Marine Park - A Beloved Brooklyn Neighborhood

Marine Park is noted for the 800-acre park of the same name that features bocce, tennis, basketball and handball courts, a one-mile running track, softball, football, cricket, and soccer fields, a nature trail and environmental center, and the Marine Park Golf Course.

The Park's Salt Marsh Nature Center, which has introduced the Marine Park marshland to the community through new after school programs and other innovative environmental activities, was selected by the New York City Parks Department as Park of the Month for January 2006.

Marine Park is connected to Gateway National Recreation Area, an area managed by the National Parks Service since 1972. Part of the recreation area had been New York City's first municipal airport, Floyd Bennett Field, which opened in 1930, was enlarged in 1936, and sold to the Navy in 1942.

At the beginning of the 20th Century a port was planned on Jamaica Bay in Marine Park, and an extension was planned for the IRT line, but neither goal was realized. Development of single-family housing with driveways followed in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1930s, the completion of the Belt Parkway encouraged more residential development. Today, the neighborhood offers some attached and semi-attached homes and small apartment buildings.