My first visit to Dead Horse Bay on 5 March 2016 has me thinking of the class implications of eminent domain. Eminent domain gives the government permission to take over private property for “the public good”. When Robert Moses decided to turn Dead Horse Bay into an airfield and proposed parkland, New York used the remnants of homes bulldozed throughout the city under eminent domain to turn Dead Horse Bay into a landfill. The topsoil-capped landfill has since burst, and the surf carries remnants of the previous homeowners’ lives and homes back to the shore.
This place is holy ground.
Dead Horse Bay got its name from the rendering plants that operated there. The carcasses of dead animals, especially those of horses that had been used to pull buggies (as this was before automobiles) were ground up for fertilizer and other uses. The remains were then dumped and became part of the landfill. You can still find horse bones on the shore.
This is what bothers me about eminent domain: you won’t see governments doing land grabs in wealthy neighborhoods. When people of fewer means are displaced due to eminent domain, people who are so economically vulnerable they can’t afford to take everything they own with them when they leave, where do they go? What becomes of them?
63 years later we can comb the shore at Dead Horse Bay and salvage whatever strikes our fancy from the unearthed landfill. We get to pick through the remnants of disproportionately low-income people’s lives and carry our findings back to our own homes. I wonder what the previous owners would think and feel, if they could see us and their belongings now.
