A quick glance at Instagram shows some odd hauls from Dead Horse Bay. They’re not windowpane flounder or diamondback terrapins or cockle clams local to the waters. They’re rainbows of vintage marbles, shards of heirloom ceramics, and even rusted bicycles from the era of black and white television.
Scour Reddit from the past year alone and find posts about Dead Horse Bay mudlarking — that is, scavenging the shore for interesting, possibly valuable items.
Dead Horse Bay figures prominently on one thread debating the most isolated part of Brooklyn. That same thread shared a February 2024 New York Post story about an uptick in animal sacrifices in the Gateway National Recreation Area, whose thousands of acres spanning Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey include Dead Horse Bay.
For lovers of urban exploration, or “urbex” per online communities, isolated spots filled with ruins or junky artifacts aren’t creepy; they’re intriguing. Google “explore dead horse bay” and 20 million search results will pop up. They range from amateur videos to Yelp reviews (4.6 stars.)
Such intrigue led Ben Nardolilli and a friend to the Q35, an Dead Horse Bay bus they’d never taken before. The vehicle rattled along the potholed Flatbush Avenue, jostling the usual passengers: tired commuters, frazzled mothers with grasping children, and bored teens. Then there were Nardolilli and his pal, hunting for the unknown.
After growing up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., Nardolilli craved citified curiosities. As the bus traveled, Nardolilli noticed the buildings getting shorter and shorter. They passed Kings Plaza Mall, which he never had any desire to visit because it reminded him too much of Northern Virginia.
Norway Maple and Honey Locust trees eventually gave way to untamed brush and marshland. And then the Holy Grail beckoned: a foul scattering of detritus in a contaminated dumping ground.
“The name ‘Dead Horse Bay’ was the pitch,” said Nardolilli, a 39-year-old paralegal and poet with a penchant for retro suits. “I asked, ‘What kind of Lovecraftian place could this be on the edge of Brooklyn?’”
Not just Lovecraftian but forbidden by law. That can make mudlarkers act secretly. One Reddit entry starts with “Would it be ok to discuss Dead Horse Bay in here?”
The bay’s dirty water laps the shoreline of Glass Bottle Beach, whose 100-year-old trash is one draw for aficionados of urbex blogs, forum sites, and YouTube channels. They include Urbexology.com (which maps more than 60,000 spots around the world) and Metal Detecting NYC, which draws tens of thousands of subscribers.
Glass Bottle Beach features a patchwork of ceramics, metal objects, rags, and a mix of random household and industrial items.
To reach the fetid beach, adventurers ignore several “Do Not Enter” signs on Flatbush Avenue and wander down a serpentine, overgrown path past scraggly woods into the marshland. Highlights of the tour include a discarded toilet, shredded tires, and a boot so tattered that it brings new meaning to the expression “talking shoe.”
The only signs of life amid the dense vegetation are horseshoe crabs and rabbits. And maybe another human.
In my two (legal) visits to the beach, I spotted fishermen and other beach-combers. We exchanged nods and glances but mainly kept our eyes glued to the ground at the bounty of historical detritus from the last century: countless shards of glass, porcelain, pipes, the remains of a rowboat and an antique car.
When the City housed hundreds of migrant families for 14 months in tents on the adjacent Floyd Bennett Field, parents waiting for the bus to take kids to school made sure to keep them from straying off the road.
Before the encampment closed in January, they had enough problems living in rat- and snake-infested tents that flooded in heavy rains. They certainly weren’t going to traipse into the stinking marshes.
So, it’s a common question: Why would someone visit such a repulsive place… for fun?
“Ruins are evocative,” said Thomas J. Campanella, a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Cornell University. “They ground us in social history. They’re where our immigrant forebears came to work. Their passing, their decay, speaks to us on different levels.”
Campanella writes about Dead Horse Bay in his book Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton, 2019). In a chapter called “The Isle of Offal and Bones,” he explains that the bay had an island, Barren Island, which was once a fishing destination for the Carnarsee Indigenous people.
From the late 1800s to the 1920s, Barren Island became a dumping ground and the site of a massive processing complex for glue, fertilizer, buttons, hides, soap, and more. The name “Dead Horse Bay” comes from the long-ago plants and city dump that contributed to its squalor.
Fisheries and garbage all wafted “enormously horrible odors,” according to Campanella, who scoured decades of newspaper articles to find many complaints.
