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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.
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 a museum 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 acres (1.34 km2) 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 2,700 feet (820 m) 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 built 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 thirty 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 Basset 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
measuring fifty by a hundred feet.
The Mill Basin Bridge is a double leaf trunnion bascule bridge supporting 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.
- Reconstruction
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 has 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 2 stages.
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