozed and everyone was scattered. In the 1950s, a cap on one of the landfills burst, littering Dead Horse Bay with eras of waste, which continually washes ashore here.

Urban explorers are drawn to Dead Horse Bay because the trash that litters its shores–toys, shoes, bottles and bones–gives them glimpses into the everyday of New Yorkers of decades past. But, not everything that washes up there is quite so “everyday.” In 1830, the pirate Charles Gibbs ran his (pirated) ship aground on a sandbar near Rockaway point after murdering the captain and first mate, a crime for which he was later sentenced to the death and hung. Before he was captured, though, Gibbs and his cohorts made it to shore on Barren Island, where they are said to have buried $50,000 worth of gold coins. Legends dispute where the treasure was buried and what was its fate. But, in 1986, treasure hunters were tantalized when a gold coin was found along the southern shore.

Please peruse Underwater New York to find work inspired by the many strange objects that have turned up on the shores of Dead Horse Bay!

Sources: 

FYI, New York Times, All The Dead Horses, New York Times, Atlas Obscura