Coney Island Creek is a tidal
inlet
An inlet is a (usually long and narrow) indentation of a shoreline, such as a small arm, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea.
Overview
In marine geogra ...
in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
,
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. It was created from a series of
streams
A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream ...
and inlets by land filling and digging activities starting in the mid-18th century which, by the 19th century, became a continual
strait
A strait is an oceanic landform connecting two seas or two other large areas of water. The surface water generally flows at the same elevation on both sides and through the strait in either direction. Most commonly, it is a narrow ocean channe ...
and a partial
mudflat
Mudflats or mud flats, also known as tidal flats or, in Ireland, slob or slobs, are coastal wetlands that form in intertidal areas where sediments have been deposited by tides or rivers. A global analysis published in 2019 suggested that tidal fl ...
connecting Gravesend Bay and
Sheepshead Bay
Sheepshead, Sheephead, or Sheep's Head, may refer to:
Fish
* ''Archosargus probatocephalus'', a medium-sized saltwater fish of the Atlantic Ocean
* Freshwater drum, ''Aplodinotus grunniens'', a medium-sized freshwater fish of North and Central Am ...
, separating
Coney Island
Coney Island is a peninsular neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is bounded by Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, Manhattan Beach to its east, L ...
from the mainland. The strait was closed off in the early 20th century due to further land development and later construction projects. Today only the western half of Coney Island Creek exists.
Course
Coney Island Creek extends eastward from Gravesend Bay to Shell Road and separates the west end of
Coney Island
Coney Island is a peninsular neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is bounded by Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, Manhattan Beach to its east, L ...
from the neighborhoods of
Gravesend
Gravesend is a town in northwest Kent, England, situated 21 miles (35 km) east-southeast of Charing Cross (central London) on the Bank (geography), south bank of the River Thames and opposite Tilbury in Essex. Located in the diocese of Ro ...
and
Bath Beach
Bath Beach is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City, United States. It is located at the southwestern edge of the borough on Gravesend Bay. The neighborhood borders Bensonhurst and New Utrecht to the northeast across 86th Street; Dyker Beach ...
. The west end of the creek is bordered by
Coney Island Creek Park
Coney Island Creek Park is a public park on the northwestern coast of Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City. It abuts Coney Island Creek, Gravesend Bay, and Kaiser Park and is across Coney Island Creek from Calvert Vaux Park and Six Diamond ...
and
Kaiser Park
''Kaiser'' is the German word for "emperor" (female Kaiserin). In general, the German title in principle applies to rulers anywhere in the world above the rank of king (''König''). In English, the (untranslated) word ''Kaiser'' is mainly ap ...
on the south side, and
Calvert Vaux Park
Calvert Vaux Park (formerly known as Dreier Offerman Park) is an public park in Gravesend, Brooklyn, in New York City. Created in 1934, it is composed of several disconnected sections along the Belt Parkway between Bay 44th and Bay 49th Stree ...
on the north side. The creek is crossed by the Cropsey Avenue and Stillwell Avenue bridges as well as two parallel rail
trestles
ATLAS-I (Air Force Weapons Lab Transmission-Line Aircraft Simulator), better known as Trestle, was a unique electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generation and testing apparatus built between 1972 and 1980 during the Cold War at Sandia National Labora ...
carrying the
West End and
Sea Beach subway lines (respectively served by the and ). The eastern end is bordered by the
Shore Parkway
A shore or a shoreline is the fringe of land at the edge of a large body of water, such as an ocean, sea, or lake. In physical oceanography, a shore is the wider fringe that is geologically modified by the action of the body of water past a ...
on the north side and Neptune Avenue on the south side. The eastern portion of Coney Island Creek runs along private industrial property and several acres formerly owned by
Keyspan
KeySpan Corporation was the fifth largest distributor of natural gas in the United States. KeySpan was formed in 1998 as a result of the merger of Brooklyn Union Gas Company (founded 1895 by merging several smaller companies) and Long Island Light ...
, the local electricity provider. The creek terminates at Shell Road where a
storm sewer
A storm drain, storm sewer (United Kingdom, U.S. and Canada), surface water drain/sewer (United Kingdom), or stormwater drain ( Australia and New Zealand) is infrastructure designed to drain excess rain and ground water from impervious surface ...
emerges from under the road (designated stormwater outfall CI-641 in city plans).
History
Extensions and infilling
At the time of European settlement the land that makes up the present day Coney Island was several
barrier island
Barrier islands are coastal landforms and a type of Dune, dune system that are exceptionally flat or lumpy areas of sand that form by wave and tidal action parallel to the mainland coast. They usually occur in chains, consisting of anything fro ...
s with interconnecting waterways that were all constantly changing shape. The waterway that became Coney Island Creek did not originally extend across the back side of the island since part of the land on the west end was a peninsula called Coney Hook. Hubbard's Creek, which ran down the eastern side of the peninsula, connected directly with the ocean. In 1750 a 0.25-mile-long canal (called the "Jamaica Ditch") was dug through the Coney Hook salt-marsh from a creek connecting to Gravesend Bay east to Hubbard's creek. This new waterway, allowing shipping traffic to travel from Jamaica Bay to New York Harbor without having to venture out into the ocean, connected Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay together. The waterway behind the islands was called Gravesend Creek in the early 19th century since it cut below the town of
Gravesend
Gravesend is a town in northwest Kent, England, situated 21 miles (35 km) east-southeast of Charing Cross (central London) on the Bank (geography), south bank of the River Thames and opposite Tilbury in Essex. Located in the diocese of Ro ...
