Skating at the Steenbakkery: Winters in Wartime Flatbush
It’s the dead of winter, and every day feels the same — until now. Because last night, the Steenbakkery froze over, and today’s going to be all about ice skating, hanging out by the fire, and having fun with friends.
If you were this person, who would you be? You’d live in a village called Flatbush, on the other side of the hills from the city of Brooklyn. You’re White and speak Dutch (although maybe only to your grandparents). You’re young, or rich enough to act like you are. And you never think twice about your favorite skatepond freezing over each winter, because it has always been there.
Known as the Steenbakkery, this magical man-made pond was part of Flatbush history for somewhere between 100 and 200 years. It made the papers on a regular basis and brought thousands of spectators to Flatbush a century before the Dodgers. It was the center of Flatbush social life during both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and was responsible for more White girls finding boyfriends than a suburban mall in the 1980s. And the only reason it even existed was because of bricks. (Yeah, I’m gonna talk about the bricks before I get to the romance, hold on.)
How a Kiln Became a Skatepond
If you garden in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, you don’t have to dig a hole too deep to find a thick layer of clay. But what Lefferts Gardens gardeners might not know is that (if they wanted to), they could dig up a hunk of this clay, form it into a rectangular cube, and make a brick out of it— just like the early Dutch settlers of Flatbush did. But to actually make a brick, first you’d need a kiln, and that’s where the Lefferts family came in.
The Leffertses (or more likely, people they enslaved) had constructed a kiln at the far end of their farm, now the northern tip of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, sometime in the late 17th century. It was one of the first things needed by the early Dutch settlers of Flatbush because before that, the only reliable way to get bricks (steen in Dutch) to Flatbush was to have them shipped all the way from the Netherlands. They called the new steen source on the Lefferts Farm the “Steenbakkery,” a Dutch-English bastardization meaning (as the name might suggest) “where the bricks are baked.” (Note: I’ve seen various other spellings for “Steenbakkery” including Steenbakkerie, Steenbakkerij, Steenbokery, Steinbokkery, and Steinbokerie.)
Flatbush bricks were used to build the giant hearths in Flatbush farmhouses — often after being slathered in lead paint — and to build buildings. I also found mention of the kiln being used for “coarse pottery,” so I’m seriously considering starting a mommy-and-me pottery studio where I pretend to be stuck up about using only hyper-local PLG clay.
Many (or all?) of the hyper-local bricks came from the land directly next to the kiln, so naturally, a giant hole formed in the ground. Because the ground was so compacted underneath, and the land is at the base of all those hills (you know the ones), it wasn’t long before the hole became a pond. It was relatively shallow until you got to the middle, and had a clay-y bottom, so it was never a good swimming hole. But in the winters, it proved to be an excellent skating pond. The kiln was eventually dismantled, but the skatepond remained for approximately 200 years, at the current location of Sterling St, between Bedford and Washington (on the north side).
If taken anytime in the 19th century, this photo would look out onto the Steenbakkery skatepond from its southeastern corner. The only thing that remains the same is the sky.
Early Skating at the Steenbakkery
In early America, ice skating wasn’t really a “thing.” It was just sliding around on the ground when it happened to get cold enough for ice to form. Although the Dutch settlers were probably familiar with the concept of ice skates, which had been invented in the Netherlands several centuries prior, it’s unlikely there were many (if any) pairs of skates floating around Flatbush, since most of their goods were imported directly from Holland and ship space was limited.
So at first, the Steenbakkery was just a place for young boys to go in winter if they wanted to play on a smooth, wide stretch of ice, rather than skating around flooded streets, plains, and vacant lots. (The girls were at home darning socks or something.) But as Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt relates in her book The Social History of Flatbush, during the War of Independence, the Steenbakkery became much more.
Revolutionary War Meeting Place
And now we come to the juicy sex part as promised, which takes place while the British were occupying Flatbush. It was a terrible time for our little town. The houses on Flatbush Ave made from Steenbakkery brick had had literal cannonballs fired through them, and that was just the beginning of the carnage. The Occupation dragged on for seven years, and there wasn’t much to do to escape the grueling problems of your daily life (or the grueling hunger in your stomach).
