in 1910 crippled the Percy Williams Amusement Park's operations, destroying $400,000 worth of property (). By 1912, two more amusement parks had been built, as well as a scenic railroad. The resorts in Coney Island and Rockaway Beach proved to be more popular than Bergen Beach because the other resorts had easy transit access, whereas Bergen Beach did not. Pollution from Barren Island, a notorious waste processing site, also decreased the appeal of Bergen Beach. As a result, the Bergen Beach resort closed by 1919. In 1917, as part of a dredging project in nearby Rockaway Inlet, the city agreed to add bulkheads along of the Bergen Beach coast. Williams and Adams later sued, ostensibly to delay the project. Redevelopment After the failure of the amusement park, Bergen Beach was redeveloped. In 1925, real estate developers Max Natanson and Mandlebaum & Levine bought Williams and Adams's former amusement park for close to $2 million (). At the time, they planned to develop Bergen Beach's 3,200 lots as a residential area with an entertainment district. There would have been a beach and an amusement park similar to Williams and Adams's park. However, this plan never materialized, and by 1926, the lots were sold off piece-by-piece to different people. Bungalows and vacation houses were built on the coast of "Flatlands Bay", around Bergen Island, before World War I. However, city records from 1909 to 1915 do not indicate where exactly these houses were erected. In 1927, the New York City Department of Docks began leasing lots and bungalows on Bergen Beach. As of 1930, the yearly rates for these lots ranged between $10 and $240 (worth between $ and $ in ). Bergen's house itself was demolished during the construction of Belt Parkway, also known as the Shore Parkway, in the 1930s. When the parkway opened in 1936, though, it did not spur development in Bergen Beach. 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. Although fourteen single-family houses were built in the 1940s, much of the neighborhood retained a rural character through the 1960s. Starting in the 1950s, a series of suburban