a new municipal airport in New York City. The New York City Chamber of Commerce approved the site in September of that year. Originally, real-estate developers suggested that in Mill Basin could be used for the new airport, which would allow the airfield to open before the end of 1928. Ultimately, New York City's aeronautical engineer Clarence Chamberlin selected nearby Barren Island as the site for the new airport, which later became Floyd Bennett Field. The Belt Parkway was built through the neighborhood in the 1930s, and it opened in 1940. The construction of a drawbridge along the parkway, traversing Mill Basin, was approved in 1939 and completed the next year. Residential development Old Mill Basin, north of the Mill Basin peninsula, was developed beginning in the 1920s. The 1939 WPA Guide to New York City mentions that the area comprising present-day Mill Basin and Bergen Beach was the residence of "pathetic communities of squatters, who live in makeshift houses, and eke out a living by fishing and scouring the near-by city dumps for odd necessities". At the time, the southern shore was still marshland. Residential development on the peninsula began after World War II, when Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific sold a large plot of land to the firm of Flatbush Park Homes. The land was bounded to the north by Avenue U, to the east by East 68th Street and East Mill Basin/Mill Island, to the south by Basset Avenue, and to the west by Strickland Avenue and Mill Avenue. Over a hundred brick bungalows were built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of which were later replaced by big, custom-built, detached one-family houses on lots measuring . The Crooke-Schenck House, on East 63rd Street, was dismantled in 1952 and later reassembled as an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Starting in the 1950s, a series of suburban waterfront communities were rapidly developed in Southeast Brooklyn, including present-day Bergen Beach and Canarsie as well as Mill Basin. In 1956, builders announced the construction of 1,500 houses on the Mill Basin peninsula. As late as the 1960s, parts of the area were still a swamp. During the 1950s, private developers laid their own streets while constructing houses in the neighborhood, resulting in a patchwork of private roads. Some of these streets were poorly maintained: a newspaper article from 1954 described houses that flooded after heavy rains because there were