Bergen Beach, Brooklyn

Bergen Beach is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The area is part of Brooklyn Community Board 18.

What is now Bergen Beach is a peninsula that was Bergen Island, off the coast of Canarsie; it was connected to the mainland in the early 1900s with landfill.

The neighborhood is named for Hans Hansen Bergen, an early Norwegian settler of New Netherland. The peninsula, south of Avenue U, is less than half-a-mile square (excluding Gateway National Recreation Area on the southern end) and is made up virtually exclusively of detached and semi-detached homes with driveways and garages. When the neighborhood was built en masse around 1970, it became filled mostly with young Italian couples from Bensonhurst who didn't want to leave the borough because they wanted to stay close to their families. Now that they have reached a turnover point, many of them are not being replaced by their offspring but instead by Russians, Israelis, and Yemenis. Houses of worship in Bergen Beach and nearby Mill Basin are St. Bernards, Flatbush Park Jewish Center (named after a housing development company and not a neighborhood), Beth Sholom and small synagogues.

The water on the three sides of the peninsula are East Mill Basin to the west, Jamaica Bay to the south and Paedergat Basin (Dutch for Horse's Gate) to the east. There are two yacht clubs - one on East Mill Basin and the other on Paedergat Basin. Shopping is along Avenue U in nearby Mill Basin to the east and on Ralph Avenue in nearby Georgetown to the north.

Transportation
Bergen Beach is served by the B3 bus. However, as part of the 2010 Budget Reduction Proposal, the route has been cut back to Avenue U/East 71st Street instead of running to and from Avenue X via East 73rd and East 74th Streets. The B-100 bus goes from East 66th Street in nearby Mill Basin to and from the Kings Highway B/Q subway station. In addition, the B41 spur runs between East 70th Street and Downtown Brooklyn via Veterans Avenue/Avenue N and Flatbush Avenue, serving the IRT subway station at "The Junction" of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues. For a premium fare, the BM1 express bus at East 71st Street travels to and from Manhattan, except on Sundays.