Sheepshead Bay's Piers Used to Hold Fifty Fishing Boats. Here's What Fills Them Now.

Captain Anthony Reyes blew the horn a little after 7:30 on a July night this summer, and the lines went down off Sandy Hook. Croakers came up almost as fast as anglers could drop bait, the drumming wail that gives the fish its name rising off the deck of the Marilyn Jean IV while two mates, Seth Rivera and Paul, worked under bright lights to clean and bag the catch. It was the kind of trip Reyes has run for more than thirty years, since he was a kid catching goldfish by hand in the Bronx River. It is also, by his own description, one of a shrinking number of trips still leaving from Sheepshead Bay's piers at all.

That word, shrinking, is the whole story if you know where to look. Walk the length of Emmons Avenue today and you will find fewer working boats tied up than there used to be, and more of almost everything else. The piers did not empty out. They changed what they hold.

Fifty boats, nine piers, one number worth remembering

In 1939, the WPA Guide to New York City described a fishing fleet of about fifty boats moored along Emmons Avenue, some carrying as many as two hundred passengers on trips that ran as far as Atlantic City. The city had built the nine concrete piers just three years earlier, in 1936, at a cost of $180,000. A tenth pier was reserved for excursion boats. The same guide named the restaurants that fed everyone who came off those boats hungry: Lundy's, Villepigue's, Seidel's, the Beau Rivage, Tappen's.

Here is the same waterfront, filled in with what's actually there now.

The boats that remain, like the Marilyn Jean IV and its sister vessels running out of Pier 6, are not a relic act. They are a real business under real pressure, and the people running them will tell you exactly why.

What actually thinned the fleet

Reyes has an answer ready when asked why the piers host fewer boats than they once did, and it isn't one thing. Hurricane Sandy hit the business hard in 2012. The COVID-19 pandemic hit it again. Recreation habits have shifted since, and the customers who do show up complain more than they used to about parking near the waterfront. Winters mean shipping the Marilyn Jean IV out to a boatyard in Sayville, on Long Island, for maintenance that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars before a single ticket sells for the season ahead.

None of that has stopped the boats from sailing. It has just made every trip count more. Rivera spends his days repairing diesel engines and boilers around the city and his nights on the water, filleting other people's catch for tip money that makes up a real share of his pay. Paul, working the rail beside him, put it simply while describing who climbs aboard on a given night.

People who are going through crazy things in life and just want to be here, away from reality

That is not a marketing pitch for a fishing trip. It is a mate at midnight, thirty miles from anywhere, explaining why strangers keep showing up.

The newer arrival, a few blocks inland

If the piers tell you what has thinned out, Sheepshead Bay Road tells you what has moved in. Earlier this year, two friends who grew up in the neighborhood, Oleg Rybak and Dmitry Khavko, opened Terra at 1716 Sheepshead Bay Road. It is the neighborhood's first European fine-dining room, run by chefs Dima Martseniuk and Anna Shitova, with sommelier John Camacho Vidal and bartender David Vilenskiy rounding out the front of house. Martseniuk cut his teeth at Veselka before opening Ruta, a Ukrainian restaurant in Washington, D.C., and the menu at Terra leans into what its own team calls layered flavoring, dishes built from black truffle and kaluga caviar sitting next to a burger finished with pineapple chutney.

Sheepshead Bay has long been home to a large Russian and Eastern European community, and Terra reads less like an outside bet on the neighborhood and more like two locals deciding the neighborhood was ready for a room like this. It keeps dinner-only hours, Wednesday through Sunday from five to ten at night, later on weekends, and it draws a different crowd than the piers do at the same hour. Both crowds are Sheepshead Bay residents. They are just spending their evening two different ways, a few blocks apart.

The clubs that never stopped, quietly

Between the boats that are disappearing and the restaurant that just arrived sits a third thread that gets less attention because it never made news by changing. The Miramar Yacht Club has been running continuous sailing seasons in Sheepshead Bay for more than nine decades, a run that traces back to roughly the same era the city poured the concrete for those nine piers. It is not a relic either. Recent seasons have focused on growing membership and keeping sailing access open to newer boaters, the same practical questions any club has to answer to keep its docks full.

A few hundred yards away, the Gravesend Kiwanis Club has run its annual charity fishing trip out of Pier 1 on Emmons Avenue for eleven years running, a three-hour tour around Jamaica Bay that has nothing to do with commercial fishing and everything to do with a civic group finding an excuse to get people on the water together. It is a small thing. It is also proof that the piers still function as a gathering point for the neighborhood, not just a mooring for a dwindling number of boats.

What one walk down Emmons Avenue actually shows you

Put it together and the picture is not decline. It is substitution. The concrete that once held fifty working boats now holds fewer of them, but the same nine piers still anchor a yacht club heading into its tenth decade, a civic fishing trip in its second decade, and a captain who still blows the horn on a July night because enough people still want to be out past Coney Island and around the tip of Breezy Point when the sun goes down. A few blocks inland, a restaurant named for the ground itself has opened its doors on Sheepshead Bay Road, run by two men who grew up close enough to walk there.

None of it looks like the fifty-boat fleet from the WPA guide. All of it is still tied to the same nine piers that fleet used. That is the part worth knowing if you live here and only think about the waterfront when you're headed somewhere else. It has not gone quiet. It has just started keeping different company.

If you're curious what else is changing along the water, or what a home near Emmons Avenue is actually worth in today's market, the team at Revived Residential knows this stretch of Brooklyn block by block. Reach out anytime, or get your instant home valuation to see where your property stands.