(later the name was used interchangeably with "Coney Island Creek"). Eventually Hubbard's and the other creeks and inlets that separated the islands were filled by a combination of natural process and land development, leaving just a single island that came to be called Coney Island and a single creek behind it that came to be called Coney Island Creek.
Coney Island Creek was still a minimally navigable waterway over its 3-mile length through the turn of the 20th century.
[Sergey Kadinsky, Hidden Waters blog Companion blog for the book "Hidden Waters of NYC" Canal Avenue, Brooklyn](_blank)
/ref> By the early part of the century, industries started to develop around the creek. This resulted in it becoming polluted with substances including arsenic, cyanide, and benzene. The largest polluters included the Brooklyn Yarn Dye Company and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company.
In a period from the late 19th century through the early 20th century there were plans to turn the creek into the ''Gravesend Ship Canal''. It would re-dredge the creek into a canal running in a straight east-west line and fill all the marsh land on either side of the creek to expand the urban grid
Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to:
Common usage
* Cattle grid or stock grid, a type of obstacle is used to prevent livestock from crossing the road
* Grid reference, used to define a location on a map
Arts, entertainment, and media
* News g ...
to the edge of the canal. The plan was eventually abandoned and by 1924 local land owners had filled a portion of the creek. A major section of the creek was further filled in to allow construction of the Belt Parkway
The Belt Parkway is the name given to a series of connected limited-access highways that form a belt-like circle around the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. The Belt Parkway comprises three of the four parkways in what is known as t ...
in the 1930s. More fill was added in 1962 with the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge ( ) is a suspension bridge connecting the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn. It spans the Narrows, a body of water linking the relatively enclosed New York Harbor with Lower New York Bay and th ...
. This turned Coney Island Creek into an inlet with the western and eastern ends of the island becoming peninsulas. None of the creek remains at the eastern end. That terminus, Sheepshead Bay, has been dredged and, for the most part, enclosed in bulkheads. The path of the landfill of what used to be the creek follows Shore Parkway, Guider Avenue, and the triangular block between Neptune Avenue and Cass Place to a bulkhead at Sheepshead Bay.
Current status
A northwestern part of the creek is known as a "ship graveyard
A ship graveyard or ship cemetery is a location where the hulls of scrapped ships are left to decay and disintegrate, or left in reserve. Such a practice is now less common due to waste regulations and so some dry docks where ships are bro ...
" for the dead and abandoned ships found there. At the southern shore of the creek, the remains of a yellow submarine, the '' Quester I'', protrudes from the water. Built from salvaged metal in the late 1960s, it was never able to maintain an even keel
The keel is the bottom-most longitudinal structural element on a vessel. On some sailboats, it may have a hydrodynamic and counterbalancing purpose, as well. As the laying down of the keel is the initial step in the construction of a ship, in Br ...
and was abandoned. The creek is also used for performing baptisms.
In 2016, the New York City government found that a nearby apartment complex, Beach Haven Apartments, was dumping of sewage each day into Coney Island Creek. The complex was fined $400,000 two years later. By late 2016, local residents were advocating the designation of the creek as a Superfund
Superfund is a United States federal environmental remediation program established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). The program is administered by the United States Environmental Pro ...
site, which would provide funding to clean the hazardous materials from the creek. Community members testified that auto shops on nearby Neptune Avenue were still dumping cars into the creek. The creek was expected to undergo some minor cleanup between 2018 and 2020. By late 2020, the United States Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it be ...
(EPA) was considering designating the creek as a Superfund site.
In 2018, the Coney Island History Project
The Coney Island History Project, or CIHP, founded in 2004, is a not-for-profit organization that works to record and increase awareness of Coney Island's history.
Oral history project
The Coney Island History Project was founded in 2004 by C ...
opened an exhibition about the history of the Coney Island creek titled: ''“Coney Island Creek and the Natural World.”''
In 2020, the city planned to build a NYC Ferry
NYC Ferry is a public network of ferry routes in New York City operated by Hornblower Cruises. , there are six routes, as well as one seasonal route, connecting 25 ferry piers across all five boroughs. NYC Ferry has the largest passenger fleet ...
dock along the creek off Kaiser Park. The ferry dock would be the terminal of a new route to Pier 11/Wall Street
Pier 11/Wall Street is a pier providing slips to ferries and excursion boats on the East River in the Port of New York and New Jersey. It is located east of South Street and FDR Drive just south of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City ...
; the route, announced in 2019, was to have begun operations in 2021. Local activists rallied against the dock plan, arguing it would disrupt the ecosystems of the creek. There were also concerns that the addition of ferry service would worsen pollution in the creek. The implementation of the Coney Island ferry route was delayed and, in mid-2022, the EDC announced that the ferry route had been postponed indefinitely. One problem was that the sand in the Coney Island Creek shifted frequently, hampering efforts to construct a ferry pier there. Another issue was that the creek itself was heavily polluted, and a Superfund
Superfund is a United States federal environmental remediation program established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). The program is administered by the United States Environmental Pro ...
cleanup project was being planned for the creek. Independent news site ''Hell Gate'' subsequently reported that test boats had repeatedly run aground in Coney Island Creek and that sand had returned to the creek after it was partially dredged in 2021.
References
External links
ConeyIslandCreek.org
Coney Island's Untamed Creek, Caught Between Past & Future
CONEY ISLAND CREEK: An Uncertain Future
{{authority control
Bodies of water of Brooklyn
Brighton Beach
Coney Island
Inlets of New York (state)