Gateway, NRA
Riis Beach, Jamaica Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Staten Island New Dorp to Great Kills, Sandy Hook,N.J.
Planning and management at the new seashore parks and urban recreation areas were especially challenging for land management agencies unused to hosting extremely diverse cultural and racial metro region visitors, and in addressing their needs and their smoldering inter-group conflicts.
Perhaps nowhere was this more true than in the early federal experience at Riis Park in Brooklyn as it became a unit of the new Gateway National Recreation Area (NRA).. I served as a member of the planning team and its sociologist for all occasions.
Jacob Riis Park was designed by New York City as a public beach with parking in 1912. Its famous bath house was built in 1932 and remodeled five years later. Jacob Riis Park became part of the National Park Service when Gateway National Recreation Area was established in 1972.
The Federal officials had little appreciation of its worn urban resources nor its endlessly partying crowds.
But it was a human ecologist's natural lab. The Parks managers. Starting with Joseph Antosca, its Chief Superintendent, knew they needed sociological advice and even guidance if available.
The displays of human territoriality in the seventies at Riis Beach especially, were joyous and at times dangerous. Bays 1-2 were celebrated gay beaches. Bay 4,5, were inner-city, Black and Latino Brooklyn party beaches. The western end, Bays 7 and on, were where the white kids from the Rockaways and Broad Channel congregated, “as far away from the queers as possible.”
My late friend, Floyd Smith, was “Mayor of Bay Five.” The scene today at Orchard Beach in the Bronx is what it was like on his Riis Beach on a July or August Sunday in the 197s and 1980s. The federal agents, U.S. Park Police , seemed doomed in their efforts to exert their control in the face of public criticism. Their lot at Gateway was never a happy one.
11 Men Arrested at Riis Park As U.S. Begins a Crackdown
July 23, 1974
Eleven men were arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court yesterday on charges that they had engaged in sodomy in Jacob Riis Park over the weekend.
The arrests—technically for disorderly conduct — marked the second phase of the Federal Government's effort to restrict the wilder sorts of social nonconformists who like to frequent the beaches of the park.
The previous weekend a nude sunbather, arrested in Riis Park, received a strong lecture on community clothing standards from United States Magistrate Vincent A. Catoggio. The Federal Government is involved because Riis Park is now part of the Gateway National Recreation area.
Bolstered by the magistrate's statements, National Parks police were saying quite openly yesterday that they were not going to tolerate behavior that might offend families who use the park.
The Changing Traditional Uses of Jamaica Bay, New York: Ethnographic Overview and Assessment, Gateway National Recreation Area (William Kornblum and Kristen Van Hooreweghe, 2012)
Donald R. Field, NPS Senior Scientist in Sociology
Tribute: Donald R. Field, the First NPS Senior Scientist in Sociology
Cooperative Park Studies Units: University-Based Science Programs in the National Park Service, James K. Agee, Donald R. Field & Edward E. Starkey
Architect Michael Adlerstein, shown here in a Robert Moses-style pose, renovated the UN. He earlier served on the Gateway planning team and worked on innumerable NPS projects, some of them with me.
Ellis Island and the (American) Dream
TK: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/william-kornblum
michelle and robin bmcc
Park Socialists
Chicago’s steel mills are forty years gone to brownfields. Most of the union halls are shuttered. Yet the parks, with their fieldhouses and pools and quiet preserves, remain as enduring gifts from social visionaries.
