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