So it makes sense that now, when the Steenbakkery froze over, it wasn’t just little boys gathering to have some fun. Joining them were more than a handful of curious American soldiers. These poor guys were actually prisoners of war, being held in the British stronghold of Flatbush. Basically on parole, they were allowed to move around freely as long they checked in with the British at certain times of the day, and many of them were even quartered in Flatbush homes.
The soldiers weren’t the only ones eager to get out. The young Dutch women of the town were facing down the notion of living with their parents forever if they didn’t find someone to marry, and soon. I’m not sure how teenage girl gossip functioned in that day, but it must have been all about the Rebel soldiers in town who were, perhaps, growing some very sexy beards.
But how to meet these hotties? There were no parties, no dances, no visiting neighbors on New Years Day like usual. Even the bodega (i.e., the general store) wasn’t open, because they had nothing to sell. So when the Rebel soldiers started hanging out at the Steenbakkery, the Dutch women bundled up in their warmest dresses and hand muffs and headed on over to the Lefferts Farm. I can only imagine how they got their parents’ OK, but the concept of exercise being good for you, especially in the fresh air, was starting to gain a lot of traction, so that’s what I would have used. “I can see them now — can not you?” Lefferts Vanderbilt wrote. “The rosy cheeked Dutch girls from the village, their young friends and brothers; the prisoner officers, and perhaps one older person here and there to look on and see the fun!”
The Rebel prisoners would have seemed rather exotic to the Flatbush girls, whose parents and grandparents had mostly married other Dutch people from Flatbush. Although they were all WASPs, the soldiers were completely different kinds of WASPs! — like Monrovian, Quaker, and Presbyterian — while the women were part of the Dutch Reformed Church. These Rebel hotties didn’t even speak Dutch! The girls’ fathers, knowing that a love match meant their daughters raising their families in far-off lands like Maryland and Pennsylvania, did NOT approve. But then as now, the daughters married the hot guys their dads didn’t like anyway.
The Steenbakkery Becomes the Nassau Pond
When the Revolution ended (we won!), the Steenbakkery presumably went back to being mostly the province of the local schoolboys. But an ice-skating Renaissance was brewing. It was becoming so popular that in 1858, ice skating opened in Central Park before Central Park even opened itself. The towns surrounding Prospect Park would have to wait almost a decade before their skating lake was completed, however, and in that time, small skating rinks in Kings County flourished.
Still a century before the Zamboni was invented, skating ice only needed one thing: to be frozen. Owners of vacant lots would put a fence around the lot, flood it with water, and charge admission: look! A skating rink!
To lend them more legitimacy, and the ability to discriminate against people who wanted to skate there, they’d form skating “clubs.” In 1861 some White guys, with local rich man Abe Lott as president, formed a skating club for the Steenbakkery and called it “The Nassau Skating Club.” They pretended it was a business endeavor, leasing the land from Lott’s pal Lefferts and charging admission to skate, but they barely took in enough money to cover their expenses.
The new club renamed the Steenbakkery “Nassau Pond.” They built what the New York Times called “a substantial board fence” and, perhaps, added skate rental (it’s also possible skate rental already existed well before this time). Eventually, they also constructed stables for carriage horses, a clubhouse with seating areas, and a restaurant. By this time, the grounds were around 6 acres in total (slightly larger than the average city block), although some sources put them at larger. The Times also reported a 250-foot plank foot road leading from the Steenbakkery to Flatbush Ave — I’m not sure where this was located, exactly, but if I had to guess it would be along the current Lincoln Rd, where some members of the Lefferts family had their homes.
