Walkabout: Of Sunny Days, Sea Breezes, Knights in Armor and Chewing Gum, Part 2

Read Part 1 of this story.

In 1896, two Brooklyn entrepreneurs, Thomas Adams, Jr. and Percy Williams bought the Jamaica Bay side of Bergen Island, off the coast of Flatlands and Canarsie. The island had belonged to the Bergen family for centuries, and was part of an isolated community of small farms in this rural part of Brooklyn which still supplied the markets of Wallabout and Manhattan with produce, dairy and meat.

The men wanted to cash in on the lucrative resort and amusement park success of Coney Island. They were counting on the cooling ocean breezes, the sunlit open spaces, and their amusement park to be more popular than an ever-increasingly crowded, and common, Coney. A short history of Bergen Island and the park appears in Part One.

They weren’t amusement park men, or hoteliers. Adams had made a fortune with the manufacture of Chiclets chewing gum. They were men with The Big Idea, but no real experience in making it happen.

They started out with a classy hotel and beachfront resort, but in order to be financially viable, soon were just as tawdry as anything Coney Island had going on. It was called Bergen Beach.

Many of their attractions were just burlesque girly acts, or played to the ethnic and racial stereotypes of the day. They had all of the requisite rides and amusements; a Ferris wheel, carousel, house of horrors, a dance hall and later, a swimming pool, but they just never really resonated with their audience.

They even had Medieval jousts. A great deal of the reason for that was in getting there.

Bergen Island really was an island, along with Mill Island, separated from the mainland by only a narrow channel of water. A bridge had been built to cross the channel, but there was only one road in or out.

The mainland side of the island was a salt water tidal marsh, which up until the building of Bergen Beach, could be dangerous to the infrequent tourists who had enjoyed the island as a quiet rural getaway where they could picnic and relax.

When the amusement park was established, Adams and Williams had negotiated with the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, the BRT, to bring trolley service to the beach. The trolley cars were headed in that direction anyway, part of the busy Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand Avenue lines.

The BRT brought trolley service to the island. Trolley cars travelled across Bergen Island down the entire mile-long Boardwalk, as seen in the photo above. Over at Coney Island, several private transit companies, including the BRT, had negotiated with the owners of the various hotels and later, amusement parks, to bring service to that area. The largest of those lines, the Culver Line, was owned by the owner of one of the largest hotels.

The results were private lines of trains and trolleys that took passengers directly to the hotel doors, and to the beach. Those lines are still with us today, which is why a remote area like Coney Island has one of the largest transit hubs in Brooklyn.

The BRT saw the potential of Bergen Beach, but were not exactly thrilled with Adams and Williams. They wanted to buy them out and run Bergen Beach themselves. Unfortunately for them, the pair was not going to let go of Bergen Beach cheaply.

In 1901, the resort was already in trouble, so the BRT made an offer of $500,000 for it. They wanted to keep the beach, the Casino Theater, the Casino Pier, the Trocadero, and the Alhambra dancing hall. They also wanted the right to sublet all other venues and privileges.

Williams, who was in charge of Bergen Beach operations, turned them down. He and Adams would accept no less than $750,000. As if things weren’t bad enough for Bergen Beach already, nature also conspired against them.

Jamaica Bay doesn’t usually get severe storms, but it did during the winter of 1901. Gale force winds and rain tore down the length of Bergen Beach, causing over $100,000 worth of damage to the Boardwalk as well as the rest of the park.

Percy Williams didn’t have the money to repair it. He was still in negotiations with the transit line, so he asked the BRT to help fund the repairs, as their revenues would be impacted as well, if the resort wasn’t able to open.

The railroad sneered at him. They told him they would run to the public beach anyway, as it was the longest ride on the trolley system, and people would go no matter what, as it was the best deal for five cents in the city.

They told Williams that “he would have to nail the planks himself.” He did, fencing off the resort as well as the public beach, so that passengers could not see the beach or the resort. So there!

The BRT retaliated by slowing down service to the island. Would-be customers found themselves waiting for their trolleys for a loooong time. Since this also affected the Flatbush and Nostrand Avenue regular service, and since Williams chose to ignore the slowdown, and proceed as usual, public opinion weighed heavily against Bergen Beach.

The place was starting to fail spectacularly. It would only take a conflagration of epic proportions to complete the debacle.

That almost happened, in April of 1904. Spontaneous combustion of paints and flammable materials in a storage shed started a fire that destroyed part of the Boardwalk, as well as part of a railroad ride, several small buildings and pavilions.

Firefighting was initially hampered by low tide, and the inability to get sea water on the blaze. Since the city fire station was on the mainland, it took them a while to get there, as well, but fortunately, the fire was contained to the immediate area, there were no winds, and the blaze and was put out when the fire department arrived, aided greatly by the arrival of high tide, that evening.

The resort soldiered on. The idea of a high end resort was gone. They began offering cheap deals, free shows, and built popular activity venues like a swimming pool, more dance floors, and in 1907, the newest craze – roller skating.

The new huge roller rink offered a huge skating floor, with a resident band that played all day. Lessons and skate rental were available, and a spectator’s balcony where people could watch professional skaters compete nightly, was packed. Roller skating was now more popular than dancing, and Bergen Beach had one of the largest rinks in Brooklyn.

The park introduced new acts, rides and attractions for the next ten years, keeping them going, but Bergen Beach just couldn’t compete with Coney Island. Another fire, this one much worse, due to strong winds, almost destroyed the park in 1910.

This time, the damage was over $400,000. The park disappears from the newspapers, probably because they couldn’t afford the advertising, or offer anything newsworthy, and finally delivered its last season in the summer of 1918. They had survived for twenty-two years.

By 1919, they were closed and abandoned. The original Bergen house, which Adams and Williams had turned into a quaint upscale hotel in the first days of the park, lay empty. In 1925, the park was sold to Manhattan real estate developers Max Natanson and Mandlebaum & Levine.

They paid $2 million for everything. They were going to build a planned community complete with beachfront, a bathing house, pavilion and small amusement park. It never happened. They ended up selling off the land piece by piece.

By this time, Bergen Beach was no longer an island. Landfill had filled in the channel between it and the mainland in 1918, the hoped-for precursor of new development. They also filled in the channel separating Mill Island from the mainland, in the Mill Basin neighborhood.

But the next Big Idea never came. Bergen Beach became the largest undeveloped piece of land in Brooklyn for the most of the 20th century.

In 1930, Robert Moses tore down the Bergen house, in preparation for the Belt Parkway. The actual construction of the Belt in 1939 took out the remaining pieces of the Boardwalk and the rest of the structures of the park.

It was thought that the parkway would spur development in Bergen Beach, but only provided a way for people to pass through it rapidly. Development would be slow.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that substantial development began in the neighborhood. By the 1980s and 90s, the area began to see more and more housing built. Today, the neighborhood is growing fast to meet the growing housing needs in Brooklyn.

This part of town is one of the only areas in all of Brooklyn where the oldest buildings are only fifty or sixty years old, and new construction predominates. Most people don’t even know the rich history of the neighborhood. The next time you hear the name “Bergen Beach,” be sure to tell people, “Did you know there used to be an amusement park there?” GMAP

(Photo:Lostamusementparks.napha.org.This was the source of much of my information.)