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Jamaica Bay

AC with 0 elementsBays of Kings County, New YorkBays of New York (state)Bays of Queens County, New YorkBodies of water of Brooklyn
Bodies of water of Nassau County, New YorkBodies of water of Queens, New YorkEstuaries of New York (state)Gateway National Recreation AreaJamaica, QueensLagoons of New York (state)Rockaway, Queens
JamaicaBay
JamaicaBay

Jamaica Bay is an estuary on the southern portion of the western tip of Long Island, in the U.S. state of New York. The estuary is partially man-made, and partially natural. The bay connects with Lower New York Bay to the west, through Rockaway Inlet, and is the westernmost of the coastal lagoons on the south shore of Long Island. Politically, it is primarily divided between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, with a small part touching Nassau County. The bay contains numerous marshy islands. It was known as Grassy Bay as late as the 1940s. Jamaica Bay is located adjacent to the confluence of the New York Bight and New York Bay, and is at the turning point of the primarily east-west oriented coastline of southern New England and Long Island and the north-south oriented coastline of the mid-Atlantic coast.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Jamaica Bay (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Jamaica Bay
New York Brooklyn

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Wikipedia: Jamaica BayContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 40.617777777778 ° E -73.8425 °
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Brooklyn


New York, Brooklyn
New York, United States
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JamaicaBay
JamaicaBay
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Ruffle Bar
Ruffle Bar

Ruffle Bar is a 143-acre (58 ha) island located in Jamaica Bay in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, off the coast of Canarsie. The island is part of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and lies just east of the former Barren Island, where Floyd Bennett Field is now located. One of the early inhabitants of Ruffle Bar was Jacob Skidmore, who built a house on the island. In 1842, Skidmore moved his house and family to Barren Island.: 14  Skidmore had disassembled his house piece-by-piece. According to one story, a storm blew his disassembled ceiling across the bay to Barren Island.During the Civil War, Ruffle Bar became a stop for ferries traveling between Canarsie and Rockaway. The Windward Club started sponsoring boat racing around Ruffle Bar in the 1880s. By the next decade, a hotel on the island had opened. Ruffle Bar was considered to be part of the public land of the town of Flatbush until the 1890s, when parts of the island were sold to 24 private owners.: 59 Ruffle Bar was so isolated that when Jamaica Bay froze during the winter, the island's few residents were cut off from the rest of civilization for three months. One newspaper article compared the situation to isolated communities in the Arctic. Making reference to an Arctic explorer named Otto Sverdrup, the newspaper wrote, "For all that the city does for Ruffle Bar, it might as well be in Sverdrup Land."In 1913, the city proposed to build a garbage incinerator on Ruffle Bar. Brooklyn residents strongly opposed building an incinerator at this location because the smell could drift northward into Flatlands, so the incinerator was ultimately not constructed on Ruffle Bar. Pierre Noel's Ruffle Bar Association began constructing structures on Ruffle Bar in 1914, for the purpose of developing it as a resort. The association leased the city-owned portions of Ruffle Bar from the New York City Department of Docks for ten years starting in 1914.: 59  Through the 1920s, landfill was added in order to expand Ruffle Bar's area. The island became the center of a successful clam and oyster industry. At one point, there were more than 40 structures on the island that supported the industry, with most of these buildings being located on the south shore.: 59 Fishing activities ceased when the water was deemed by the New York City Department of Health to be too polluted for the breeding of shellfish. The Great Depression caused most of the residents to move elsewhere, but a few squatters remained. By 1940, there were twenty-five structures left on the island.: 59  The last resident, a fisherman, was thought to have moved away in 1944. However, The New York Times showed that Census Enumerators visited Ruffle Bar as late as 1950 to collect Census data from the remaining residents. The island is uninhabited and, along with other islands in Jamaica Bay, has been designated as a bird sanctuary. Due to its remoteness, kayakers have sometimes become stranded on the island.

Spring Creek Park
Spring Creek Park

Spring Creek Park is a public park along the Jamaica Bay shoreline between the neighborhoods of Howard Beach, Queens, and Spring Creek, Brooklyn, in New York City. Created on landfilled former marshland,: 5  the park is mostly an undeveloped nature preserve, with only small portions accessible to the public for recreation.Spring Creek Park consists of three major parts, which surround the park's eponymous creek and several smaller waterways. Spring Creek South comprises the section on the Queens side south of the Belt Parkway, which consists mostly of a marsh and forest on the shore of the Howard Beach peninsula, surrounding the neighborhood on its western and southern sides. Spring Creek North consists of a largely fenced-off section of land north of Belt Parkway; it straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border, which runs along Spring Creek. A third section of parkland was built around the Gateway Center shopping mall, which is located north of Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn side. The southern section is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area and under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, while the northern and Gateway Center portions are managed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. A park along Spring Creek was first proposed in 1930 by the New York Park Association's Metropolitan Conference on Parks. It was ultimately decided that the park be built upon fill, since the site mostly consisted of marshland. Spring Creek Park was approved in 1942, and land-filling operations began in 1949. Temporary landfills for waste disposal were operated at the future park site until the South Shore Incinerator along Spring Creek was completed in 1954. The southern section of Spring Creek Park was integrated into the Gateway National Recreation Area in 1974. In the 1990s, the northern section of the park was expanded via land acquisition, and in 2003, The Related Companies built extra parkland as part of Gateway Center's construction. The New York state government opened the Shirley Chisholm State Park along the Brooklyn coastline, south of the Gateway Center section of the park, in 2019.