The History and Geography of Newtown Creek

The last glacier, known as the Wisconsinan Glacier, receded and left behind the ‘terminal moraine’ which formed the southeastern border of the Newtown Creek watershed in Maspeth and Ridgewood (the terminal moraine also formed what is now the high ground of Green Wood Cemetery, Prospect Park and the rest of the hill that separates the northern and southern sections of Brooklyn). Enormous tonnages of gravel, pebbles and boulders (dragged by the ice sheets from points north) were deposited as the more than 1,000 foot thick ice wall began its final melt.

As the glacier retreated, leaving behind all of this material it carried, the archipelago of New York Harbor’s islands emerged from the water.

In 1658, a little over 40 years after Europeans first arrived, a catastrophic and quite lethal smallpox epidemic hit New York Harbor. The outbreak reportedly killed two-thirds of the indigenous people from the local tribes in the area and throughout Long Island. This devastation caused the absence of many of the native people around Newtown Creek in both fledgling Brooklyn and Queens. With more European settlers coming to the area every year, more and more farms took land that had previously been forests and grasslands full of wild animals, for cultivation.

Many of the remaining original Lenape people, looking for safety and following their animal food source, left their island home and migrated to the mainland. By 1741, it is estimated that there were only 400 remaining native people left on all of Long Island. By the time the American Revolutionary War began in 1776, a native person on Western Long Island was a rare site.

European style agriculture flourished in both Kings and Queens County in the 18th and early 19th century, and eurasian farm animals were imported to the area; including pigs, horses, cows, sheep, dogs, cats. Pest animals also crossed the Atlantic on the sailing ships, notably the Norway and Brown Rats.

The first bridges were built over Newtown Creek in the first half of the 19th century; the first was in 1850, built by Neziah Bliss from wood, who called it the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge. Penny Bridge (to be replaced again in the 1880’s), there were also multiple “Plank Roads,” wooden causeways that allowed horses and wagons to cross the water. 

New York City’s ports were over capacity with goods traveling in and out by shipping. By 1880 Brooklyn was the fourth largest producer of goods in the United States. Elected officials, merchants, entrepreneurs and developers looked for other opportunities along the cities unclaimed waterfronts to use for barging goods in and out and to build new manufacturing facilities.

In the mid 1800’s, the low-lying salt marsh started to be filled in with waste material, excavated soil, bricks, stones and all kinds of debris (urban fill) and the waterway was deepened, or dredged in some areas to make way for the passage of bigger boats. It’s meandering path was straightened where industry was gaining a foothold, and bulkheads created a new waterfront with hard edges for the new ship traffic. This was happening mainly along the Brooklyn shores but also in Long Island City and a few other locations in Queens. Most of this activity was occurring in the sections of Newtown Creek which were near the East River.

By 1854 the first large-scale petroleum refinery opened in Queens, Abraham Gesner’s North American Kerosene Gas Light Company. The Petroleum Industry had been officially born and was about to transform Newtown Creek and the world; and the second Industrial Revolution had truly begun. Kerosene, distilled from oil but often called coal oil in those early days, was used as a lamp fuel. Surpassing the popularity of lamp oils produced by the whaling industry, (the tributary Whale Creek gets its name from this industry) and other alternatives of the day. Five years later, (1859) in Titusville Pennsylvania the first modern oil wells were sunk.

Over the next 30 years, the banks of the Creek saw the opening of more than 50 different refineries of all kinds producing consumer products, including; oil, sugar, copper, sulfuric acid, chemicals and dyes. Animal rendering and glue factories also found their smelly homes here. Companies like the Locust Hill Oil Works, Devoe Manufacturing Co., Sone & Fleming's Kings County Oil Refinery, the Pratt Oil Works, Astral Oil, and many more were all in the business of refining crude oil into fuels. 

This burgeoning industry didn’t come without a high price and many risks, but it provided an always expanding number of jobs and was extremely lucrative financially. The risk of deadly explosions and fire was always present, and there were several total loss fires from the early 1880’s right into the first half of the 20th century which saw the entire Newtown Creek Brooklyn coastline reduced to smoking rubble (see Additional Resources for NY Times archived links).

All of these oil companies would ultimately merge, whether they liked it or not, into one massive company -- J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Trust in 1882, and very quickly the company controlled 97 percent of the oil production and distribution business in the United States. The Standard Oil Trust, as it was known, fixed prices to control the market, and forced their competitors to either join the trust or be forced out of business. Federal antitrust laws were passed in 1890 to defeat these sort of anti competitive practices, but it wasn’t until 1911 that the company was finally broken up into at least 30 different entities due to the direct action of President Teddy Roosevelt.

Standard Oil was broken up into over three dozen regional companies. The Standard Oil Company of California became Chevron, the Standard Oil Company of Texas became Texaco, and so on. The Standard Oil Company of New York in Brooklyn continued refining oil along Newtown Creek until 1966. Two of those smaller companies were found along the shorelines in New York Harbor, The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as Exxon) and the Standard Oil Company of New York (Mobil) merged again in 1999 to form the present day’s ExxonMobil.

The Long Island Rail Road tracks, skirting the northern shore of Newtown Creek were beginning to be built in the 1850’s and meant to move people and freight from eastern points in Long Island, then along the Creek and through to Long Island City in western Queens. This connection brought materials from the eastern headwaters of Newtown Creek to the East River, where they could be moved onto larger ships or cross over into Manhattan on barges. This was also the main rail line connecting Long Island to all points north including Canada and New England.

With all this new growth, infrastructure wasn’t able to keep up (some things never seem to change) and progress had its price for the health of the Creek. The city of Brooklyn began dumping raw sewage into the headwaters of the Creek as early as 1856, right about the time the cause of cholera and the concept of “public health” was just beginning to be understood and embraced in NYC.

Nearing the end of the 19th century, and right before NYC was consolidated into America’s largest city (1898), Brooklyn was beginning to build its first planned sewers for its growing population, to dispose of wastewater and redirect it from the now fetid Newtown Creek to the East River. At the time, the new combined sewer system, one that carried both sanitary sewage and stormwater in the same underground pipes, was a revolution in infrastructure technology and for human health. 

This effort wasn’t enough to keep the Creek clean, and by the mid 19th century neighboring residents and the NYS Board of Health were complaining of horrible smells and dangerous health conditions emanating from the factories lining the Newtown Creek and the sewers that carried industrial pollution and raw sewage into the waterway. Complaint after complaint was made for decades about the problems, but the burgeoning animal rendering and chemical factories scoffed at any attempt to slow their efforts, and the Creek and its neighboring communities suffered.

At the same time the Federal Government was called upon to make the waterway more suitable for heavy shipping traffic. A wider and deeper waterway, boasting industrially useable shorelines with completely functional bulkheads, would make Newtown Creek competitive with any waterway in the Nation, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers designed the modern shape of Newtown Creek.

Fires raged every few years, and as human waste, fuels, and chemicals, and all manner of unregulated byproducts were poured into the water, plans were set to elevate manufacturing along its shores to one of the busiest, and dirtiest, in the country.

With dredging and channelizing of the Creek progressing it proved to be an economic boon, 1910 is a record setting year for Newtown Creek. The New York Times proclaims that “the traffic here is greater than on the Mississippi with cargo worth the equivalent of nearly $3 billion.” Less than a decade later, one of the worst fires in Newtown Creek’s history set the Standard Oil Sone and Flemming ablaze.

It took 3 full days before the fire was brought under control. During these years, it seems, that with environmental ruin came economic prosperity - further dredging and expansion of industrial water use was called for. Plans to specifically straighten, deepen, and widen the Maspeth Creek tributary and remove a mudflat know as Mussel Island move forward.

This is expedited as Brooklyn Union Gas Company (now National Grid) purchased 115 acres in 1925, and built their largest facility (abandoning a much smaller plant on the Gowanus Canal) boasting that it could supply enough manufactured gas to satisfy all but the 4 largest cities in the country. This purchase included additional water frontage, and Mussel Island, the removal of which was approved by the US government before the end of the decade.

1980 was also an important year, Congress passes the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund.

This law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad Federal authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment. A decade later the Concerned Citizens of Greenpoint formed and a modern local effort was set in motion to improve the quality of life for the residents living alongside the industrial Newtown Creek.

These efforts rolled into the formation of a new advocacy group that formally formed in 2002 after the Brooklyn Council Member and members of his staff took a trip up Newtown Creek with state water advocacy group Riverkeeper on their patrol boat. They were awed and outraged by what they saw. Two years later, in 2004, Riverkeeper, and a handful of Greenpoint residents filed suit against ExxonMobil for the oil under the Greenpoint community and for the oil continuously seeping into Newtown Creek. 

In 2007 there was a second lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office. He states that “This company cannot ignore the harm its oil spill has caused to the environment and residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. With [this] action, we will hold ExxonMobil accountable for the damage it has created. This suit sends the message that even the largest corporations in the world cannot escape the consequences of their misdeeds.”

Three years later, in 2010, a settlement agreement is reached and the company is required to “conduct a comprehensive cleanup of its oil and related contamination at its Greenpoint facility and in the surrounding community, including oil floating on top of the water table, contaminated groundwater, soil as well as soil vapors.” Exxon was also required to pay approximately $25 million for penalties, costs and improving the local environment. This amount included $19.5 million for environmental projects that will benefit the Greenpoint community. A record payment in New York State.

This push to clean up the Greenpoint Oil Spill has resulted in the removal of millions of gallons of oil from the site and stopped the seepage of oil from these areas into the Creek. Other oil spills that still seep into the Creek have been found in other areas and other lawsuits and settlements continue to take place as more contamination and polluters are found.

In 2010, and in large part due to the advocacy efforts of political and local leaders in Brooklyn, the Newtown Creek was designated a Superfund site by the Federal United States Environmental Protection Agency, slating it for a major cleanup to remove past industrial waste.

The clean up is projected to be completed around 2035 and will cost millions, if not billions, of dollars. Additional government remediation includes toxic soil excavation in land around Newtown Creek through the New York State Brownfield cleanup program, and improvements to stormwater management that will help control Combined Sewage Overflow.