Mussel Island was an island in

Newtown Creek Newtown Creek, a long tributary of the East River, is an estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in New York City. Channelization made it one of the most heavily-used bodies of water in the Port of N ...

located near its confluence with Maspeth Creek, between the

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

neighborhood of Greenpoint and the

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

neighborhood of Maspeth in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Prior to industrialization, Newtown Creek hosted a sizable population of

mussel Mussel () is the common name used for members of several families of bivalve molluscs, from saltwater and freshwater habitats. These groups have in common a shell whose outline is elongated and asymmetrical compared with other edible clams, which ...

on its bottom and at the confluence of Maspeth Creek and Newtown Creek was Mussel Island, an uninhabited patch of marshland that survived into the 1940s. With hundreds of thousands of vessels traveling through Newtown Creek in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this island posed a navigation hazard, forcing boats to tightly swerve around it. In 1921, Congress approved a dredging project for Newtown Creek that proposed to eliminate Mussel Island in favor of a "turning basin" that would enable larger vessels to turn around. By the end of the following decade, the project was completed and the island disappeared beneath the water. Map company Hagstrom continued to mark the island on its maps until October 2000, when a reader asked ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' about the island and Hagstrom conceded that it no longer belonged on the map.

References

* Confluence of Newtown and Maspeth Creeks. Islands of Brooklyn Greenpoint, Brooklyn Islands of New York City {{BrooklynNY-geo-stub