History

Marine Park and the land it sits on features a rich and diverse history. Until the arrival of the Dutch, Gerritsen Creek was a popular hunting and fishing spot for Native Americans living nearby. The first Europeans to settle in the area were the Dutch. Dutch colonist Wolfert Gerritsen, who built a gristmill and a field house on the creek in the latter half of the 17^th century, serves as the namesake of Gerritsen Creek.

In the early 1900s developers began making elaborate plans to turn Jamaica Bay into a port, dredging Rockaway channel to allow large ships to enter the proposed harbor. Speculators anticipated a real estate boom and bought land along the Jamaica Bay waterfront. Fearing that the relatively pristine marshland around Gerritsen Creek would be destroyed, philanthropists Frederick B. Pratt and Alfred T. White gifted the city 150 acres in the area for use as a park in 1917. After a seven-year delay, the City accepted their offer and began to design what would become Marine Park. The prospect of a new park inspired developers to erect new homes in the area, although park improvements were slow to follow.

Plans for the park’s development evolved over time, including one by landscape architect Charles Downing Lay which won a Olympic medal in “Designs for Town Planning” in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first medal awarded to an American that summer.

Fill deposited in the marshlands in the 1930s and new land purchases increased the park’s area to 1822 acres by 1937. That year the Board of Aldermen named the site “Brooklyn Marine Park.” A series of additional land transactions, including the 1974 transfer of 1024 acres to the National Park Service for inclusion in the Gateway National Recreation Area, have stabilized the area of Marine Park at 798 acres, including land underwater.

Over the decades, portions of Marine Park have been improved with recreational facilities, while other areas have been conserved to protect wildlife and plant life. In 1939 the Pratt-White athletic field was dedicated in tribute to the two fathers of Marine Park. A 210-acre golf course opened in 1963, and the John V. Lindsay Model Airport was dedicated in 1971. New ballfields were opened in 1979 and named for baseball lover and police officer Rocco Torre in 1997. Nature trails established along Gerritsen Creek in 1984-85 invite park-goers to observe a wealth of flora and fauna. In 2000, the Salt Marsh Nature Center opened, where Urban Park Rangers present to the public a variety of nature-themed educational activities. In 2013, the Carmine Carro Community Center opened, named after Brooklyn community advocate and former Marine Park Park Warden Carmine Carro.

Marine Park surrounds the westernmost inlet of Jamaica Bay.  The bay is one of several formed during the last 5000 years as ocean currents deposited sand in a series of long strips off the south shore of Long Island.  These strips of beach form a barrier against the surf and allow salt marshes—coastal wetlands which are flooded and drained by tides—to grow in the calm water on their protected bay side.

Gerritsen Creek, originally called Strome Kill, was a freshwater stream that once extended about twice as far inland as it does today.  Around 1920 the creek north of Avenue U was converted into an underground storm drain.  Yet it continues to supply the salt marsh with fresh water, which helps the marsh support a wide range of organisms. Broad expanses of fertile salt marsh, wildflower-adorned meadows, and rolling sand dunes dominate the landscape of Marine Park.  Myrtle warblers, grasshopper sparrows, cotton-tailed rabbits, ospreys, horseshoe crabs, and oyster toad fish are a small sampling of the animals that inhabit these plant communities and live in or around Gerritsen Creek.

The creek was probably a favorite hunting and fishing spot for Indigenous Americans living in the nearby Keshawchqueren village.  Archaeological excavations in the Marine Park area have revealed arrowheads, pottery, and food preparation pits dating from 800 to 1400 A.D.  The first Europeans to settle here were the Dutch, who found the salt marshes and coastal plain of southern Brooklyn reminiscent of Holland’s landscape.  Their diet consisted of farm produce, livestock, game, and harvests of oysters and clams.  Gerritsen Creek takes its name from Dutch colonist Wolfert Gerritsen, who built a gristmill and a field house on the creek in the latter half of the 17^th century.  The mill was in continuous operation until 1889, and it was destroyed by fire in 1935. The old field house was demolished by the city in 1937. According to local legend, the grist mill produced flour for both the armies of George Washington and Lord Cornwallis at different points during the Revolutionary War.

