Bergen Beach -- Brooklyn History
Bergen Beach, 1896 Ad, lostamusementparks.naptha.org

Read Part 2 of this story.

A summer day’s journey to the beach at Coney Island has long been a destination for hot and city-weary New Yorkers. The history of Brooklyn has long been connected with the goings-on at Coney Island.

Some of our best roadways and several of our longest mass transit train and trolley/bus lines were developed in order to get people to the beach. Isn’t that great? They weren’t developed to get people to work, but to play.

In the beginning, it was all for the wealthy, as huge resort hotels were established on all of the Coney Island beaches, and rich people summered in luxury by the shore. But by the turn of the 20th century, the beach was fast becoming Everyman’s playground, as the lure of a public beach and cheap entertainment was just too great.

But as Coney Island was reinventing itself and growing by leaps and bounds, a couple of Brooklyn entrepreneurs were already looking around for the Next Big Thing. They thought they found it in an island just off the coast of Canarsie.

It was a nice-sized sandy coastal island named for the Dutch family that had owned it since the 1600s. Like the rest of Flatlands, it was still farmland, visited only by the farmers who tilled the soil and day trippers who made their way across its salt marshes to picnic and bird watch. It was perfect, and it was called Bergen Island.

Jamaica Bay is one of the greatest bays in the world. The Canarsee had treasured the area, and had been there for centuries when Henry Hudson came along and decided this was the entrance to the great passage to the East.

Hudson’s employers, the Dutch West India Company, didn’t get their passage, but they got something just as good; New Amsterdam. They began setting up forts and trading posts in areas where the Canarsee would be likely to trade. This island was perfect, and was a popular place for the Canarsee to hunt, fish and gather shellfish for food and wampum.

The Dutch slowly pushed the Canarsee out, and took over what was now called Mentelaer’s Island. By the end of the 17th century, it belonged to Hans Hansen Bergen, the patriarch of one of Brooklyn’s most important old Dutch families.

During the Revolutionary War, the island was commandeered by the British, who used the fort and the Bergen house as an outpost guarding the bay. After the war, the island went back to being a peaceful farm. In the 1850s, as Brooklyn was organizing itself and establishing its city-wide streets, the island was officially named Bergen Island.

The only way to get to Bergen Island was to take Flatbush Avenue to the end of the line, and then take a road to a bridge that led to the island. The island was surrounded on the mainland side by salt marshes, affected by the tides.

There was quicksand and swamp, which was enough to keep most people away. But those who braved the road, like the couple we met in our last story, the island was a bucolic place to see nature at its wildest, and an agrarian way of life that was fast disappearing into the development of one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world.

The local farmers, Bergen’s no doubt, or their tenants, had a nice informal system going for the tourists. They welcomed them to the island, provided parking, and rented picnic baskets, blankets and walking sticks to the tourists.

The generally well-heeled day trippers would wander around, bird watch and collect flowers, and sit on the beach and picnic in relative privacy. They could then go back to their carriages, return their equipment, and be home by evening. It was a perfect day. You just had to watch for that quicksand.

Perfect is what two Brooklyn entrepreneurs were looking for. Thomas Adams Jr. was Brooklyn’s chewing gum king. He manufactured Chiclets gum, an enterprise that had made him quite wealthy, and enabled him to build a fine double mansion on 8th Avenue in Park Slope.

He and his partner Percy Williams were looking for a new Coney Island. They thought they found it on Bergen’s Island. Those in the know were already going there for nature and picnics. Why not ramp up the experience and provide an upscale resort park to rival anything Coney Island has to offer?

They bought part of the island from the Bergen family, and set out to out-Coney, Coney Island. They didn’t want Everyman’s park, they wanted to build a high-end amusement park for people like themselves. Much of Coney Island had been built by self-made men who became wealthy after the fact.

These men of humble backgrounds wanted to amuse the masses, and did so with great panache. Adams and Williams were building for the moneyed crowd, they said. Their amusement park would be tasteful and lavish.

OK, it would be tasteful and lavish, and also have exotic Egyptian dancing girls, knights in armor jousting to amuse the crowds, and jugglers, Irish villagers, mountebanks and opera singers.

Not to mention the plantation with “authentic plantation Negroes,” who sang spirituals and did fun plantation-y things, an exotic Egyptian village with scantily clad harem girls, and an authentic Irish village.

There, tourists could watch villagers in red wigs, green velvet vests and corduroy pants dance authentic Irish jigs and do other Irish-y things to amuse and amaze.

To be fair, the place looked gorgeous. The park opened in 1896 and the New York Herald said: “Coney Island lacks the refinements of gayety, compared to this brightly caparisoned and gilded resort within view of the cat-boat dotted waters of Jamaica Bay.

From a distance as the trolley approaches it looks like a mass of orange and crimson boathouses.” The boardwalk extended about half a mile along the beach, and the attractions were all along its route.

The Casino offered diners steak and oysters. You could eat outside on the veranda, or stay inside and watch the dancing girls. The reporter for the Herald hated the Moorish Maze, which was a hot, sticky series of rooms that led to dead ends.

By the time he got out of there, he was sweaty and aggravated. Outside, the Egyptian camp offered dancing girls and real camels. A barker announced that it was all refined and tasteful. Then the band struck up the “cootchee-cootchee” and the men surged into the enclosure to watch.

There was also a Ferris Wheel, a carousel, and a ride which took the passenger into an indoor cavern on a rail car, where they would pass all kinds of scary vignettes, and finally land in a fairy grotto.

There was a puppet theater that was supposed to be for children, but soon attracted more men without children. Hmmm. And, if you wanted to, there was a bathhouse where you could change into your bathing costume and actually go to the beach.

Other attractions included the aforementioned plantation row, a Medieval joust, which apparently was filled with gross anachronisms, a Wild West show with “real” Indians, and a water show. In subsequent years, the attractions changed, for better or worse.

Some acts were hugely popular, others were a bust. But Bergen Beach, as it was called, just never resonated with the crowds. They certainly didn’t attract the moneyed set, which was their intention. The two were not carnival men, and it showed.

By 1902, there were rumors the place would not open. The easiest way for the masses to get to Bergen Beach was by a trolley run by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company.

A private company, the BRT had negotiated with Adams and Williams to be the exclusive trolley to the resort. The BRT wanted to buy Bergen Beach, keeping the profitable attractions like the dance halls, Ferris Wheel and other such amenities, but the men would not deal.

It’s not wise to mess with the company that provides the only way to get to your little island resort, and the BRT played vindictive hardball. They slowed service down on their trolleys so much that people had to wait forever if they wanted to go to the amusement park.

This not only affected service to the park, it affected service all up and down Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues. People were not happy, and they weren’t blaming the BRT.

(1896 Ad for Bergen Beach. Via lostamusementparks.naptha.org They were the source for most of the information for this article)

What happened next, and what was the fate of Bergen Beach? The conclusion, next time.

1850s map, showing Bergen Island, off Flatlands. From: bergenbeachcommunity.com
1850s map, showing Bergen Island, off Flatlands. From: bergenbeachcommunity.com
Bergen Beach Carousel. Photo:lostamusementparks.naptha.org
Bergen Beach Carousel. Photo:lostamusementparks.naptha.org

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