Navy gives Bay Ridge Station to Brooklyn

One hundred years ago today … The US Navy gave its station in Bay Ridge to NYC’s Parks Department, which announced it would use the facilities as a park, a recreation center, and housing for the homeless.

Brooklyn Life carried the story:

A gift from the Navy Department, the Bay Ridge Naval Station, was turned over to the Department of Parks, Brooklyn on May 21st. The station, representing an outlay by the Government of $3,500,000, was made upon application of Park Commissioner John N. Harman and was announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. It is understood that the Navy Department is to vacate the station not later than June 15, and Park Commissioner Harman intends to convert the property to Park Department purposes immediately. The naval barracks and buildings will be transformed into a vast recreation center, extending from Bay Ridge Parkway to Fort Hamilton and from the Shore Road to the sea wall. Some of the naval buildings, which during the war housed as many as 80,000 men, will be used as shelter houses in Prospect Park, Dreamland Beach Park, Dyker Beach Park—which is entirely without building at present-Canarsie Park, Gravesend Park, Lincoln Terrace Park and Playground, Amersfort Park, Seaside Park, Sunset Park, McCarren Park, Fort Hamilton Park, Highland Park, McKinley Park, New Lots Playground and Bensonhurst Park.

(“Navy Gives $3,500,00 Station to Brooklyn.” Brooklyn Life, 28 May, 1921, p. 18.)

The Navy’s gift to Brooklyn was the result of two years of disputes about what to do with the station, the barracks in particular. According to Bay Ridge history site Hey Ridge, the US military had wanted to create “a military installation that stretched from Fort Hamilton to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, two miles or more of fortifications, docks, sleeping quarters and more, a massive Army–Navy complex.”

But the parks department opposed this, not in small part because $3.5 million (almost $48 million, adjusted for inflation) had already been spent on improvements—development that would continue when the Navy tore down its little community (which had cost it more than $1 million, or more than $13 million, adjusted for inflation). Bay Ridge’s local leaders also opposed permanent barracks, not in small part because of the effect it would have on property values (and, uh, the beauty of the natural landscape!).

But contentions continued, creating a rift between locals and the military.

(Henry, “How Shore Road Almost Didn’t Become a Park,” Hey Ridge, 5 February 2016.)

Eventually, the local community, led by wealthy owners of the large estates along Shore Road, won out. The Navy wound up leaving the premises on June 10th, 1921. The area was not developed into parkland until the constructuction of Robert Moses’s Belt Parkway, which began in 1930. The plan to use the Barracks as materials for homeless shelters never came to fruition either, as they were dismantled and sold b\gor lumber in 1922. (Henry)

Hey Ridge offers photographs of the Naval Barracks that we can compare with the park today. The image below is about at 79th Street.

– Jonathan Goldman, May 21, 2021

TAGS: parks, homelessness, recreation, military