Skating at Nassau Pond
You could pay to get into the grounds of the new-and-improved Nassau Pond just for the day, but Flatbush locals “joined the club,” that is, bought season tickets. In Tales of Old Flatbush, Flatbush old-timer John Synder writes that it was “a favorite alike with Brooklynites and Flatbushers who went there. Everybody—{ }—and hundreds of others that memory fails to serve.” Where I wrote { }, Synder wrote an entire page of names, so important was the pond — and name-dropping — to the locals. (TL;dr version: there were a lot of Bergens, including one they called “Edge.”) The locals were apparently pretty good at skating, too, with the Brooklyn Eagle reporting on a weekend of skating in January 1862 that at Nassau Pond “the skating was both fancifully and gracefully executed, as several of the skaters belonging to this club are of the first class.”
When the ice was frozen over at Nassau Pond, trolleys to Flatbush from the Fulton Ferry carried a sign to let potential skaters know, as was the custom at the time for most trains going to Central Park Lake and the “pay ponds.” It’s not like you could call them up and ask if the ice was frozen, of course (no phones yet), but during cold snaps, you could open up the local paper to find “The Skating Report,” which let you know about ice conditions and events at all of the Kings County ponds. For people outside of Flatbush, going to Nassau Pond to skate was a little like (for us) going to Jones Beach instead of Rockaway. It was outside of the city, “nicer,” and more exclusive. As the Eagle described it, “It is more private, on account of the distance, than the others, and those who have visited it have always returned well satisfied.”
Just like during the Revolutionary War, during the Civil War, ice skating became a popular pastime for young men and women alike, and gave them a socially sanctioned way to get to know one another. An Eagle article from 1865 reported, “Nassau Pond has become the favorite resort of the ladies of Flatbush during the winter afternoons, the fair country maides of that rural district finding it quite pleasant to meet there...while they warm themselves by the stoves preliminary to having a grand time of the skates on ice.” Clothing companies even came out with dresses made especially for skating, and ladies had several options for getting around the ice if they didn’t want to skate — for example, a little chair that the guys would push them around in or a bar attached to skates they could hold as they skated along (I need this!).
Nassau Pond tended to have smoother ice than the flooded-over lots, but its real claim to fame was that it stayed frozen longer than both the lots of Brooklyn and the lake of Central Park. This makes sense because it was shallower than the lake but deeper than the lots. In the winter of 1861–62, the Steenbakkery froze 64 times to Central Park Lake’s 48 times (yes, it was a lot colder back then). The following winter, when Central Park’s lake only got cold enough for skating eight times, Nassau Pond was frozen over 28 times, five more times than the flooded lot that came in second place. How do I know? Skating was such a popular fad that these stats were reported in the Times.
This 1862 lithograph from Currier & Ives depicting skaters on Central Park Lake gives you a good idea of what skating would have looked like on the Steenbakkery during the same period — although it was probably even more crowded on the ice.
Carnivals — and Baseball — on Ice
Even with impressive freezing rates, you could never guarantee ice back then, so putting on an event at Nassau Pond was always a bit of a crapshoot. To make up for the possibility of no skating, they had mad entertainment. Musical acts were a regular feature, and vendors probably attended, much like Flatbush street fairs of today. Awards were given to the best skaters, and at night, they’d set off fireworks.
On February 22, 1862, events to commemorate Washington’s birthday took place all over Kings County. Of them all, the Times reported that “the most attractive event of the day was, perhaps, a game of ball played on skates at the Nassau Pond.” While baseball on ice might sound insane to us, the 1860s was a time when baseball was just beginning to bloom, and many of those flooded lots that competed with the Nassau Pond turned into baseball grounds in the spring, after the thaw. The prior winter, two baseball teams had played a well-attended ice game on one such grounds, and the Steenbakkery game would be a rematch.
Taking place only two blocks from the future site of Ebbets Field, the ballgame on ice was attended by more than 2,000 spectators. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned. “The affair broke up in a row,” the Times politely reported, while the Eagle went into juicy details: “[T]he playing...[was] stopped by the interference of three or four of the members who, wishing to bring themselves into notice, and not possessing the ability to do so as superior skaters, very rudely skated arm in arm with the females accompanying them through the field.” Afraid of plowing into one of the ladies while skating the bases, the other players couldn’t continue the game, and it was called.
