1897 Watch by Joann Brosnan

Dan was a good father. He loved his two sons and worked hard to provide for them. When he left Ireland shortly before his seventeenth birthday, he had received his patrimony in the form of a brand new, gold-plated, pocket watch. This treasure had never left his possession.

Today, he walked the boardwalk, with his younger son on his hip. It was July of 1923, just twenty-six years from the day he had left home. As Dan strolled through the Sunday crowd, his wife and older son a few paces behind, the toddler on his hip laughed, spotting the balloon seller.

“Would you like one, Joseph,” Dan asked, and pulled a coin from his vest pocket. Joseph laughed again and pointed to a beautiful red one. Coin and balloon changed hands and Dan handed the string to his son. “Don’t let it go, now, Joseph,” he said.

Glancing at the sun’s angle, Dan reached into another pocket for his prized watch. Running his finger, lovingly over the inscribed date “1897”, he hadn’t yet opened it when the fates, in the form of a red, hydrogen-filled balloon and Dan’s lit cigar, collided explosively. The fiery bang, at the end of his nose, startled Dan badly enough that he dropped his son and staggered backwards. When the boardwalk railing hit his back, he lost his grip on the watch and it sailed into the air for several yards, landed on the boardwalk, slid another yard or two and dropped between two boards, and out of sight.

Dan’s first thought was for his son, who had landed well and now sat on the boardwalk, looking wide-eyed. “Bang, Daddy,” he said.  The second was the fate of his precious watch and in seconds, he had a small army searching the area under the boardwalk. They search for almost an hour, with no success; the watch never was found and Dan was forced to accept its loss. On the ride home, he held his son on his lap and, once, gave him a little squeeze. “I’ve got you,” he said.

Waiting by Nate Worrell

Benjamin watched the second hand step around the circle.   There was something comforting in its predictability.  He held the watch often for reassurance.  Over the years, the palm of his left hand had actually molded into a cup that fit the watch perfectly. He seemed to think as long as he saw the next second arrive, he wouldn’t be dead.   Coming to America was supposed to have given his family opportunity and freedom, but the slums had taken their toll.  His mother died of illness, his older brother was fatally stabbed in a knife fight, and his father took a cowards way out one rainy evening in April.  The only thing Benjamin had to live for was Ana, and she was due to arrive at Coney Island on the midday ferry.  Her letters gave him hope through the mud and the blood.  The ship’s horn groaned and Benjamin snapped the watch shut and placed it in his pocket.  He watched passengers stream off the boat, eagerly scanning for blond curls under a blue hat, which she promised to be wearing.  He never saw her.  He checked his watch again, making sure he had the right time and place.  He looked all over for her.  He waited all day, watching boat after boat empty and never a sign of her. He came back the next morning and the next.  For weeks, he waited for her counting the seconds between the arrivals and departures until he had their schedules memorized to the minute. Benjamin decided Christmas Eve would be the last time he would try to meet her.  It was bitterly cold, and he huddled on a bench. He shivered, alone, in the wind and icy rain.  At some point, he fell asleep, because a tap on the shoulder woke him up.  He squinted through the dreariness to see a soft face with blond curls under a blue hat.  His Ana had finally come.  He checked the watch to see what time it was, and noticed the second hand had stopped.

1897 Pocket Watch by Grady Yandell

An old man walks through empty stretches of lonely sand, remembering a night long ago. He wonders aloud. “Was it late summer, or was it early fall?” He sighs knowing recollections like time fade into the mist, but one memory refuses to die. “Melody.” Her name still brings tears to his ancient eyes. He stops near the broken pylons of a primeval pier. The sturdy dock is no longer here. Like his mind it was once so strong. Now their remains rests in depression.

“I never liked night swims so I watched Melody from here. My little bunny danced on the waves before they wrestled us to separate graves. Her watery crypt filled with a broken body and heart stopped. My body a lifeless tomb with a heart beating.” He looks left, then right. Lights from a distant ship twinkle with gathering stars in this eve’s twilight. “Alone with you forever Melody.”

