BOYS DROWNING AT CONEY ISLAND (1889)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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Lifesaving at Coney Island has existed since sunbathers have been flocking there to lie along the beach and swim in the surf. As such, there were constantly brave or foolish little boys who thought that they could swim further and further into the briny blue. Many such instances ended in drownings – or near drownings if the lifeguards got to you in time.
Two such incidents occurred on one day in 1897. One, “Nathan Nichols, a Negro Boy,” had “drowned in the surf.” Nicholls, 18 years old, who was employed by a feed man on Neptune Avenue, whose custom it was every Sunday to give his employer’s horses a bath in the surf.
About noon, Nicholls was riding one of the hoses in about seven feet of water, off the foot of Ocean Parkway when we was suddenly seen to slide from the animals’ back and disappear. When Nicholls did not reappear, a few people on shore who had been watching ran to the police station. A roundsman grappled for the body for an house but failed to locate it. The body had not been recovered.
Worse must have been a drowning in the Gowanus Canal where, it might be expected, a boy would be able to grapple his way to shore before sinking into the murky depths.
One such account took place in 1866 and involved a 5-year-old boy named Edward Taylor who left his parents’ residence (“in Bond near Warren street”) one afternoon and fell into the canal while playing and was drowned. Another took place in 1843. The son of a Mr. Conrad, “while playing about the Canal near Morgan’s printing establishment, accidentally fell in and was drowned.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he was “about six years of age, and an interesting little fellow.”
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