Dead Horse Bay, Barren Island, New York

Just across the road from the Floyd Bennett Airfield on Barren Island is a short trail that leads down to Dead Horse Bay. Back when Barren Island was actually an island, it was home to many horse-rendering plants. Some 70 years later, bones still wash up on the beaches and can be seen among other flotsam and jetsam. From the New York Times‘ “F.Y.I.” section, 1999:

“From the 1850′s until the 1930′s, 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. A rugged community of laborers, many of them Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants, lived in relative isolation on neighboring Barren Island, which shared the bay’s unsavory reputation….The number of horse carcasses in Dead Horse Bay dwindled as the automobile grew in popularity, and by the 1920′s only one rendering plant remained. Around that time, the city began dumping its garbage at sea, and the Barren Islanders themselves began to disappear, though some diehards remained until the 1940′s. Sand, coal and garbage were used as landfill to connect Barren Island to the Brooklyn mainland in the 1920′s, and the Barren Island Airport, later renamed Floyd Bennett Field, opened in 1927.”