Abstract of the presentation:

Jamaica Bay As New York City's Conflicted Backyard: Recreation And Refuse, Transportation And Trash, Wetlands And Wastelands

Presented at the

28TH ANNUAL DREW SYMPOSIUM ON

INDUSTRIAL ARCHEOLOGY

IN THE NEW YORK - NEW JERSEY AREA

Co-sponsored by the Drew University Anthropology Department and the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeology

October 26, 2008.

Drew University Hall of Sciences in Madison, New Jersey

Kevin Olsen, Chemistry & Biochemistry Department, Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey

Jamaica Bay is a shallow tidal estuary on the southern shore of Long Island. The eastern portion of the Bay is in the Borough of Brooklyn and the western portion is in the Borough of Queens. The bay measures approximately 52 square kilometers (20 square miles.) It is roughly semicircular with many sandy marsh islands in the center. The Rockaway Inlet is the only opening of the bay to the Atlantic. It is located at the western end of the peninsula separating it from Coney Island and Brooklyn.

The earliest European settlement on Long Island was the area near Jamaica Bay known as Flatlands, established by the Dutch in 1631. The patent for the 1651 settlement of Flatbush granted the lands of the Canarsie Meadows east of the Indian planting ground. As the name implied, much of this land was low and flat. It overflowed with each tide and was described in the journal of Jasper Danckaerts (1679-80) as being miry and muddy at the bottom.

Despite its proximity to the settled areas of Kings and Queens Counties, until the 1860s the bay shores were sparsely settled marshlands and the primary resource utilized in the area was the marsh grasses that served as animal fodder. Because good roads connected the farming centers to the Brooklyn Ferries from an early date, Jamaica Bay never developed as anything but a minor maritime center.

Jamaica Bay became part of New Yorks waste disposal and recycling network in the 1840s. In response to a cholera outbreak it was decided to move all putrescible waste processing operations out of the city. City Inspector Alfred White established a franchise system to handle the city's waste in 1849 and using a dummy partner as a front, arranged for himself to have a monopoly on waste disposal. He and co-owner William B. Reynolds selected Barren Island in the east end of Jamaica Bay as the sit of a plant that would turn the citys garbage into grease and fertilizer.

During the 1800s it was important to recycle waste products back into fertilizer because without massive inputs of nutrients the sandy soils of Long Island would not have been able to sustain a large urban population. While some food stuffs such as grains could be transported long distances, until the twentieth century, there was no technology that could fresh fruits and vegetables from distant farms. Recycling the citys organic waste products; food scraps, offal, night soil, manure, dead animals, and bones allowed the farmers on Long Island to use twice the amount of fertilizer as farmers in other parts of the country. It also removed smelly, disease-breeding nuisances from the city.

Barren Island in the eastern end of Jamaica Bay became a processing center for all kinds of waste products. Beginning in the late 1860s and early 1870s fish oil and fish meal processing plants were built on the island. Despite efforts to close the plants, Barren Island remained a center of these industries until the early 1930s.

During the 1800s resort and residential development of the bay followed the available railroad routes. The first railroad was the Brooklyn & Rockaway Beach (1865) that extended as far as Canarsie where a ferryboat took tourists to the Rockaway Peninsula. Although Canarsie itself was only a small village the site of the ferry landing became a popular resort. The calm waters of the bay offered an attractive alternative to the surf of the Atlantic. On the eastern side of the bay, the South Side Railroad (1869) followed former stagecoach route. A trestle over the center of the bay was built in the 1880s by the New York, Woodhaven & Rockaway Railroad. Construction of the Cross Bay Boulevard in the mid-1920s accelerated development on the Rockaway Peninsula and the islands in Broad Channel.

The lack of freight railroads in the bay meant that there was little incentive for industrial development despite the abundance of water transportation. Around 1900 plans were advanced for the creation of a major new seaport in Jamaica Bay. The opening of the Panama Canal was expected to increase ship traffic into New York. Furthermore, the citys existing wharves were already too small for the newest ocean-going ships.

This scheme was never realized in large part because the competing freight railroads were never able to agree on a system to connect the new port to the mainland. Some historians have argued that the port scheme was one of the principle reasons why Brooklyn and Queens were both incorporated into the five boroughs of New York when the city was consolidated.

Jamaica Bay did ultimately become a major transportation center with the construction of two major airports. In the early 1930s Floyd Bennett Field was built on Barren Island. It served first as a municipal airport, then a Navy aviation base, a Coast Guard airfield, and finally home to the New York Police Departments helicopter unit. Idlewild Airport was built in the 1940s and was renamed John F. Kennedy Airport in 1963.

Property developers almost entirely filled the marshes on the perimeter of Jamaica Bay during first decades of the twentieth century. The use of refuse for fill was stopped for a time in the 1920s not because of environmental concerns, but because the landfills were encroaching on areas where a number of prominent city officials had invested in real estate. Before 1900 the area of the bay was 10,100 ha and in large part to landfilling and bulkhead construction along the perimeter, the area had shrunk to 5,260 ha by 1971

Robert Moses is often credited with saving Jamaica Bay as open space through the construction of the Belt Parkway in the 1930s and development of parkland along the bay shores. As part of this effort the last of the waste processing plants were removed from Barren Island and the site was re-developed as Floyd Bennett Field. After the Second World War much of the refuse being used as fill was being sent instead to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. The last remaining landfill in Jamaica Bay, Edgemere Landfill, was closed in the 1990s but ironically, is now the site of the citys lawn waste composting operations.

In 1972 Jamaica Bay became a national wildlife refuge and is managed by the National Parks Service as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.

For More Information:

Black, Frederick R., Jamaica Bay: A History, Cultural Resource Management Study No. 3, National Park Service, Washington, D.C., 1981,

Linder, Marc, Of Cabbages and Kings County : agriculture and the formation of modern Brooklyn, University of Iowa Press, 1999

Miller, Benjamin, Fat of the land: garbage in New York : the last two hundred years, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2000.

Wines, Richard A, Fertilizer in America: from waste recycling to resource exploitation, Temple University Press, 1985.

For Jamaica Bay maps, historical data, and lists of maritime resources,

http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~olsenk/