BERGEN Beach is a southeast Brooklyn former island community found east of Marine Park. In the mid-1600s after the Canarsee Indians left, the island was owned by Dutchman Hans Hansen Bergen, whose property was later occupied by British troops during the Revolutionary War. Early on, the island was connected by a causeway to the mainland, which featured an electrified trolley that today limns the route of the B41 bus along Veterans, formerly Island, Avenue, seen above. The island was connected to Brooklyn by landfill in 1918. During that era it was home to an amusement park co-sponsored by Chicklets gum king Thomas Adams Jr.
The amusement park suffered because of competition with Coney Island and shuttered in 1925. The ensuing Depression and World War II spelled an era of slow growth for Bergen Beach and its roads were not fully filled out with housing until the Easy Eighties. When I first bicycled into the area, I found empty tracts for the most part east of Ralph Avenue and north of Avenue T. That space has since been filled by the relatively new development called Georgetown, which began construction in the 1960s and continued very gradually well into the 1990s.
Bergen Beach, together with the adjacent Georgetown as well as Brownsville and East New York to the northeast, are the Brooklyn communities I’ve spent the least time in. For a short while in the late 70s I was interested in a girl who lived in Bergen Beach. Without a car, here’s what I’d have to do: Take the B4 Bay Parkway bus, transfer to the B3 Avenue U bus, and take it to the end of the line at Veterans Avenue. That was about 90 minutes door to door; neither of us drove a car.
The last time I conducted a journey to adventure in Bergen Beach, it was in 2017.
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6/29/23
7 comments
The area would be *extremely* different today had the city gone through with its early 20th century plan to build a giant seaport on Jamaica Bay, centered around the Paerdegat Basin.
The original native population of what’s now NYC didn’t so much leave as were subjected to land theft (by both force and fraud), and massacred by European settlers. They were also killed off by European-brought infectious diseases.
Stolen by who?:
https://www.americanheritage.com/24-swindle
Thank you. Coming from someone whose native land was actually stolen by a foreign power (and still partially occupied) long before Europeans landed in what became NYC.
Boring. If you were so concerned about your “native land” why did you leave?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJHuX2Xio7A
I was supporting your comment, dude. My people left a country where all the natives were being starved to death, by the way.
The Indians had no concept of real estate in the white man’s sense and when
they were closing the deal for some items they were laughing under their breath.
To them saying you were going to buy some land was like saying you were going
to buy the ocean or the sky.Then when they finally did figure it out they went
absolutely berserk.