The Unexpected Wilds of New York City

Did you know that a portion of New York City contains a National Park Recreation Center?

 The Gateway National Recreation Center is located in sections of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey in areas that are shaded in green in the map below. (All photos will enlarge when double-clicked on)

 

map source

The National Park's website states:  "Gateway covers more than 40 square miles in New York and New Jersey. That’s an area nearly twice the size of the island of Manhattan. The park attracts over 9 million visitors a year—making it the third most visited National Park in America  The woods, waters, and beaches at Gateway is the perfect place for ocean swimming, nature walks, sailing, bicycling, bird watching, camping, astronomy, and fishing. In the middle of these natural areas, you can stroll through a historic aircraft hangar or tour forts that reveal important stories in our nation’s history."

In Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field is part of Gateway.  This historic airfield opened in 1931 as New York's first municipal airport and was named for naval aviator and Brooklyn resident Floyd Bennett, who was the first person to fly over the North Pole. In the early days of aviation, it was a point of departure for record-breaking flights of famous aviators, including Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes.

After serving as the city's municipal airport, Floyd Bennett Field was converted to a Naval Air Station in 1941. It was the most active airport in the United States during World War II, and it has an important place in the history of military aviation. In 1971, the U.S. Navy deactivated the Field. Soon thereafter, the National Park Service made the location part of Gateway National Recreation Area.

The historic control tower and terminal at Floyd Bennett Field had been converted into the site's visitor's center and is now undergoing extensive renovation.  Volunteers are working on the park's collection of historic aircraft in Hangar B for future display. 

One of the special places I like to visit in Gateway is the community gardens. The gardens at Floyd Bennett Field are probably the city’s largest and currently hold more than 400 garden plots. The community gardens program offers a picnic area, a "Champions of Courage Garden" with wheelchair access, and a "Children’s Garden."

Garden plots are available to residents of all the boroughs of New York City through an application, although there is a long waiting list for new members at present.

Most of the community plots are well maintained and neatly gardened.

One of my favorite garden plots was the one in this photo collage. This gardener obviously spent a lot of time making brick pathways along their neat vegetable beds and they even made a shady nook for their picnic table.

Some more scenes from the community garden.

I liked the varied and creative ways each gardener enclosed his plot. One of the gates (top middle in the photo collage) was a recycled wooden side of a baby's crib!

I took a hike this weekend on one of the Gateway park paths that leads to Dead Horse Bay.

 

Why is the area called such a gruesome name? According to the New York Times, "From the 1850s until the 1930s, 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. The chopped-up, boiled bones were later dumped into the water. The squalid bay, then accessible only by boat, was reviled for the putrid fumes that hung overhead.

The number of horse carcasses in Dead Horse Bay dwindled as the automobile grew in popularity, and by the 1920s only one rendering plant remained. Sand, coal, and garbage were used as landfills to connect Barren Island to the Brooklyn mainland in the 1920s, and the Barren Island Airport was later renamed Floyd Bennett Field."

The bay now looks reclaimed by nature, except when you begin to walk along the shore where you'll see hundreds of old bottles washed to shore, some that are over a hundred years old, from the city garbage that was once dumped here and from the garbage used as part of the landfill to fill in the marshlands and islands to form Floyd Bennett Field.

It is a sobering reminder of the permanent impact garbage makes on the environment, and I'm happy that New York City now recycles glass, plastics, and paper.  Scavengers, collectors and the curious often visit Dead Horse Bay at low tide looking for antique and rare bottles.

Another sight often seen on the beaches around Gateway is the very unusual-looking horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus).  As a species, horseshoe crabs are estimated to be at least 300 million years old. They are most closely related to trilobites that existed 544 million years ago. Horseshoe crabs are often called "Living Fossils" for this reason.

This is another wild-protected beach of Gateway National Recreation Area on the Rockaway inlet. The Marine Park - Gild Hodges Memorial Bridge connects Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn with Fort Tilden in the Rockaways in the borough of Queens. Both areas, along with Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaway Peninsula, are now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. This bridge is a popular route for NYC bike clubs and other cyclists to get to the Rockaway beaches in the summer.

I hope you enjoyed seeing a little of the little-known wild areas that exist around New York City.

Today we will be having heat and humidity in NYC that will climb to 100 degrees!  I'll be trying to stay cool and hope the power grid will keep working in our community and all of NYC. It's always a challenge to keep all the air conditioners going in such a large, populated city.