After making your way down 86th Street and past Dyker Beach Golf Course, where Tiger Woods’ father played, your setting off down the main drag of Bath Beach, Cropsey Avenue…
There were indeed once beaches on the western Brooklyn shore (which is also the western extremity of Long Island) delineated by the place names Dyker Beach and Bath Beach. There’s even a narrow sandy area remaining at about Bay 8th Street where it meets the Belt Parkway. Most of the beaches, though, were obliterated when the Circumferential, later simply the Belt (though the signs say Shore)* Parkway was constructed in 1940, give or take a year. A pedestrian and bike path (one of Robert Moses’ very few concessions to non-auto traffic) was placed along the shore, which was fortified with a seawall and heavy stones. Winter storms still wash it out every couple of years.
Bath Beach was so-called for the British spa town and originally settled in the late 1800s by Brooklyn’s nabobs and elite as a suburban playground, with villas, yacht clubs and mansions. After the stock market crash in 1929 and later, the construction of the Parkway, the elite moved further east on Long Island, Jewish and Italian immigrants moved in, and joined by Asian and Latinos, they are still there in large part. In the 1920s, a pair of brothers named Horwitz built houses in Bath Beach while trying for a big break in showbiz. After getting that break, they performed for decades as the Three Stooges.
South of 86th Street and east of Dyker Beach Golf Course, Brooklyn’s carefully crafted arrangement of numbered streets comes to an end, and there are just three east-west streets between 86th and Gravesend Bay: Benson Avenue, named for Egbert Benson (1746-1833) NY State’s first attorney general, chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and first president of the New-York Historical Society. His nephew, also Egbert Benson, married Jane Cowenhoven, who inherited much of what is now Bensonhurst. The elder Benson retired in Jamaica, Queens, where he is buried in Prospect Cemetery there. Bath Avenue was named for Bath, England…
…and Cropsey Avenue for German immigrant Casper Crepser, who arrived in New Utrecht in the 1700s. His descendants changed their name to Cropsey; they include Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey (whose painting Looking Oceanward from Todt Hill has its point of view recreated in the Cropsey Overlook in Todt Hill, Staten Island) and murderer Andrew Bergen Cropsey, who killed his wife in 1908 in Bath Beach.
Cropsey Avenue begins at 14th Avenue and Poly Place across from Dyker Beach Golf Course and runs generally southeast — until curving south, for a reason I’ll describe in a later cache. The Department of Transportation has finally decided on Poly Place as the name of the road that runs along the southern border of Dyker Beach Park between 7th and 14th Avenues. For decades, the road was unnamed, leading some to call it Poly Place and others, Cropsey Avenue Extension.
