BARREN Island, at one point, was an actual island at the south end of today’s Marine Park, but was landfilled to create what is now the Floyd Bennett airfield. In the 19th Century and early 20th, Barren Island was home to glue factories (as reflected in the names of nearby bodies of water: Dead Horse Inlet and Dead Horse Bay). Nonetheless, the glue factories were a bustling industry and supported a small community on the island.
There was once a small community here of well-kept small homes with porches, and the people who lived here ignored the unholy stench of the animal rendering plants (the first one built in 1859) that once dotted the island, as thousands of deceased Dobbins were turned into a number of products including glue, fertilizer, and commercial gelatin in a process founded by Peter Cooper, for whom Manhattan’s Cooper Union school is named.
In the 1920s, Barren Island was attached by landfill to Long Island in anticipation of Floyd Bennett Field’s construction. The horse rendering plants were closed and the homes razed, but the smell remained for several years.
After the rendering plants were closed the Dead Horse Inlet shoreline became a landfill in the 1930s. Thousands of tons of trash were buried under a narrow cap. In the 1950s, this cap came apart and detritus of the decades, including thousands of bottles and plastic products that don’t biodegrade have filled the beach ever since. There are those who say that equine bones can be found amid the garbage.
On a Forgotten NY tour in the spring of 2018, we found this ancient Pepsi bottle and many other decades old relics at low tide, featuring its old swashy script logo. Pepsi-Cola was first formulated by pharmacist Caleb Bradham in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1898 as “Brad’s Drink.” Within its first year of production it was renamed Pepsi-Cola from the digestive enzyme pepsin and kola nuts, which were both in the formula. Likely its largest representation anywhere is in the giant neon sign in Hunter’s Point marking its now-razed bottling plant.
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11/15/24
6 comments
About five years ago a co-worker wished that glue factories were still a thing. She owned a couple of horses, and one evening one of the horses, quite old, was Gathered to Its Ancestors. As health codes thwarted her plan to bury it on her property, she had to pay almost $2,000 to have old Dobbin removed and disposed of.
My favorite Dead Horse Bay find was a coke bottle with a clam shell inside.
Manhattan’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was not just “named” for Peter Cooper; he founded it, built it, and initially funded it when it opened in 1859.
I hope that this beach will be cleaned up at one point.
I once knew a Puerto Rican woman by the name of Pepsi Maldonado
Glass Bottle Beach was closed to beachcombers at one point when radioactive contamination was found. I think it has since reopened?