Creating Space in New York City: Historic Landbuilding in Brooklyn

Summary

Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field was the first municipal airport in New York City (1928) before its use by the U.S. military until the Vietnam War. Since 1972, the field has been administered by the National Park Service within the Gateway National Recreation Area- the first of its kind in an urban setting. The landform supporting Floyd Bennett Field is almost entirely anthropogenic having been created by numerous landfill episodes dating from 1878 to 1941. These efforts used two general categories of parent material- natural and cultural. Combining natural landfill (sand from Jamaica Bay) and cultural landfill (historic trash and industrial debris from across NYC), city engineers combined Barren Island with several other small islands to create Floyd Bennet Field. This poster examines the processes, records, and materials comprising the archaeological record of this part of Brooklyn.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage