The bay's fishing tradition prospered after the Civil War, when ferries carried vacationers from Canarsie, Brooklyn, to beaches on the nearby Rockaway Peninsula. A handful of oystermen, clamdiggers, and fishermen like Joe, Ben, and Bill Shaw lived in shacks on Big Egg Marsh during the summer, providing boats and bait to visitors for three dollars a day.

The bay islands remained sparsely populated until 1880, when the New York, Woodhaven, and Rockaway Railroad erected a 4.8-mile-long wooden trestle across Jamaica Bay. The line, which connected mainland Queens to Rockaway, made four stops—Goose Creek, The Raunt, Broad Channel, and Beach Channel—and accommodated far more passengers than the ferries.

Within four years, as many as eighty-seven crowded trains chugged through the Jamaica Bay islands each summer day. The route was sold in 1887 to the Long Island Railroad, and by 1895, the trains carried a million and a half passengers. In 1902, three and a half million fun-seekers rode the line.

Transportation put Jamaica Bay on the map. Tiny fishing shacks, boathouses, fishing clubs, and small hotels-many built on stilts-rose near the railroad trestle. Goose Creek became known for its weakfishing and had a fleet's worth of boats ready for hire, with colorful old-timers like Sebastian"Bas" Hesbach as guides. The Raunt became popular for its rod-and-gun clubs, and Broad Channel had elegant hotels that attracted wealthy fishermen and visitors.

The bay developed a reputation for its shellfishing, with the Rockaway oyster being especially popular. In 1906, an estimated four hundred fifty thousand tons of oysters and clams, valued at $2 million, were harvested from the bay.

End of the Commons

Dunton and a developer named Patrick Flynn had ambitious plans for the remote area. Dunton leased some of the land he then controlled to Flynn and supported Flynn's plan to build a trolley line across Jamaica Bay to compete with the railroad. The project, which included a bicycle path and lane for carriage drivers, angered executives of the Long Island Railroad, which held a monopoly in the region.

While costly lawsuits were waged by the Long Island Railroad, New York City (which Queens joined in 1898), and others against the Flynn-Dunton interests, a route was designed, land dredged, trestle spiles erected, trolley cars ordered, and tenants thrown out of their homes. The project was halted in 1902 after New York had the Dunton leases invalidated in court. Title to the land and water eventually reverted to the city.

Flynn lost about $1 million and abandoned several miles of newly constructed roadway and embankments. Twenty years later, the city used them to build Jamaica Bay Boulevard, later named Cross Bay Boulevard, the major thoroughfare that begins in Queens and bisects Broad Channel.

The city then issued permits to anyone who wanted to live in, or develop, the bay area. Broad Channel, unlike the patchwork communities on The Raunt or Goose Creek, grew into a thriving community. By 1908, there were stores, a church, a volunteer fire department with 185 firemen, and four hundred houses, each paying an average of twenty-five dollars rent to the city's dock department.

In 1915, the city leased a five-hundred-acre parcel of Broad Channel to real estate developer Pierre Noel with the condition that the land be improved. Noel sublet the lease to the Broad Channel Corporation, which built roads, provided running water and electric light, and subdivided about one hundred fifty acres into lots one hundred feet by twenty-five feet. The corporation rented each parcel for about $116 a year to anyone wanting to build a summer home. Broad Channel prospered as a summer resort, offering bungalows and boating to weary city folk in search of respite. People were soon receiving postcards from friends celebrating the lazy life in fashionable Broad Channel.

Grandiose plans were also afloat to transform Jamaica Bay into a commercial port unrivaled by any in the world. Beginning in 1906, an array of private developers and government planners took to the task. The state endorsed the plan three years later, with Congress authorizing $7.4 million for the project if New York City built the docks and basins. The city kicked in $1 million, and in 1913 the bay was partially dredged by the federal government. The project picked up steam during the next decade, when a massive dredging and landfill undertaking thoroughly altered the bay. Channels were deepened in anticipation of the arrival of large boats, and landfill connected some of the islands and eliminated marshes and creeks. But lack of rail freight service and poor coordination at various levels of government doomed the project in the 1920s.

The bay nonetheless felt the negative effects of growing industrialization and New York's burgeoning population. In 1912, seafood caught in Jamaica Bay was blamed for a typhoid scare in Brooklyn and Queens. The US Department of Agriculture temporarily banned commercial fishing in the bay—jeopardizing five thousand jobs—rather than investigate the deluge of untreated sewage pouring into the bay. By 1917, plants in Queens and Brooklyn were daily discharging fifty million gallons of inadequately treated waste into the bay, poisoning clams, oysters, and ultimately people. The water became so polluted that in 1921 the department of health abolished shellfishing in Jamaica Bay altogether, destroying both a major industry and a way of life.

Rum Running

Broad Channel's popularity increased when Cross Bay Boulevard was finished in 1923. Motorists in dandy new cars now zipped to the island at whim, free from train-schedule constraints. The road also paved the way for Broad Channel's growth as a year-round community, a change ushered in by the Great Depression and the need for cheap housing. Bungalows were winterized and many summer residents moved in permanently.

Eventually hard times befell the Broad Channel Corporation and it went bankrupt in 1939. Suddenly, New York City found itself landlord to a thousand tenants. Residents negotiated with the city to purchase the land under their homes, but were rejected. The citizens of Broad Channel were stuck as permanent renters, a situation that pitted residents against city government for more than forty years.