First his shoes and socks come off. Then shirts and pants join them in the sand. He stops to look at his watch rusted from waters that stole his soul mate. Time frozen to the minute when their lives ended. He walks into the surf, fear in his cataract eyes. Frosty waters chill his bones, but he braves them, more afraid to be alone.

Inheritance by Rebecca Lynne Fullan

On his deathbed, our father held out his hand and called my youngest brother, Gregory.  Abernathy and I sat side by side in straight-backed chairs, in the tiring tension of a long death, eyes drooping, jaws clenched.

Our father’s mouth worked itself open.  Thin strings of spit hung from the top lip to the bottom, and yet his mouth looked frighteningly dry.

“The watch, for you,” he said to Gregory. It was a grand watch, bronzed and shining and engraved with our father’s initials.  It ticked with pleasant loudness.  When I was a child, I would wait until he took it out on our walks together and then thrust up my hand, laughing at the weight of the watch against my small palm.  We all three walked the Coney Island boardwalk with him on holidays, but only I played the watch game.

I’d expected to lose to Abernathy.  We were grown now, such games abandoned, and he was the eldest son, carrying my father’s name, though we shared his initials.

Gregory sobbed in strange, messy gasps.  He would never be grown, not really.  He did not take our father’s hand.  Gregory abhorred physical contact and would cry out as though it bruised him.

Our father smiled and held the watch out to him.  “Now you’ll always know what time it is, Greg,” he said.  I stood up.  Abernathy stood and took my arm, and I leaned against him.  He pulled me to a window seat, and we perched on the cushion.

“He’ll lose it,” I whispered.  “Or he’ll drop it—”

“I don’t want the watch,” Abernathy whispered back.  “It’s all right.”

Gregory was laughing now, persuaded to pleasure by some trick of our father’s, clutching the face of the watch in both his hands while our father held the chain.

“I want the watch,” I said, too-loudly, grabbing everyone’s attention.   “I want it.”

“Anne,” our father said.  His voice was angry despite its quiet rasp.

“I won’t get married,” I insisted.  “I won’t ever change my name.”  Gregory let go of the watch and put his hands over his ears.  Our father kept it from dropping.  “See?  You can’t trust Greg—”

Abernathy hit me.  He had a thin hand, but the force of the blow was surprising.  It drove tooth to cheek and filled my mouth with blood.

“That’s enough,” Abernathy said.  I stared.  Abernathy was quiet, kind.  He relied on me.

“Anne,” my father said, “Anne.  Anne?”  I went out of the room to clean my mouth.  He lived for a few more days in silence.  Gregory carried the watch constantly, and then one day he came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes.   It was the only time he’d touched me voluntarily.

“I gave it back to the water, where we walked,” he said, solemn, pleased.  “It’s fair.” A few days later, I noticed he didn’t have the watch anymore, but not one of us ever said anything about it.

The New York Times, August 23, 1942

At the end of what is frequently termed “the world’s biggest excursion for a nickel,” is Staten Island—this year coming into new prominence as a vacation objective. Remembered by old-timers as a place of big estates and old-fashioned farms, the island retains wooded stretches and grass uplands. Its highest hills still offer the fine panoramic vistas that attracted early settlers seeking a rural retreat within easy reach of Manhattan. Twenty minutes from the Battery, holiday-makers are finding a new field of exploration.

And surprises are in store for the Manhattanite who has never toured the island’s fifty-seven square miles. For the nature lover, there is contrast in the seascapes and the shoreline rising steeply to wooded hills. For the energetic excursionist there are plenty of amusements—South Beach with its boardwalk, picnic grounds and sports fields; thirty-five miles of water front; bathing beaches facing the open sea yet sheltered from heavy surf; Great Kills and Princes Bay with their protected harbors for small sail boats. Indeed the list is a long one.

