Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History

Download or read book Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History written by Miriam Sicherman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unbeknownst to most of the city's inhabitants, a rural community of garbage workers once existed on a now-vanished island in New York City. Barren Island was a swampy speck in Jamaica Bay where a motley group of new immigrants and African Americans quietly processed mountains of garbage and dead animals starting in the 1850s. They turned the waste into useful industrial products until their eviction by Robert Moses in 1936, all in the name of progress. Barren Islanders built businesses, fought fires, demanded a public school and worshipped at churches as they created a quintessentially American community from scratch. Author Miriam Sicherman tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost in the annals of New York City history.