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I remember that we burned
coal to heat the house in Gerritsen Beach up until 1957. I also remember when the Brooklyn
Borough Gas Company converted all the houses from manufactured gas to natural gas for
cooking. Every stove had to have parts changed in it.
I haven't thought this much about Gerritsen Beach in a
very long time. There is a good feeling about it. However I am a realist and when people
start talking about the good old days of the 50's I'm quick to remind them we also had
Joseph McCarthy and Polio!
--Richard J.
Your links talk about 3? racetracks , I think the one one
near PS194 must have been another.
One of the links led to a 1939 WPA blurb
about a community living at what must have been in our time the Floyd Bennet seaplane ramp
(the current intersection of the Marine Park Bridge, Flatbush Ave, and Floyd Bennet Field)
. They were called a community of "house wreckers," many of whom had worked at a
fertilizer factory at Dead Horse Bay. We used to keep a sailboat there. Wonder how the
"house wreckers" got to work, and where in that area the house wrecking business
was flourishing? WW II probably displaced the "house wreckers." In the 50's the
place where they had lived was now Coast Guard Barracks and a seaplane ramp.
| When the Belt Parkway and the
greater Marine Park was designated there were a number of houses (squatters?) all along
the shoreline. Robert Moses was the Czar for getting everything done in NY. The story was
that he hired some thugs (the house wreckers?) to destroy these homes before they
established "squatters rights". The remains of these houses are often still
visible all along the shoreline. The Roberts across the street were supposedly among
the original squatters. |
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Do you remember "Old Pop"? Mom used to take us
for walks along Knapp St; you may have been very small. We used to visit a very old man
who was the caretaker to one of the old barges that were used to offload fish. Roughly
across from the canal. Later he was living on a little barge stuck on the shore a little
further south. There was a little Italian? community between Schatz Bros and the Belt
Parkway east of Knapp St. There was a funny loop to the Knapp St Parkway exit that seemed
like a mistake, It was south of the parkway, east of Knapp. Think it became the site of a
motel and later a senior citizens home. In 1940? this spot was just a depression
surrounded by a road that had no purpose. I think "Old Pop" had to move,
somebody must have had pity on him--they moved the barge from the shoreline into that
depression. Don't know the end of the story. Mom's recollection was that he had worked on
tugboats etc. in the NY area all his life.
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