Some of the early movies were filmed on the island and hard-riding cowboys whooped over hills that present-day hikers climb to view the bay and the skyline of Manhattan. Well-known are Wolfe’s Pond Park, Silver Lake Park and Dongan Hills. Todt Hill, on the ridge that runs across the center of the island, is said to be the highest point of land along the entire Atlantic Coast between Maine and the Florida Keys. At New Dorp and Tottenville, at Willowbrook and Richmondtown, are historic houses. One of them, Conference House, was reputedly the scene of a meeting called to discuss reconciliation between the Colonies and England. Today, horseback riders and golfers are keeping fit on acres where Benjamin Franklin and Admiral Howe once walked and talked.

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.

The New York Times, September 1, 1901

Nearly half a century has elapsed since the first fresh-air charity was instituted in New York by a kind-hearted editor who pitied the waifs playing about City Hall Park in sweltering midsummer days, whose little blistered feet might now run upon the cool grass beside them.

But for the saving help of the many fresh-air agencies in this city thousands of little ones would have perished during the recent hot wave which dealt suffering and death in unsparing measure in the crowded tenement districts of the city.

Nearly all the large churches in Manhattan conduct fresh-air charities for the poor of their districts, some for two weeks, some for the Summer, others for a day, but the burden of such work falls on the Children’s Aid Society, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, St. John’s Guild, St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Mont Lawn Home, Edgewater Creche and Gilbert Robertson Memorial Home. The great work of these associations is supplemented by many smaller ones, and the work of each rendered more effectual and far-reaching by co-operation made possible by the Charity Organization Society.

The Secretary of this association stated that during the hot spell not half his invitations to go to Bath Beach were accepted. The poor people were too prostrated by the heat to come for their tickets and make the journey thither. Mr. Brace of the Children’s Aid Society, on the contrary, was besieged by pale-faced, suffering children eager to go to Brace Farm for two weeks, and so distressing was their condition that the little ones were sent without regard to the adequacy of accommodations at the farm, and allowed to sleep in barns, out-houses, and anywhere about the house. Everything was cool, clean, and comfortable. Barns were like glimpses of paradise to the poor little waifs from east side sweat boxes.

The same state of affairs prevailed at Mont Lawn, near Nyack-on-the-Hudson, where for a number of years a home has been maintained in which 2000 children of the slums may spend two weeks. Some children have gone there eight successive years and show in every way the benefit which they have derived from their surroundings. When a child is over twelve years of age it is not eligible for Mont Lawn, although some young people are taken as helpers about the place.

Great care is exercised in selecting those who shall have charge of the children. They must be women of agreeable manners, sweet dispositions, refined, and highly educated. There is little actual study, but instruction is given in various ways.

All caretakers are salaried and number graduates of Pratt and Armour Institutes, Vassar, Smith and Teachers Normal Colleges, and occasionally public school Principals. The same set of teachers are retained as far as possible.

A child in Mont Lawn is never struck or spoken to harshly, and this law of love works wonders in the manners and morals of the little children of the slums.

Probably the only fresh air organization which takes whole families for a two weeks’ vacation is the Gilbert A. Robertson Home in Westchester County. Its managers state that if they had $500 more they could accommodate twice as many people. There is room enough, but not provisions enough. Families pay their own carfare, which they get at a reduction, and when more cannot be accommodated at the home board is secured for these in surrounding farmhouses for $1.50 to $3 per week apiece. The home entertains eighty-six families each season, numbering on an average 54 men, 86 women and 220 children. Some men only spend Sundays with their families. Besides these 4,670 transients are entertained for a day each. These visitors feast on fruit, vegetables, and milk raised on the place, drive about the country, or amuse themselves in the beautiful grounds. A little work is done, but almost the whole time is given up to enjoyment.

Thousands of working girls find rest and refreshment at several places conducted under the auspices of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society, while its sick and weakly members are cared for at the Santa Clara Home in the Adirondacks.

