Barren Island, Brooklyn

New Jersey

A bay on the edge of Brooklyn got its name because factories there dumped the remains of nearly twenty thousand horses a year.

historicalengineering

On the southeast edge of Brooklyn there is a stretch of water called Dead Horse Bay. The name is literal. For about seventy-five years, factories on Barren Island took in the carcasses of New York City's dead horses and boiled them down. At their peak the plants processed close to twenty thousand horses a year. What came out the other end was glue, fertilizer, buttons, and material used for refining gold and sugar. Whatever was left over went straight into the water on the island's western shore, which is how the bay earned the name it still carries. One plant, where Flatbush Avenue runs today, was reported to be the largest carcass-processing operation in the world. Nobody else wanted the work, and nobody else wanted to be near it. That isolation was the whole point. There were no land routes to the rest of the city. Today the ground is part of Floyd Bennett Field, and no trace of the industry remains.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The plants processed almost 20,000 horse corpses annually at their peak, leading to the nickname "Dead Horse Bay" for the still-extant water body on the island's western shore, since the waste processors on the island would simply dump the processed waste into that bay.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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