need to fill in a smaller waterway known as Flatlands Bay. Engineering plans for the airfield would also require much of the 387 acres that comprised Barren Island to be covered with sand, raising the land some sixteen feet from its original height and destroying the native cord grass in the process. Fill was also used to connect Barren Island to the mainland of Brooklyn, filling in the narrow waterway around where Flatbush Avenue now crosses Avenue U. Floyd Bennett Field would play a major role in the early days of aviation. Pioneering aviators like Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, Wrong-Way Corrigan, and Charles Lindberg all flew out of the new airport, and several historic aviation firsts began on Jamaica Bay’s shores. Despite all of the early contributions and successes of Floyd Bennett Field, however, it would soon be overshadowed by its far larger cousin on the bay’s opposite shore. In 1947 the city decided to build a newer and even larger airport on the eastern side of the bay, choosing Idlewild marsh as a suitable location. This area, a staggering 4,527 acres of relatively untouched
marshland, was soon completely filled in, and nearly fifty-three million cubic meters of sand were pulled from the bay floor to create what we know today as John F. Kennedy International Airport. The sole reminder of the once wild marshland can be occasionally seen in the flocks of geese that have become something of a nuisance to pilots in recent years, with all other traces firmly buried beneath several feet of concrete and sand. Robert Moses, the legendary powerbroker who helped to shape so much of New York City, also had a hand in the creation of the modern Jamaica Bay. On Urban planner Robert Moses (1888–1981) is a controversial figure in New York history. His development projects reshaped much of the infrastructure of the five boroughs, including the Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach State Park, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, West Side Highway, and Long Island parkway system, among approximately 1,700 major projects, plus hundreds of playgrounds and the designation of more than a million acres for state parks and conservation lands.
photo by c. m. spieglitz for the world telegram and sun, courtesy library of congress
photo by joseph byron, library of congress
When horse-drawn carriages were still a regular mode of transportation in New York City, pollution in city streets from manure was a problem, but not nearly as objectionable as the problem that resulted when those horses died and were left to decompose in the streets. These kids in New York circa 1905 seem unfazed by the dead horse lying at the curb. The city hauled carcasses by the dozens on a regular basis and dumped them in Dead Horse Bay at Barren Island in Jamaica Bay. A solution for Manhattan, perhaps, but a growing problem for those around Jamaica Bay.
25 February 1930, when Moses unveiled his grand plans for bridge and parkway construction all around the city, he included the bay in his vision, outlining designs for a large boulevard to run along the “Brooklyn shore from Brooklyn Bridge south and then east to Jamaica Bay. From the southwest corner of the bay, the boulevard would proceed north and then east to connect with a projected cross island parkway.” He also laid out the plans for a large park to be situated in the middle of the bay, which eventually would become known as the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. The rise of the environmental movement in the years after the Second World War gave further impetus to Moses’s plan for a wildlife preserve in the bay, and in the years to come city planners began to take a distinctly different view of Jamaica Bay than the views that had been prevalent before. The waters, city planners finally recognized, would better suit the city if they were preserved and made into a recreational zone, as the thriving and bustling ports in New Jersey eliminated any further need for grand-scale commercial transformation of the area. This idea would lead to the creation of the Gateway National Recreation Area, which was conceptualized by its planners “as a hybrid space of city and nature defined by its ecological connections.”
SEA HISTORY 164, AUTUMN 2018 35