It is not possible to enumerate the lives saved by St. John’s Guild. Its two floating hospitals, the Emma Abbott and the Juliard (the latter donated by Mrs. Augustus D. Julliard) carry on an average 70,000 patients, and of these at least 5,000 are usually critically ill. Yet no deaths occur on these boats. Salt and medicated baths are given all; doctors and surgeons take women and children in charge, and the trained nurses speak between them seventeen languages, for the poor and often squalid and ignorant mothers speak seventeen separate tongues and cannot be won to confidence and contentment save by the language to which they are accustomed.

Many thousands of mothers and children are treated in the splendidly equipped hospital at New Dorp, Staten Island. But St. John’s Guild, like other fresh air charities, is hampered in perfecting and extending its good work by lack of funds. It needs more wards where mothers with very sick children may obtain isolation and quiet, just as the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor finds crying need for an isolation hospital where children suspected of having infectious diseases may be detained.

At Sea Breeze, LI, the association has at present but one room for that purpose, while among the poor families in their charge in this city are at present many cases of smallpox, measles, chickenpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and minor diseases. Sorting well from sick children is a difficult and dangerous task, and one which confronts every fresh air association.

The Association for improving the Condition of the Poor has spend $8,500 on improvements at Sea Breeze since last season, and now has 18 new bathhouses, one new suithouse, and a fine pavilion for children and mothers who come on day parties, and new fences around its property.

Last season 17,814 people enjoyed the day trips, and 1,510 spent two weeks each. As an average 5,300 have an outing of two weeks at Sea Breeze, Bath Beach, and the home for crippled children.

Edgewater Creche on the Hudson, opposite Fort Lee Ferry landing, has for seventeen years proved a blessing to little ones and their mothers or caretakers who flock there to the number of 10,192 in a season. Tickets to the crèche are furnished by the Charity Organization Society, and 7,000 children, attended by parents, sisters, hospital nurses, or missionaries, enjoy the shady playgrounds, bathing pools, pavilion, hammocks, and cribs provided by the crèche. Lunches and milk are furnished for a few pennies, and nothing is lacking to insure comfort and health. Mothers with sick infants are kept at the crèche until they can be sent to some fresh-air home for treastment.

Always most interesting is the word done by the Children’s Aid Society, who have nine agents in this and six Western cities seeking out and placing in good homes pauper children. More than 70,000 have been placed in homes during the past forty-seven years, and the city has been relieved of their care. Of these two have been Governors of States, several are members of Congress, and large numbers of them stand at the head of every profession and many great commercial enterprises.

Boys are sent to the Brace farm and school and remain there until they have learned how to be useful and the manners and morals of gentlemen. Homes are then found for them, usually by adoption, and each child is visited until its future happiness is thoroughly assured.

Besides the fresh-air work on the farm carried on all the year, 5,162 homeless boys and girls have been sheltered during the year in the eight lodging houses provided by the society, and homes or situations found for all. Families and children have been helped to reach friends, twenty-six industrial schools, both day and evening, have aided American, German, and Italian children-including cripples—who would otherwise not attend school at all, and five fresh-air homes at Bath Beach, West Coney Island, Kensico, NY, and East Broadway have cared for the ill or helpless or poverty-stricken children and brightened their lives, not only for a Summer, but for always.

It cost $35 apiece to place in permanent homes 581 children, who would otherwise have cost the city $120 per annum if placed in an orphanage.

The average attendance at Bath Beach is 6,508, of whom 3,955 remain a week each. At Coney Island 7,385 mothers with sick babies find rest and health, and 1,810 boys from the industrial schools spend a week at the Boy’s Farm School in Summer.

These figures do not represent half the work done by the Children’s Aid Society, any more than brief mention tells of the thousands of little slum children who learn religion and happiness at Pelham Bay, in charge of the good priests of St. Vincent de Paul’s Society; or the thousands of others who continually fill the five special trolley cars set apart for use of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor to carry children to and from the seaside.

New York leads the country in the number and efficiency of its fresh-air associations, and these attest to the wonderful influence for good exerted by the fresh air and happy surroundings upon the ignorant, the sick, and the poor.

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.