Dead Horse Bay, located on the western cove of Barren Island, was the last resting place for heaping piles of dead horses, cattle, cats, dogs, and whatever other animals needed a graveyard with no actual burial. (For this reason, urbex fans can still find horse and cattle bones on Glass Bottle Beach today.)
As many as two million menhaden fish could be boiled at Barren Island plants every week. The fish poop was sold as guano to farmers whose depleted soil needed a boost.
“This was the swamp wastelands of the metropolis,” Campanella explained. “But [city development] eventually grew there.”
By 1923, Barren Island was no longer an island. The City extended Flatbush Avenue across it and filled in nearby salt meadows and creeks with Rockaway Channel sand; this joined Barren Island to the rest of Brooklyn. By 1937, dynamite had toppled the Sanitary Utilization plant there.
The City brought in more fill between 1948 and the mid-1950s, and the National Park Service records that “great mounds of garbage from Queens and Brooklyn flattened into compact layers with sand carpeting 1 to 2 feet thick.” That pile grew to reach an elevation of 25 feet.
Though the trash heap had been covered, one of the topsoil caps burst in the 1950s. Hence the explosion of odd treasures on Glass Bottle Beach.
Today, one only needs eyes and a nose to sus that Dead Horse Bay is still a foul place. Due to concerns about chemical contamination and radium-bearing items, the National Park Service (NPS) closed Glass Bottle Beach in August 2020.
The NPS also wanted to discourage the use of metal detectors, which might expose visitors to contaminants when digging through the soil. Plus, authorities wanted to discourage visitors from harming the site itself whilst plucking vintage souvenirs.
Among the seven “Leave No Trace” principles is that visitors leave what they find, even if it’s disgusting. “Preserve the past: examine, photograph, but do not touch cultural or historical structures and artifacts,” it reads.
Natural objects, even rocks, should not be removed from national parkland. A promised public re-opening of Glass Bottle Beach has been delayed as the area continues to be restored, and the NPS declined to comment on the reason for the postponement or the new target date.
Deniz Ataman, 37, is another urban explorer who visited the site in early 2020 before the closure. The journalist, who covers the food and flavor industry, went to escape the confines of COVID quarantine.
“Even the drive there seemed like fleeing to another world where the pandemic didn’t exist,” she said. “I was drawn to the escapism.” Five years later, she still recalls admiring the apothecary bottles and beach glass sparkling like gemstones.
The urban historian Campanella believes that such romanticism is what magnetizes urban explorers at such abandoned spaces. He believes younger generations are searching for authenticity in a world increasingly lived online.
“I love this about the hipsters,” said Campanella, who grew up in Brooklyn’s Marine Park neighborhood, where Glass Bottle Beach is located. “They actually took a real interest in the history of this borough that they were colonizing.”
As a teenager in the 1970s, Campanella recalls riding his bike and fishing on Glass Bottle Beach. The abandoned shorefront seemed imbued with mystery. Still today, as an academic, he sees the value of viewing such abandoned landscapes as “markers of a declining civilization.”
“There’s this idea of, have we really progressed? Were we better as a nation and a society back then? In many ways, we are,” he said. “There were horrible inequalities, bigotries, and injustices. But with recent political changes, it’s hard to see a glowing sunrise on the American future.”
Matt Postal also encourages people to get inquisitive about their city. He’s an architectural historian who gives licensed tours for the Municipal Art Society and the Art Deco Society of New York.
One of his pet excursions was a single poke around the abandoned Seaview Hospital in Staten Island that was once the largest tuberculosis sanatorium in the United States. Dead Horse Bay is not on his offered itinerary, however.
There are no remaining buildings to excite an architectural historian like himself. He doesn’t condone trespassing and urges explorers to respect signage. When there are buildings involved, he frequently knocks on doors and talks to security guards to get a legal glimpse.
Postal understands the attraction to lesser-known sites, even if the secret’s largely out. He appreciates New Yorkers who yearn for a deeper understanding of their city beyond typical tourist draws like the Empire State Building. “People need to see things they haven’t thought about before,” he said.
Christine Stoddard is a writer, artist, filmmaker, and multimedia journalist named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 50 Most Fascinating People. A 2025 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she creates deeply reported pieces drawing from her background in storytelling and the arts. Currently, she hosts two shows for Manhattan Neighborhood Network: Don’t Mind If I Don’t and Badass Lady-Folk. Find her films and videos on YouTube on the Stoddard Says and Quail Bell Productions channels. IG @stoddardsays
Comic and photos by Christine Stoddard.
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