This ad for a carnival at the Nassau Pond appeared in a 1862 issue of the Brooklyn Eagle. The paper later reported that it didn’t actually get cold enough for skating that day.
The “Steamer” Pond
Once the Civil War ended and the lake opened up on Prospect Park, there was less need for the smaller “pay ponds” of Brooklyn. Plus, baseball started to take off, making flooding the lots in winter more cumbersome and less necessary. The Nassau Skating Club disbanded after the 1865–1866 season, just before Prospect Park Lake opened for skating. But the Steenbakkery stayed put.
While couples and cityfolk flocked to Prospect Park Lake, the Steenbakkery went back to being mostly the domain of neighborhood boys, who shortened and Americanized its name, calling it “the Steamer.” I’ve been unable to figure out how many of the Nassau Pond’s amenities remained, but it still offered skate rental for decades after, as late as the winter of 1892–1893.
After that winter, it appears that part of the pond was finally filled in to build Bedford Ave and part of a sewer system. But locals still went there to skate—especially when Prospect Park Lake wasn’t frozen over yet. In December 1894, the year Flatbush became part of the city Brooklyn, the New York Tribune reported that “The only skating in Brooklyn yesterday was on the small ponds in the suburbs. The so-called ‘Steamer’ pond, at Bedford ave. and Malbone st., was visited by many eager votaries of the sport….Visitors to Prospect Park found that there was open water.” Sometimes skaters even showed up at the lake, only to end up at the Steamer when they heard there was a pond nearby that actually had ice. During one such incident, the Eagle reported that “The crowd grew so great that in the afternoon Sergeant Zimmerman was sent out with a detail of policemen to test the ice and keep it from being overweighted. The sport there continued until two o’clock in the morning.” I always love a story about historic partying.
Other than the occasional article about early-season skating, the Steamer made news several times in the 1890s for dramatic rescues of neighborhood children who had fallen in. A trolley now ran directly past the spot, so these acts of heroism often had an audience, and several New York papers reported on a rescue in December 1893 that attracted a huge crowd. After a child named Willie fell into the Steamer while playing tag, a man from a passing trolley saved him by wading into the freezing lake not once but twice (the second time, after taking off some clothes and tying a rope around himself). “When the lad was carried ashore,” the New York World reported, “a thousand voices swelled forth in enthusiastic cheers, while hats went flying in the air and women hugged each other in their emotion.” Willie was taken to a nearby hotel to dry off.
The last winter the Steenbakkery saw skating was 1897–1898, the same winter Brooklyn became part of New York City as a whole. “‘The Steamer,’” wrote the Brooklyn Times Union on January 3, 1898, “once a famous and favorite spot of the skater, presented an animated appearance yesterday.” The article, which put the number of “devotees to the blade” at “fully 500,” described the new New Yorkers as “gliding aimlessly about, enjoying the sport immensely.”
The End of the Steenbakkery
Although there were still plenty of people interested in skating at the Steamer, there weren’t that many skating days per year. And the rest of the time, the area was — well — a dump. This was before there was trash collection or really sanitation of any kind, and despite a well-intentioned “NO DUMPING” sign in the middle of the dirty pond, the site was filled with ash and garbage. One year, the police found someone squatting on the property in a self-made mud hut. People who lived nearby complained of the unbearable stench, and a judge ordered that it be cleaned up.
Meanwhile, the trolley line that went alongside the Steenbakkery on Malbone St. was being put underground, and the pond needed to be filled in to accommodate the new tunnel. As an interesting side note, the Malbone St. train tunnel would become infamous years later for a horrific train wreck that happened at its mouth, near the Park. It was so bad that people cringed even mentioning the name of the street, and its name was changed to Empire Blvd. (Although it still exists, the tunnel is in use today only to occasionally turn around or park the Franklin Ave shuttle train.)
