Barren Island’s Buried Past

December 17, 2021

On the southeastern edge of Brooklyn, New York, a landfill lies eroding along the coastline. Tires, children’s toys, bathroom tiles, and innumerable glass bottles coat the sand, giving the area the colloquial name “Glass Bottle Beach.” The area has long been a favorite of historians, scavengers, and creatives, who sift through the debris, photograph the landscape, and conduct research at the site.

In 2019, the National Parks Service (NPS), who manages the land, discovered radioactive material at the site and promptly closed it to outside visitors in preparation for a cleanup of the site. This decision, though not enforced by any physical barriers, signals a change in the treatment of this area, which has long been plagued by environmental hazards brought on by poor city planning. In 2021, as the NPS begins the planning stage of the cleanup process, historians and advocates for the area seek to draw attention to the site’s unacknowledged history and help the City learn from its past.

Once known as Barren Island, this area was the City’s site for its most pungent industry: waste processing. From the 1850s to 1930s, factories on Barren Island processed everything from horses who died in the streets of Manhattan to everyday household garbage. This detritus was in turn made into usable material: animal hides rendered into glue, shin bones carved into buttons, feeder fish made into oil, every element possible salvaged and sold for profit.

Amongst these factories existed a small community of workers and their families, who lived on the marshy island then separate from mainland Brooklyn. This community, which at its height had a population of around 1,800, is the focus of local historian and elementary school teacher Miriam Sicherman. Author of Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History, Sicherman spent years combing through oral history recordings, newspaper clippings, and census records to piece together the narrative of Barren Island. Since the book’s publishing in 2019, Sicherman has sought to educate others on the area’s history and its importance through webinars and social media.

“People forgot about Barren Island,” said Sicherman in an October webinar with NYC H20, a water ecology education nonprofit, “When I learned about it, I just felt like people should remember this. It’s part of our social history. And it’s very important to think about the people who handle garbage.”

Sicherman found that the community was composed almost entirely of new European immigrants and Black families who had escaped slavery earlier in their lives. The island, chosen as a site for so-called “nuisance factories” because of its distance from dense urban areas, was originally accessible only by ferry, so residents quickly learned to become self-reliant. Barren Islanders planted gardens, raised livestock, and taught their children in the schoolhouse that served as one of the few institutions on the island. 

The isolation also allowed for workers to have relatively more power in their workplace, says Sicherman. “The workers had some power to command changes in their working conditions or their pay through strikes,” she explains, “It wasn’t like on the Lower East Side where a factory owner could walk outside and have other workers right there in the street practically begging for a job, it was harder to bring in scabs.”

Outsiders generally failed to appreciate the community’s importance, and media coverage from the era often focuses on the smell and perceived primitive nature of Barren Island’s inhabitants. This attitude was mirrored in later developers’ treatment of Barren Islanders. 

Barren Island was chosen as the site for New York City’s first municipal airport, Floyd Bennett Field, in 1928. Though Sicherman notes that residents initially enjoyed watching the planes, the airport signaled a new phase of development that would eventually drive the entire community out.

In 1934, Robert Moses, a prominent public official who at the time held the title of New York City Parks Commissioner, officially spelled the end of Barren Island. Moses, using Public Works Administration funds, constructed the Marine Parkway Bridge to connect two of his recently opened parks, Jacob Riis Park and Marine Park. To complete the landing for the bridge, Moses invoked eminent domain and evicted the entire Barren Island community before dumping 2,000,000 cubic feet of fill onto the site. 

In the late 1940s and 50s, Moses again used the site as a dumping ground. In the process of constructing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Moses carried out extensive demolition projects in what was then known as South Brooklyn, dividing and displacing Black, immigrant, and working class communities. The wreckage of these homes and businesses, many containing leftover objects from their inhabitants, was subsequently deposited in the area of Barren Island, adding onto the layers of garbage, fill, and waste from decades past. 

Floyd Bennett Field similarly dwindled. Lloyd Trufelman, a historian and tour guide at the now abandoned airfield, attributes its failure to poor Depression era economic planning and the opening of LaGuardia Airport in 1939.

“Floyd Bennett’s beginning and end were pretty much simultaneous,” he says, “It was not possible to be commercially viable as a passenger airport because people just didn’t fly back then. They couldn’t afford to.”

As the cleanup process begins for the former home of Barren Island, Sicherman and Trufelman remain skeptical about the feasibility and timeline. Superfund projects can see notoriously slow results, as with the Gowanus Canal, which received its designation in 2009 but did not see substantial work begin until 2017. Trufelman admires existing developments such as community gardens and camping sites in Floyd Bennett Field, but recalls the failure of the 2010 Floyd Bennett Field Blue Ribbon Panel. 

“The panel issued a comprehensive report that addressed such park issues as future visions and designs, educational opportunities, restoration, infrastructure, funding needs and opportunities for new management partnerships,” he says. “Unfortunately, not much has come from any of these, due to the extremely limited funding within the National Park Service’s budget. I mean, basically, they created Gateway [National Recreation Area] from little bits and pieces of land that either were unused or unwanted.”

Sicherman similarly doubts the power of the NPS to quickly or efficiently clean up the site, but hopes that the agency will work with historians to preserve artifacts left in the former site of Barren Island. When the NPS announced Glass Bottle Beach’s closure, she started a petition online to request that they work with archeologists to collect, decontaminate, and catalogue as much as possible. 

As Sicherman finishes her webinar presentation, she reads a line from a 1912 article in the Brooklyn Eagle, quoting a Barren Islander credited only as “prominent worker” to remind the audience why she finds this topic so important:

“Everyone recognizes that this kind of work is important, but they’re perfectly willing to let someone else do it and then look down on them for it. The people on the island are the most industrious to be found anywhere. Barren Islanders are better than a lot of folks, and they live better lives. How the idea got about that these people were different from the rest of the world is more than I can understand.”