ulmer.html

Beyond Bath Beach was Ulmer Park, an old-fashioned drinking and picnic place with carousels, swings, a bathing beach and all the appurtenances of the old-style beer garden amusement resort. The bathing was in Gravesend Bay, just where it began to narrow down toward Coney Island Creek.

And then a stretch of open meadow, the fishing shacks, the creek and the back yard of Coney Island.

I am not too sure when Ulmer Park closed. One source says 1899 but another giving a list of establishments forced out of business by 'prohibition' would give the date post-1920. (1926 newspaper reporting on the last few years after prohibition was enacted)

------ Ulmer Park Casino, Twenty-fifth and Harway avenues, closed.

----- Nearby Coney Island entertainments beckoned, but Bath Beach also had its own amusement park. Opened in 1893 by the Ulmer Brewery of Brooklyn and advertised as a "family resort," Ulmer Park offered rides, a dance hall, and swimming. A residential community grew up around it that remained after the park closed in 1899.

-------- Unless there were 2 Ulmer Parks the dates are un-sure for now.

-------- It was a short-lived amusement park in Bath Beach, the seaside Brooklyn neighborhood named after the English spa of Bath, and it owed its existence to a beer company (as did many things in Brooklyn, then the city's brewing center).

-------- According to "The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn," edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, Ulmer Park was opened in 1893 by the Ulmer Brewery of Brooklyn and advertised as a family resort. It offered rides, a dance hall and swimming. A residential community grew up there and remained after the park closed in 1899.

--------- Ulmer Park survives as the name of a bus depot in Bath Beach and a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Salute to Ulmer Park, short-lived Brooklyn beer getaway

Ulmer Park was the lark of William Ulmer, one of Brooklyn's most successful brewers in an age where much of the nation's finest beer was coming from the future borough. The German-born son of a wine merchant who learned the trade from his uncle, Ulmer opened his eponymous brewery in the 1870s at Belvedere Street and soon came upon the idea of opening a park as a way of selling more beer. (Not a bad idea. Jacob Ruppert would have similar designs in mind when he bought the New York Yankees in 1915). The park would open in 1893 in Gravesend Bay along the southern shore of Brooklyn -- back when there was an actual shore -- between Coney Island farther south and the more conservative Bath Beach resort community to its west. Ulmer Park seemed to have more in common with Bath Beach -- clean, family friendly (keep Dad happy so he keeps drinking!) with a beer garden, carousels and swings, rifle ranges, a dance pavilion and of course plenty of beachfront property. The park seemed to be particular popular with Germans -- Ulmer after all was German, and this was a beer garden -- and particularly the annual 'Saengerfest' festival. A Times article even claims that 100,000 gathered at Ulmer Park for the end of one such festival. We can get a good idea of Ulmer's intentions for the park by looking at his failure at obtaining a "liquor tax certificate" (or license) in a report from 1900. "A picnic ground, or open air pleasure resort, of about two acres" between Harway Avenue and the shore, the park had a bowling alley, a pier with canopied bar at the end, two or three other beer pavilions scattered throughout the property and a hotel. Ultimately, neither the resort at Bath Beach nor amusements at Ulmer Park could compete with Coney Island which was about to enter its golden age in the early 1900s; apparently, it was grit and decadence people wanted in their summertime Brooklyn getaways. Ulmer closed in 1899. The land remained a public space hosting baseball, cricket and track and field events. Eventually it was wiped away and redeveloped. It remains in name only, at the Ulmer Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the name of the neighborhood bus depot.

For your frame of reference, the park was located a couple blocks west of today's bus depot, located here:

CREDITS: From my old Photocopies. I believe the two images came from the New York City Library. Otherwise this site is non-commercial and makes no money. Scream if anything is yours and you object !!