“I went past [the] spot quite recently,” Lefferts Vanderbilt wrote at the end of the 18th century, as the last of the Steenbakkery was being filled in. “The dump cart of the city contractor was trying to fill up the pond, but ...the moon passing over may find a small portion of it even yet. … The city is creeping up to obliterate what is left of it just as surely as the green grass has covered from sight the [Revolutionary] soldiers’ graves.” By 1911, brick row houses were popping up on the north side of Sterling St., on top of (or closeby) where the skaters once glided.
Lefferts Vanderbilt, who had grown up on the Lefferts Farm, wasn’t the only one who always remembered the fun times at the Steenbakkery. Reminiscences about the “skating mania” that swept New York in the 1860s often mentioned Nassau Pond fondly (although they sometimes misattributed its source as an underground spring), and the Brooklyn Standard Union reported the news when apartment buildings went up over the rest of the site in 1918, recalling the good times at what was now “the foot of the hill past Ebbets Field.” Around that time, in an early example of content marketing, a book called Rambles of Historic Brooklyn was released by a Brooklyn bank, and it seemingly made up a bunch of superstitions about the old pond, saying that the “country folk” nearby believed sea serpents and ghosts lived there, while nearby “Indians” (huh?) thought it was “the home of fire dragons.” It was suggested by a reader of the Eagle that the book’s source for these legends was basically the town drunk. But a fun story is a fun story, and they became incorporated into the mythology of the legendary pond anyway.
Finding the Exact Location of the Steenbakkery
Close-up of the Steenbakkery location from a map of the village of Flatbush
After the last grandparent who had skated on the Steenbakkery died, it was almost completely forgotten. In fact, I’m pretty sure the article you’re still reading for some reason is the longest one ever written about the place. The badlands between Flatbush and Brooklyn became the badlands between PLG and Crown Heights, with Empire Blvd being a place you’re more likely to go in a car to get some drive-thru on the way home than visit for a nice winter afternoon with friends. So it’s not like there’s a plaque or a trendy bar nearby the Steenbakkery spot named “The Steamer'' (yet?? If you take this idea pls venmo me).
So of course, that made me want to find the exact location of where the Steenbakkery stood (well, sunked) even more. The Steenbakkery does appear on several maps in the Brooklyn Collection archives, starting with a famous map of colonial Flatbush that appeared in both Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt’s history and an earlier history by a guy named Strong. The Steenbakkery is downright huge here, and it’s hard to know if it’s to scale, or how its location relates to present-day streets.
Complicating matters is that, until the very end of its 100+-year existence, the Steenbakkery was on someone’s farm, not along an official street of any kind. So even when it appears alongside actual streets in atlases of Brooklyn made around 1860, it’s still hard to tell where it is.
I thought I had the answer in this odd lil’ 1868 map by Teunis G. Bergen, who drew a circle on top of suggested streets (not yet built or officially named) that a Historical Society libririan and I were sure must have been the Steenbakkery. But then, almost a year after I originally wrote this post, I finally found the precise location of the Steenbakkery while doing research on Flatbush’s geology. According to a 1900 topographical map, then Steenbakkery was located between present-day Lefferts Ave and Empire Blvd (Sterling St did not exist yet), between Bedford and Washington (closer to Bedford).
This map, created by the US Geological Survey, is likely to be extremely accurate — and it shows the Steenbakkery completely across the street as compared to the other maps. We also get a clear sense of its kidney shape, although the pond changed size and shape over the years — in 1900 it was consideraby smaller than the 6 acres quoted in the Times during its Nassau Pond heyday.
The Steenbakkery is clearly indicated on this 1860 map, but it would be nearly impossible to tell its precise location, even if it was accurately notated.
This topographic map from 1900 shows the location of the Steenbakkery, as well as the geographic features that caused it: Water running off nearby hills filled the clay pit that colonizers made when digging out bricks.