The land that Marine Park sits on today was primarily a gift from two of Brooklyn’s leading men in the early twentieth century, Frederic B. Pratt (1865-1945) and Alfred T. White (1846-1921). Pratt, son of the founder of the Pratt Institute, served as the university’s president for 44 years and was a philanthropist. White, a fellow philanthropist, built some of the earliest housing for workers in New York City.

Both Pratt and White were members of the Brooklyn Committee on City Plan, of which Pratt was also the president. Starting in 1912, Pratt and White began to purchase land around Marine Park, convinced that the sparsely-settled neighborhood needed to provide park and playground space for current and future residents of Brooklyn. In 1914, Pratt wrote that “While so much land is still available at reasonable prices it seems almost a crime to the future city not to make some provision now.” In 1917, they offered over 120 acres of land to the city, and then they waited. And then they waited some more.

The main concern on the part of the city was cost. How much money would the city have to pay to fill in the marshland, or to pay landowners for the rest of the land needed to make Marine Park complete? And how much would the park be worth, considering that the Marine Park neighborhood was still rural at the time? These questions took seven years to resolve, with the city finally accepting the Pratt-White bequest in 1925. White died in the meantime in 1921.

Pratt and the estate of White agreed to give the city further money to purchase additional land and to pay all of the taxes associated with the properties that had accrued over the long interval. Today, the influence of Pratt and White’s generosity is seen in Marine Park at the Pratt-White athletic field by Avenue U, dedicated to the two fathers of Marine Park. At the dedication ceremony for the field in 1939, a speaker extolled that “…generations of New Yorkers to come will benefit from the vision, the generosity, the superlative civil spirit of Alfred T. White and Frederic B. Pratt.”

The Marine Park neighborhood, now a thriving community in Brooklyn, boasts the largest public park in Brooklyn, a benefit accrued through the foresight and patience of two of Brooklyn’s first leading citizens.

During the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, Charles Downing Lay, the initial designer of Marine Park, came home with a silver medal in “Town Planning” for his work on the park. He was the first American to win a medal that summer. How was this possible? Until 1948, art was an official class of competition in the Summer Olympics, although all submissions were required to be related to athletics. Lay’s vision of Marine Park exceeded that requirement by far. A Harvard-educated landscape architect, Lay received one of the first formal degrees in landscape architecture, a field first developed in the mid-nineteenth century.

Painted by Lay in oil on a forty-five square foot canvas, his plan was magnificent. Filling in hundreds of acres of salt marsh, Marine Park was to be larger than Central and Prospect Parks combined. Its grounds would feature typical park amenities like picnic areas, athletic fields, and a canoe harbor, but also included more grandiose ones like a skating rink, a zoo, and even a casino.

One of the most well-touted facilities was the Knute Rockne Memorial Field, a football field named after the recently deceased famous Notre Dame football coach. If built, the stadium would’ve been able to hold 125,000 people, making it one of the biggest stadiums in the world at the time. Hired by the city in 1931, Lay’s official plans were released publicly in 1932. Despite his vast vision of Marine Park, the Lay plan was not to be. With an estimated cost of construction of $40,000,000 dollars, the cost was simply too high for the city, eventually drastically scaling back his design.

Enough money was appropriated to complete the Pratt-White athletic field, which remains true to Lay’s vision today by Avenue U. More evidence can be seen in the wooden pilings visible outside of the Salt Marsh Nature Center at low tide, which were intended to provide the bulkhead line of the canoe harbor. Despite the ultimate failure of Lay’s vision, he was still celebrated for his bold and ambitious proposals for the park by the Olympics.

Upon hearing of his victory, he remained modest, saying “…I did not win the Olympic medal in a contest…It was much more of an exhibition. My Marine Park drawings were lying finished years ago. I sent them to Berlin. Now I am very glad indeed that they were successful.”