Dead Horse Bay

Dead Horse Bay lies in south Brooklyn near the old Floyd Bennett Airfield and is part of a large parcel of land that is now part of Gateway National Recreation.  One particular stretch of beach is covered with glass bottles, bones, ceramic, and other detritus.  There is so much glass that as the waves lap the shore there is an audible tinkling much like a faint wind-chime. 

This beach has a past as the coast of what was once called Barren Island. From the 1860’s to the 1930’s Barren Island was largely avoided because of its terrible stench.  It was the site of a small community of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants who worked at more than a dozen animal rendering plants where vast quantities of horses, no longer of use for transportation or other labor, were turned into fertilizer and other products. After the carcasses were stripped of any usable material, the boiled, chopped up bones were simply dumped into the water.

Between 1859 and 1934 twenty-six companies operated on Barren Island, their tall smokestacks visible in the distance and their overbearing stench fouling the air for miles. The island’s natural topography made it ideal for its purpose: at low tide animals could walk to the northern coast of the island (now connected to the mainland by Flatbush Avenue extension) and ships could load cargo off the deeper water on the southern coast. Not only horses ended up on Barren Island.  All of the city’s animal carcasses – in fact until 1918 – all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx’s household garbage arrived there by ship to be sorted and boiled down.  There was a hierarchy of job status: top was sorting bone, then came sorting metal or paper.  At the bottom was rag picking, where the bare hand was necessary to get a “feel” for the material. In the animal carcass hierarchy the job of dealing with the tons of rotting fish was reserved for the lowliest, which was the island’s small black population.  The island’s residents, living in drafty wooden cabins, weathering epidemics of diphtheria and typhoid, went for years without a doctor or nurse, electricity, or a post-office.  People wore salt pork wrapped in flannel around their necks to ward off disease.

When the automobile became the standard mode of transportation the horse cadaver businesses closed down or moved away.  In 1936 Robert Moses condemned the island so as the build Marine Park Bridge, and evicted the last occupants.  The site became landfill and remained so until it was capped in1953.  Grassy dunes and paths hide any sense of what is underneath until you take the path through the dunes to the beach.  Toward the southern end of the beach one can notice a rupture in the roots of the sumac trees and grass that now cover the dunes.  Each time the tide rolls in and recedes it pulls out more and more stuff: shoes, toys, bottles, bones from the breeched landfill.  The beach is covered with an endlessly changing landscape of objects the most recent being from 1953 and stretching back at least a hundred years.