Tuesday, MAY 5, 2020 – Family, Community and Yachts
T U E S D A Y
May 5, 2020
RIHS’s 38th Issue of
Included in this Issue:
Seagate
My Family
A Small Community
Yachting at the Turn of the Century
The Berdy’s of Seagate
For many years my father had a Berdy cousin, Irwin Berdy (not to be confused with my father Irving Berdy) and his wife Ruth Berdy (not to be confused with my mother Ruth Berdy) who lived in Seagate. They had two sons Michael and Andy. Irwin was a retired Army veteran who instilled the Army life into his sons.
Both attended West Point. Michael, class of ’65 was a football star at the Point and was killed in Vietnam, in 1967. His younger brother Andy went onto a long Army career and has two sons, both now senior officers in the Army. (I mean real senior officers, with lots of stripes and responsibilities.
I remember visiting the Berdys in Seagate and then going to Nathans or somewhere a little fancier for dinner. Families did that, meet and eat on weekends hearing the family tales over and over, sitting on the porch overlooking the neighborhood. In the house was the flag from Michael’ funeral at West Point, a father that never was the same after that loss of a child.
The local public school P.S. 188 and the street outside Lincoln High school are named for Michael E. Berdy.
Going to Seagate was entering a different world with quiet streets and the hub-bub of Coney Island a million miles away. The street had an aura as on our island where everyone knew the kids, the families and the stories of a community.
SEAGATE
Sea Gate is a private gated community at the far western end of Coney Island at the southwestern tip of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Located on the portion of the Coney Island peninsula west of West 37th Street, it contains mostly single-family homes, some directly on Gravesend Bay.
History
The area that is now Sea Gate was once known as Norton’s Point. “Norton” was the name of the owner of a casino, which was situated where the Coney Island Light now stands. The neighborhood held a reputation for gambling before it was developed into a residential neighborhood.
Sea Gate was developed into a full neighborhood in 1892 by developer Alrick Man. By 1899, Sea Gate property owners included the Morgan, Dodge, and Vanderbilt families. Governor Al Smith and others frequented the Atlantic Yacht Club, whose clubhouse was designed by Stanford White.
Sea Gate is surrounded on three sides by water with private beaches. In 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers completed its work of replenishing Coney beaches and building new jetties, including a long jetty at the border of Sea Gate and Coney Island
Residents refer to Sea Gate as “the gate” and venturing into adjoining Coney Island as going “out the gate”. There are no stores in the neighborhood. There are express buses to Manhattan, which take an average of 80 minutes.
As of 2010 Sea Gate is made up of 832 single-family houses in a variety of architectural styles, including Queen Anne Style and Mediterranean. Residents pay for private security as well as sewer, beach, lifeguards, street lights, and street cleaning.
There are two points of interest in Sea Gate. Located on Beach 47th Street in Sea Gate is the 75-foot-tall Coney Island Light, is a lighthouse built in 1890, before the area was populated. The lighthouse is the former home of Frank Schubert, the United States’ last civilian lighthouse keeper, who died in 2003.
The chapel in Sea Gate, once used for services and built in 1901, is a historical building now used for social events, yoga classes, and is a polling site at election times. The Chapel with its stained-glass windows is the first structure seen when entering the main (police protected) gate.
A sandy/grassy patch of land with views of Lower New York Harbor and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It is nicknamed “Lindy Park”, commemorating Charles Lindbergh.
Atlantic Yacht Club
The Atlantic Yacht Club is a family-oriented yacht club located on the shores of Gravesend Bay in south Brooklyn. A storied member of the New York sailing community, the club is perhaps best known for its contributions to New York sailing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it featured prominently as one of the leading yacht clubs of its day.
The Atlantic Yacht Club’s facilities have moved several times over its history: the first facility was located at the foot of Court Street on Gowanus Bay in Gowanus, Brooklyn; it subsequently moved to a site at the foot of 55th Street in the neighborhood that subsequently became known as Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
In 1898 it moved to perhaps its most famous club-house, located in Seagate. Seagate is located on the western end of Coney Island, and the club facilities were located on the northern, inland, side of Coney Island facing Gravesend Bay.
For many years, the Atlantic Yacht Club was one of the largest and most prestigious yacht clubs in New York City. History Clubhouse of the Atlantic Yacht Club at Seagate, as it appeared in the 1890s.
