Bergen Beach, Brooklyn: An Island, a Resort, a Parkway

How Bergen Island stopped being an island is genuinely unsettled. Wikipedia's account, and one Forgotten NY article, put a landfill connection at around 1918; another Forgotten NY piece describes the area as staying marshy and largely undeveloped until an extensive landfilling project in the 1960s, with most of the housing going up in the 1970s and 1980s.

What is certain is that the neighborhood was planned long before it was built. A 1922 Hagstrom map shows streets, and even bridges at Bergen 6th and Bergen 12th Streets, that were platted and never constructed; numbered Bergen Streets from 1st to 20th and named courts including Appolline, Brenda, Celestial, Damask and La France exist only on that paper. Some of the houses that did get built stand on unstable landfill, and local accounts describe them built with the expectation that extra entrance steps could be added later if the ground in front settled.

The trolley down Avenue N and Island Avenue, the causeway route to the mainland, ran until March 1951, when the B41 bus replaced it; Island Avenue was later renamed Veterans Avenue in honor of the Second World War's veterans, and the bus still traces much of the old alignment. Ferries ran to Canarsie from roughly 1905 to 1921, and a brief, unprofitable run to Rockaway Beach was tried; neither survives.

The Jamaica Bay Riding Academy, a fixture in the area for roughly 50 years, closed permanently in 2026. Its horses were rehomed to 13 Hands Equine Rescue in Dutchess County.

No subway, Long Island Rail Road or ferry service currently reaches Bergen Beach. The bus is the only public transit answer.

The B41 runs the length of Flatbush Avenue from Cadman Plaza West in Downtown Brooklyn, and south of Avenue P it splits: one branch continues to Kings Plaza, the other runs via Avenue N and Veterans Avenue to a terminal at Veterans Avenue and East 71st Street, near Avenue U, in Bergen Beach. It descends from the Flatbush Avenue and Island Avenue streetcar that ran until March 1951.

The B3 runs along Avenue U between a Bergen Beach terminal at East 71st Street and Avenue U and a Bath Beach terminal at Harway Avenue and 25th Avenue; it was truncated to that Bergen Beach terminus in 2010. A weekday-morning short-turn ends at Avenue U and East 16th Street in Homecrest, at the Q train's Avenue U station.

The BM1 express began service on July 10, 1972 from Avenue U and Bergen Avenue; its Brooklyn terminal today is 56th Drive and Strickland Avenue in adjacent Mill Basin, running to East 57th Street and Second Avenue in Midtown with a downtown variant at State Street and Battery Place. It runs weekday peak hours only, with no overnight or Sunday service.