Mill Basin, Brooklyn

Mill Basin is a neighborhood in New York City in the southern portion of the borough of Brooklyn, lying along Jamaica Bay and bounded to the north by Avenue U and to the east, south, and west by the Mill Basin/ Mill Island Inlet. The area is part of Brooklyn Community Board 18. As of 2009 Mill Basin has a population of 85,229.

History


The area was called Equandito (Broken Lands) by the local Lenape Native Americans, who sold it in 1664 to John Tilton Jr. and Samuel Spicer. During the seventeenth century it became part of Flatlands and tide mills were built on it; the land was owned from 1675 by Jan Martense Schenck and between 1818 and 1870 by the wife of General Philip S. Crooke. The Crooke-Schenck House, which stood at East 63rd Street, was dismantled in 1952 and later reassembled as an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The area retained its rural character until Robert L. Crooke built a lead-smelting plant in 1890. The Crooke Smelting Company was bought out by the National Lead Company, and Crooke sold the remainder of the land to the firm of McNulty and Fitzgerald, which erected bulkheads and filled in the marshes.

Until the early twentieth century, the chief resources were the abundant crabs, oysters, and clams in Jamaica Bay. In 1906 the Flatbush Improvement Company brought marshland and engaged the firm of Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific to dredge creeks and fill in meadows. Eventually the parcel had an area of 332 acre and was fit for industrial development, and within a decade National Lead, Gulf Refining, and other leading firms engaged in heavy industry opened plants there. Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific bought the land in 1909 and built three large drydocks employing a thousand workers; it also began promoting Jamaica Bay as a major harbor but failed to attract a large volume of shipping. A project begun in 1913 and completed in 1923 to extend Flatbush Avenue to the Rockaway Inlet provided an additional 2700 ft of dock facilities and a strip of land for a road across the marshes. In 1915 a channel was dredged to the main channel of Jamaica Bay, and a bulkhead and wharfage platform were build on the mainland side of Mill Creek. By 1919, Mill Island was the site of at least six manufacturing and commercial concerns. During the late 1920s and 1930s the docks were rented to a number of small industrial firms. The neighborhood remained a grimy industrial area for 30 years, but its further development was hindered when plans for rail service to the rest of Brooklyn went unrealized. Residential development began after World War II, when Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific sold to the firm of Flatbush Park Homes the land bounded to the north by Avenue U, to the east by East 68th Street and East Mill Basin / Mill Island, to the south by Bassett Avenue, and to the west by Strickland Avenue and Mill Avenue. Brick bungalows were built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of which were later replaced by large custom-built detached one-family houses on lots that measure 50 by 100 feet.

Houses of worship in Mill Basin and nearby Bergen Beach are St. Bernards, Flatbush Park Jewish Center (named after the housing development company and not a neighborhood), Beth Sholom and small synagogues.

Mill Basin Drawbridge
The Mill Basin Bridge is a double leaf trunnion bascule bridge that supports the Belt Parkway over Mill Basin. Each leaf carries six lanes of traffic - three in each direction. There is a sidewalk on each side of the leaf; the eastern or downstream one being part of the Shore Parkway Greenway.

Built in the 1940s, the bridge, which cost $1.4 million, is the only drawbridge on the Belt Parkway.

The New York City Department of Transportation reconstructed the Belt Parkway Bridge over Mill Basin in late 2006. The bridge was constructed in 1942 and had outlived its useful service life. Due to the effects of age, weather and increased traffic volume, reconstruction was deemed necessary. The reconstruction work was accomplished in two stages.
 * Reconstruction

Transportation
Mill Basin is served on East 66th Street by the B100 bus to and from the Kings Highway B/Q station and (for a premium fare) by the BM1 express bus to and from Manhattan.