Brooklyn's Barren Island: A Forgotten History

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 the name of progress, in 1936. 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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: History Press Library Editions
Published: 11/18/2019
ISBN: 9781540241436
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.44d