The Atlantic Yacht Club was organized in 1866 by a breakaway group from the earlier Brooklyn Yacht Club. Within five years its membership rolls eclipsed those of the Brooklyn Yacht Club, and the club developed a reputation as an active corinthian sailing organization that attracted many of Long Island’s most prominent citizens and soon drew in members from throughout the region, as well as prominent sailors who frequented the active New York sailing season.
The Atlantic Yacht Club rapidly developed into one of the most active yacht clubs in New York, hosting regular regattas and competing against the leading yacht clubs in the region. The club’s annual Atlantic Race Week and Lipton Cup regatta regularly drew sailors from around the world, competing in multiple classes. The club was also a driving force behind the formation of the United States Power Squadrons in 1914.
The club’s original clubhouse was a barge that was moored at the foot of Court Street at the end of Gowanus Creek, facing Gowanus Bay. Gowanus Creek, and the Erie Basin in Red Hook, Brooklyn served for several decades as a center of the New York sailing and yachting community, and several important boat yards were located in the area. As time passed, however, increasing industrialization in the area led many to relocate to other sites around New York Harbor and, indeed, locations in Long Island Sound. In the early 1880s, the club acquired a waterfront farm property on 55th Street in Yellow Hook, Brooklyn.
The neighborhood subsequently assumed the name of Bay Ridge, a name suggested by club-member, former Commodore and leading Brooklyn florist, James Weir. The converted clubhouse was soon replaced by a larger facility constructed at the end of the club’s new pier at the end of 55th Street. A marina and anchorage were established at the same site at that time. Clubhouse of the Atlantic Yacht Club at 55th Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, as it appeared in the early 1890s. Photo by John S. Johnston.
A new clubhouse at Seagate was designed by Frank Tallman Cornell and built in 1898 on Poplar Avenue overlooking Gravesend Bay (the site of the old clubhouse becoming the main yard of the Morse Dry Dock and Repair Company). The move to the new clubhouse was driven in large part by Commodore George Jay Gould I, the prominent financier and a son of Jay Gould. The club attracted New York socialites and aristocrats, including prominent members of the Auchincloss, Dodge, Elsworth, Fish, Gould, Hoagland, Iselin, Vermilye and Voorhees families, among many others. Sir Thomas Lipton, J.P. Morgan and the Earl of Dunraven (the British challenger for the America’s Cup, with his yacht Valkyrie) were among the club’s prominent members.
Known for corinthian sailing, for many years the club sponsored one of the most active racing programs in New York Harbor, holding races almost weekly through the summer season. Sir Thomas Lipton, a five-time unsuccessful British challenger for the America’s Cup, typically stayed at the club during his America’s Cup campaigns. His yacht Shamrock docked at the Atlantic Yacht Club during the Cup campaigns. The Atlantic Yacht Club played a major role with respect to the famous Kaiser’s Cup transatlantic race of 1905. The race was initially proposed on September 18, 1903 at the Sea Gate club-house during a dinner to commemorate the retirement as club Commodore of Robert E Tod.
Initially intended as a snub directed at the New York Yacht Club’s largely steam-powered yachting fleet, at Lipton’s recommendation the regatta was encharged to the New York Yacht Club. In due course, the regatta was won by the yacht Atlantic, sponsored by the New York Yacht Club, and skippered by Charlie Barr. Barr, a three-time winner of the America’s Cup, was one of the leading sailors of his day.
The Atlantic sailed to victory in record time, establishing trans-Atlantic mono-hull records that stood for 100 years. The AYC’s entry, the yacht Thistle, a schooner built in 1901 by New York’s Townsend & Dourney, and owned and skippered by Robert E Tod, finished 10th. Tod, a New York investment banker, was the only owner-skipper in the regatta.
The Atlantic Yacht Club’s Seagate clubhouse burned down in 1933. The club soldiered on for a number of years thereafter, becoming inactive in the 1950s. The club was revived several decades later, in the early 21st century. Today, the AYC operates as a sailing club based off Bay Parkway, directly across Gravesend Bay from its earlier Sea Gate location, with a social facility in Brooklyn Heights.
EDITORIAL
This is a personal story. I have to thank my neighbor Ross Wollen for keeping me informed on his West Point class mate, my late cousin Micheal Berdy, thru the alumni network.
Family history is not all cut and dry like I read in the records as I have been using for this series. My father had 18 first cousins and I had 4 aunts, his sisters. We had the family “show up” at our houses on Sundays. I always laugh that they would all call parent telling them they were taking a ride from Brooklyn to suburbia on the spur of the moment. There was always food and fun. This is something we don’t do now .
Judith Berdy
917-744-3721
jbird134@aol.com
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Dottie Jeffries
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rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
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