Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn has a beach with thousands of bottles and pieces of sea glass. Soda bottles, prescription vials, porcelain figures — most in shards, some still intact — and other discarded items now litter “Bottle Beach,” a sight that is particularly spectacular at low tide. After the waste reduction factories were closed to appease communities living upwind, there was still a landfill on the island, a landfill which closed in the thirties when Robert Moses evicted the remaining inhabitants and bulldozed their homes. Welcome to Dead Horse Bay. The school, which had trouble keeping a teacher for an extended length of time, originally sat in a depression that routinely flooded with every high tide. Dead Horse Bay sits at the western edge of a marshland once dotted by more than two dozen horse-rendering plants, fish oil factories and garbage incinerators. According to the New York Times, From the 1850’s until the 1930’s, the carcasses of dead horses and other animals from New York City streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer and other products at the site. Barren Island was selected largely for its location, distant from the main centers of population. Dead Horse Bay has one other dubious claim to fame. The two dozen families who stayed left their clapboard houses in 1942. Many horses were left there when food and water ran out and as a result many horses died and or jumped off the cliff. [4] [5] How the trucking company got its name remains in dispute. Connected by fill to the mainland in 1926 to build Floyd Bennett Field, Barren Island was once so wretched, its odor elicited complaints from people living miles away. Today, the shore is covered with old glass bottles and early plastic toys. “Hundreds of thousands have had an olfactory introduction to Barren Island, though few have ever visited it,” The Times wrote in 1890. Not that anyone seems to be paying attention. There’s a debate online about whether these people are removing history, taking archaeological items of interest from a National Park, or helping to clean a beach. A recent North Bay Business Journal article on Mare Island’s development found there were more than 3,000 jobs on the peninsula, a far cry from the approximately 10,000 jobs there in … Across the street from Floyd Bennett Field are the remnants of an earlier piece of history, a bit of beach called Dead Horse Bay. At its peak, Barren Island was home … Oh, and why is Dead Horse Bay called Dead Horse Bay? History washes up on this shoreline every single day. Back in the 19th century, a substantial portion of the city's oysters and other seafood came from these waters. Jobs at the plants included reducing dead fish into fertilizer, usually considered the least desirable deed, and “rag-picking”: sifting through the garbage with bare hands to rescue valuable cloth materials. It’s these items that attract hundreds of people each week. The bay was given its name sometime in the 1850s, when horse-rendering plants still surrounded the beach. Back then, I’m pretty sure nobody foresaw that the beach would be a draw for eager scavengers. But just a few decades later, trash was spewing into the ocean and washing ashore. You can hear the tinkling of glass as the water laps the shoreline. Dead Horse Bay is a small body of water in between two inlets near Jamaica Bay in South Brooklyn. Well, from dead horses, mostly chopped-up ones, that were processed on adjacent Barren Island. Bay A bay is a red(ish) horse with a Black mane and tail and also black lower legs. Dead Horse Bay is known for the items that have washed ashore, including numerous glass bottles and other lost treasures. Well it used to be the site of the rendering plants for NYC carriage horses in the late 1800s/early 1900s. In fact there‘s one right next to the big green bottle in the back. Proponents cited the color and uniqueness of the name. The most cited theory appears to be that the area takes its name from a local business prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s, the "Dead Horse Haulers" trucking company. Though it seems abandoned and neglected, this bit of land is technically under the auspices of the National Park Service, and it is technically illegal to take things from a National Park. Your email address will not be published. Recently featured in Atlas Obscura, the bay has become a sort of mecca for those looking for unusual things to do in NYC.The beach is situated next to an old landfill and it is covered with old bottles, old toys, even old bicycles. Dead Horse Bay is a beach in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn. Workers would place the horse bodies in large vats and boil them until the fat could be removed for use in fertilizer, glue and oils; they would then chop up the bones and dump them into the nearby water. What was then a marshy landmass called “Barren Island” was filled in with garbage and connected to mainland Brooklyn. This tiny plastic shoe was found washed up on Dead Horse Bay in south Brooklyn, one of the best places in the city to find old things. We’ll look at some old airplanes and listen to the glass tinkle. Yet at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, NY garbage is the main attraction. The island was the site of Dutch tidal mills in the 17th century, and its industrial period began with two horse-rendering plants in the late 1850s. "The irony," Golia says, is that Jamaica Bay — the larger body of water where Dead Horse Bay lies — "is one of the more polluted places in the area, but it's still a really abundant and diverse ecosystem." Many have gone in the mail already, and more are about to go out soon enough. The stench depressed property values in the Rockaways and was blamed for illnesses in Brooklyn beach communities. The marshy area was filled in with garbage in the 1920s, but at some point, the landfill cap ruptured. They still wash up, too. Dead Horse Bay refers to the dead animals brought here on barges to Jamaica Bay to be boiled down into new industrial products. The bay horse's body will be the same color as the chestnuts above and can vary to the same degree. The shores of Dead Horse Bay are strewn with copious amounts of glass bottles, vintage housewares, toys, animal bones, and many other obscure items–all of which were disposed of nearly a century ago. The first pamphlet of the year covers Floyd Bennett and Dead Horse Bay, and I hope will be a decent introduction to Jamaica Bay in general. Would you like to know more? As nauseating as Barren Island was for those downwind, it must have been excruciating for those poor, unfortunate souls who lived and worked there, as many as 2,000 at one time. Feral dogs roamed the island; domesticated pigs and cows feasted at the community’s refuse heap. This Randonautica Experience was very Scary.It took me to a dark Abandoned Place.Do not listen to Randonautica app.I was terrified going their alone.This Abandoned Beach was called the Dead Horse Bay. Dead Horse Bay is a small water body off Barren Island, between the Gerritsen Inlet and Rockaway Inlet in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. As for the drinking water, one visitor told The Brooklyn Eagle in 1901, “Usually it tastes like oil, though sometimes by way of variation it is flavored much more horribly.”. More Like This. Dead Horse Bay refers to the dead animals brought here on barges to Jamaica Bay to be boiled down into new industrial products. Inside Dead Horse Bay, One of America’s Most Polluted National Parks Theodore Roosevelt once called the island a "nuisance of the worst kind." Because of this, the water that surrounded the island was called Dead Horse Bay. But don't come here with a picnic blanket and open-toed shoes. 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