Marine Park is both the name of Brooklyn’s largest park and the neighborhood that surrounds it. To reach the southeast Brooklyn neighborhood by public transportation, you need to take a subway and then transfer to a bus, which explains why so many of the houses, most built in the 1920s, have driveways and garages. The area’s relative isolation, “far from the hipsters or the merchants of twee” as Brooklyn historian and Marine Park native Thomas Campanella puts it, has largely shielded the neighborhood from the waves of gentrification that have reshaped so much of northern Brooklyn. At the intersection of Kings Highway and Flatbush Avenue, once sat the Lenape village of Keshawchqueren, meaning "at the bay." For centuries, the adjacent Gerritsen Creek watershed was prime Lenape hunting and fishing ground. The Hendrick I. Lott House on East 36th Street, built in 1720 and continuously occupied by the Lott family until 1989, is one of the neighborhood's only surviving historic structures. Records suggest the Lotts were abolitionists, and a hidden room in the house was likely a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Lott farm was one of Brooklyn's largest producers harvesting more880,000 pounds of potatoes in 1916 alone. Less than ten years later, in 1925, those potato fields were replaced by a bumper crop of mock Tudor homes with "Normandy Fireplaces," colored bathtubs, and built-in garbage incinerators. As fort the actual park, early plans were wildly ambitious. Entrepreneur and politician Sol Bloom, the man behind the memorable "There's a place in France / where the women wear no pants," proposed a 200,000-seat stadium, a skyport, and a searchlight visible from Quebec to commemorate George Washington's 200th birthday. It never happened. Landscape architect Charles Downing Lay tried next with a scaled-back plan: a 125,000-seat stadium, a half-mile-wide swimming pool fed by canals, 180 tennis courts, 30 baseball diamonds, and 50 croquet fields. Newly appointed Parks Commissioner Robert Moses immediately trashed it, redirecting funds to his Marine Parkway Bridge and Jacob Riis Park instead. Today the park is the heartbeat of the neighborhood. The eastern portion hums with bocce players, pickleball courts, and basketball games. Cross Avenue U and you're in sprawling salt marshes thick with myrtle warblers, cottontail rabbits, and oyster toadfish drawn to Gerritsen Creek's brackish waters. The occasional rusting car carcass aside, it remains one of Brooklyn's most unexpectedly beautiful spots.