Barren Island-Floyd Bennett Field

Park · Brooklyn

Barren Island-Floyd Bennett Field is parkland off Flatbush Avenue on the Jamaica Bay shore of southeastern Brooklyn.

• 1.96 square miles
• 5 street corners
• 1 bus route

Barren Island was once an isolated marshland settlement whose workers rendered city garbage into grease and turned dead horses into goods such as gloves and buttons; in the 1920s sand pumped from the bay filled the channels around it, joining it to Brooklyn. Floyd Bennett Field, named for the pilot of Richard E. Byrd's 1926 North Pole flight, opened in 1931 as the city's first municipal airport and became part of Naval Air Station New York in 1941. Its old terminal is now Gateway National Recreation Area's Ryan Visitor Center.

Sources: Floyd Bennett Field History (National Park Service); Work and Life on Barren Island (National Park Service); Floyd Bennett Field (National Park Service); Floyd Bennett Field (Wikipedia).