Barren Island + Dead Horse Bay
Big cities produce big piles of garbage. Over the past 400 years, New Yorkers have found many creative places to put it.
One such place is on the edge of Brooklyn that faces the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, with part of Jamaica Bay in between. Originally a shifting group of marshes, this area was once the site of Barren Island, where household garbage and dead animals were processed for many years. The area of the beach near the "horse factory" became known as Dead Horse Bay. Later, it was the site of an improperly capped landfill, also composed of household garbage. This garbage, deposited in the early 1950s, has been slowly emerging from underground since the 1980s.
Barren Island
“Barren Island is a long way from anywhere,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1906. Indeed, in the 1850s, this swampy speck in Jamaica Bay was chosen for just that reason to be the site of garbage and dead animal processing for New York City. And there a community grew, of the workers and their families, almost all either new immigrants or African Americans from southern states.
Dead Horse Bay
On the Brooklyn side of the Marine Parkway Bridge, a tiny wild patch of woods can be seen from Flatbush Avenue. Until recently, you could walk on a path through these woods to a hidden beach covered with garbage. Sounds gross! In fact, Dead Horse Bay, a.k.a. Glass Bottle Beach, is a unique trove of historical artifacts that have settled (and unsettled) among snails, blue crabs, whelks, razor clams, quahogs, and seaweed, embodying the daily life of New Yorkers circa 1952.