Mill Basin, Brooklyn

At the end of Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, there's a place called Kings Plaza.  It's a shopping mall with a Sears, a Macy's, Toys R Us and all the other chain stores found in shopping malls across America.  But it wasn't always so.  Those monstrous concrete boxes are actually sitting in Jamaica Bay!  According to The Encyclopedia of New York City, the local Canarsee Indians called this place Equandito (broken lands) and  until the industrial revolution, the area supported a thriving economy based on the abundant crabs, oysters and clams.  Then dikes, dams and causeways were built to support the tidal mills, lead smelters and refineries that located here and Equandito became Mill Basin.  After WWII, the lead smelters left, more of the marsh was filled, brick bungalows were built and Mill Basin became Kings Plaza.
 

But back there, past Avenue U, past the Mill Basin Golf Course, behind the Toys R Us, there's still a little Mill Basin left.

And back there, behind the wreckage of the industrial revolution, Equandito lives.

The sign informs us that this patch of forest and the marsh behind it were restored with funds from the 1996 Clean Air/Clean Water Bond Act.

That's panicum grass and goldenrod in the foreground and behind them are wax myrtle bushes, juniper, black locust and American elm, all but the locust native to this very site. 

Those are red maple trees with a dock species carpeting the ground.  Later in the year the dock will produce abundant seed kernels relished by numerous animals, especially water fowl. 

Now that's broken land!  Thank you Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and everyone who pays taxes.

Because it could have looked like this!  Alien vines like bitttersweet, multiflora rose and Japanese honey suckle climb the trees, shade the canopy and eventually pull down entire woodlands, creating impenetrable thickets of downed trees and thorny, tangled masses of vines. This photo was taken a few hundreds yards from the previous one.  I guess the money ran out.  Shame. 

Meet George.  Born in Belize on 7 September 1948, he's been living here between Equandito, Mill Basin and Kings Plaza for the past year.  When he told me he's homeless, I said "Homeless!", "You have one of the most beautiful homes in all of New York!" He smiled and said in a gentle, slightly accented English, "Thank you for saying so."  

A happy visitor.

And a happy host.