Visiting the Site of the Steenbakkery Today
Although I knew there wasn’t going to be a century-old old ice skate poetically wedged in the cement or anything, I wanted to check out the site of the old Steenbakkery. Were towering self-storage facilities the only thing marking the spot? Would I be able to feel any of those history-making vibes in the air?? Could I keep myself from stopping a stranger and asking them if I could tell them a story about ice skating???
Walking the block of Sterling St between Washington and Bedford is basically walking on top of where the ice once stood. Today, it’s pretty row houses. No ice skating here. But Bbehind them, on Empire Blvd, an unexpected surprise: On what would have been the pond’s northeastern side, tucked between a permanently closed falafel place and a carpet warehouse, was a perfect homage to the Steenbakkery: a bright little shop called Skateyogi. Not ice skating, of course, but skateboarding. It buzzed with activity, even during a pandemic, and “Black Lives Matter” was displayed in the window along with hearts and colorful skateboards.
If you really want to imagine what it must have felt like to meet up at the Steenbakkery, go to Prospect Park instead. Of course, you can no longer hop on the ice and skate from the Audubon Center to Ocean Parkway, but for a small fee you can rent some skates and take to the ice at the LeFrak Center. These days, skating in Prospect Park is one of the only (legal) things you can do together with a group of people outside. Watching the skaters at the LeFrak Center, even on the sidelines, you can step away from yourself for a minute and become part of the crowd. People bursting forth after being stuck inside gives you energy and weirdly, hope — and I wonder if that’s how people felt during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, when the Steenbakkery was at its prime.
Afterward, sometimes I head over to the old Lefferts House, which was moved from the family farm to the Park a couple of decades after the dump carts came for the pond. Even though it’s temporarily closed for safety reasons, you can still visit the brick fireplace and oven on display out front, built by volunteers in 2005 to show visitors what it was like to heat and cook by flame. There’s a conspicuous brick in the middle of the hearth. According to a sign nearby, it was taken from an inside wall of the house, and “may have come from the ‘stone bakery’ that was on the Lefferts Farm.” That is, the old Steenbakkery. I’m pretty sure that’s just a legend, but I take my gloves off to touch it anyway, wiping a little bit of history away.
Skateyogi holding down the vibes next to a rotating cast of strip-mall stores.
Skaters at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park during the pandemic make me think of skaters at the Steenbakkery during the British Occupation of Flatbush.
The conspicuous brick above the fireplace in the front yard of the Lefferts House is hundreds of years old. It might have been created in the Steenbakkery’s kiln, and it makes me think deep thoughts.
I wrote this article in Jan/Feb 2021 (updated in Jan 2023 with the correct location of the Steenbakkery) and used the following sources:
Maps (as cited above) from the Brooklyn Collection
Topoview from the US Geological Survey
The Social History of Flatbush: And Manners and Customs of the Dutch Settlers in Kings County by Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt (1881)
A Historical Sketch of the Zabriskie Homestead, Flatbush, LI by Peter Shneck (1881)
Tales of Old Flatbush by John Snyder (1945)
Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn by Maud Esther Dillard (1945)
Rambles of Historic Brooklyn by the Brooklyn Trust Company (1916)
The Prospect Lefferts Gardens Historic District Designation Report
“The History of Ice Skates” by Johanna Mayer, Science Friday (2018)
“Ice-Skating in the 1860s” by Sarah Kay Bierle, Emerging Civil War (2017)
“Cold winters fueled ice skating boom of 19th and early 20th centuries” by Kevin Ambrose, Washington Post (2016)
“February 4, 1861: Brooklyn Atlantics win a baseball game on ice” by Bob LeMoine, the Society for Baseball Research
”When They Played Baseball on Ice Skates” by Hannah Keyser, Mental Floss (2015)
Archival newspaper articles from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Standard Union, Brooklyn Times Union, New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Tribune, via Newspapers.com. (Can you believe how many newspapers there were back then??)
For more on these sources and others, visit the Flatbush Research Materials section.
Postscript: I have been unable to locate a single photograph or painting of the Steenbakkery/Nassau Pond.