When Long Island Went Coastal

Queen Victoria led her countrymen to the seashore throughout her reign of Great Britain from 1837 until her death in 1876. The Queen is often credited with encouraging her subjects to spend "restorative sessions" at the  beach.

As a young monarch, Victoria spent summers on the shores of Osborne, frolicking about and collecting shells with her nine children and Prince Albert. 

The Queen also swam. This she accomplished with the aid of a “bathing machine,” 

Queen Vic's actual bathing machine at Osbourne*

a gypsy-type caravan that allowed her to change, privately, into a bathing dress with bloomers, hat, stockings, and soft-soled shoes. The caravan was then drawn to the water where the Queen emerged from behind its closed door to be escorted down steps into the sea. However, most of the Queen’s subjects couldn’t afford such extravagant relaxation. *

Similarly across the pond, and on Long Island in particular, it was the U.S. monarchy who discovered the tranquility of the sea. By the 1890s wealth earned from the Second Industrial Revolution had built 500 mansions along the North Shore’s “Gold Coast” in one 70-square mile radius. Among the residents: Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Woolworths, Kahns, and Roosevelts. 

However, just before the turn of the century, hundreds of miles of LI coastline had housed smelly, fish-oil factories (see previous blog) that produced fertilizer. Since 1870, the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) at Sag Harbor and Greenport had provided transport for the product to farm stops all along LI’s north and south forks. But by 1897, once the Gold Coast was firmly established, those industries were gone. Much of the land beneath those  farms now housed small developments and service businesses. Also of great importance to the rise in popularity of LI beaches,  the LIRR turned its full attention toward commuters. Trains were the way to travel. Long Island roadways were still 20 years away from Robert Moses’ paved and gardened parkways.

At the turn of the century, the railroad company hired a special agent, Hal B. Fullerton, to lure more visitors to Long Island. Fullerton did so by, first, encouraging bicyclists to ride the train to the east end where random roadways awaited their exploration on two wheels.  Fullerton blanketed the New York boroughs with billboards and pamphlets that promised exploration and relaxation. One summer, 150,000 LIRR passengers loaded their bikes onto the LIRR and headed for the extremities of the 101-mile stretch. **

rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=9&pu...

Of course it wasn’t long before these cyclists began to discover favorite beaches, and soon resort hotels, closer to Manhattan on the shores of Coney Island and Brighton Beach, flourished (though several earlier attempts had failed). Rapidly, small inns and grand hotels sprouted along the coasts of Oyster Bay, Northport, East Hampton, Shelter Island, and beyond to Orient and Montauk. 

So in much larger numbers, and in increasingly less modest attire, Americans took to the beach. It was a trend not missed by the young Robert Moses who had begun planning his roads to the south shore long before 1924 when he first headed the Long Island Parks’ Commission. Moses knew it was the automobile age, and he saw the future of relaxation in a family car trip to Jones Beach. He just needed to build a parkway system to get drivers there. Once he accomplished that, by 1929,  the beach frontier of Long Island flew wide open. During four decades at the helm of the Parks Commission, Moses dedicated 15 coastal parks, and with his many other huge accomplishments became known as the “Power Broker.”

ROBERT MOSES C.M. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer - Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c36079

Today, on Long Island, all roads lead to the beach. Even though some swaths of sand are only open to local residents, public beaches abound and thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world come by train, boat, and plane to bask in the beauty of the Long Island coast, where not so long ago, only fishermen and factories reigned.

The cultural clash that accompanied this transition is the topic of  my novel Don't Ya Know, a Long Island story from 1900-1928.

*http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2174602/Queen-Victorias-private-beach-Osborne-opened-public.htm h
**htttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/nyregion/an-exhibition-of-century-old-long-island-photographs-at-the-heckscher-museum.html?_r=0

Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser is the author of several books:

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Fish Oil Factories on Long Island

Fish Oil Factories and the Long Island Stench 
by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Photo: George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887). Deserted Fish Oil Factory, Shelter Island, New York, ca. 1872-1887. Collodion silver glass wet plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.2-360 



Fish oil factories dotted the 400 miles of Long Island’s coastline before the early 20th century. 

Before Long Island's coast was discovered as a respite for the weary, it housed huge and smelly fish oil factories at points along its shore where fish oil production was the mainstay of the economy for generations. Locals seined mossbunker, slimy fish indigenous to the area, and boiled them with bat guano. The word guano refers to dung used as an agricultural fertilizer; it's usually found on rocks or on the floors of caves. Mining bat and seabird guano from  ice-age deposits of granite all over the LI  was an industry in itself. Locals scraped fresh or fossilized guano into pails and sold the contents by weight to the fish oil factories.They pressed the resulting mush to extract an oil known in the trade as 'Long Island Shit.' Containers of the thick, slimy oil were transported to depots where it was processed into fertilizer. 

The oily slime was then spread on lima bean, tomato, and potato fields all across Long Island's farms which stretched far and wide between its shorelines before the arrival of the Victorian era and the discovery of sunbathing by the seaside

East End bayman, Bruce Collins (a menhaden fleet fisherman from 1954-1960), spoke at the East Hampton Library in 2015 about the industry in the Twomey Lecture Series. The East Hampton Star's Irene Silverman covered the event in an article entitled: "The Most Valuable Fish That Swims," (Sept. 24, 2015). She reported that Mr. Collins said the fish oil factories were centered in an area of Gardiner's Bay known as "Promised Land" because of the enormous schools of menhaden found there:

“These fish were put on the face of the earth just to feed other fish. They have no teeth. They swim in huge schools with their mouths open. You can cast into a school of a million bunkers all day long and never catch one. They’re not going to take your lure," Collins said. 

In the 21st century, the popularity of fish oil for medicinal and cosmetic uses has increased the mossbunker's value. Billions of the bony fish are caught with hydraulic cranes attached to huge nets. However, in the early days, it was huge men who were hired to haul the bunker nets. This required no particular maritime skill other than pure brawn.  In The Fish Factory, Barbara Garrity-Blake writes this factor contributed to integration on Long Island when many muscular, black men turned to menhaden fleets for work.

Processing fish oil wasn't the only large industry along that stretch of the eastern seaboard. In fact, horse processing plants joined fish oil processors to further pollute the shores and let loose an ever more odious smell. This kept the hardiest of souls from trying to get a breath of fresh air at the beach. One factory worker said it was an odor of "sewage and death."

www.szannerosenwasser.com

Don't Ya Know, a Long Island novel by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser, available at online retailers.