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Gateway National Recreation Area is a 26,607 acre (107.67 km²) National Recreation Area owned by the United States government in the New York City metropolitan area. The park comprises four separate units located in three boroughs of New York City and northern New Jersey and is managed by the National Park Service. Three of the four units include popular swimming beaches. The area drew more than 8 million visitors in 2005.
Jamaica Bay Unit includes much of the shoreline below the Shore Parkway beginning at Plum Beach and ending at Kennedy International Airport, as well as several dozen islands in Jamaica Bay that, along with the water itself, is designated the only "wildlife refuge" in the National Park System (usually, "wildlife refuges" are a US Fish & Wildlife Service function). It is a tidal estuary on the south part of Brooklyn and Queens.The unit has a visitors center named for William Fitts Ryan (the congressman who championed Gateway's creation) that has been under development for many years at the historic former airport - Floyd Bennett Field - where many civilian aviation records of the "Golden Age of Aviation" were set and broken, and which later became a Naval Air Station during World War II. A visitor contact station specifically for the wildlife refuge is accessible nearby by automobile and subway, which links to the trail system on the main island. This is the only portion of the refuge accessible to the general public, all of the remaining island are prohibited. This is the only unit that does not have beaches. Fishing, nature-viewing, photography, boating, cycling, and sailing are the most popular activities within this unit.
Breezy Point Unit is located on Breezy Point in Queens. It stretches to the tip of Rockaway Point and includes Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden. It preserves, in part, some of the last remaining natural dunes in the area, and is home to at least two endangered species (piping plover, and beach tiger beetle).
Staten Island Unit is located on the south shore of Staten Island within Lower New York Bay. It includes Fort Wadsworth, an historic collection of masonry fortifications on the site of much earlier fortifications; Miller Field, a former airfield south of New Dorp; as well as Great Kills Park on Great Kills Harbor. Also within this unit are Hoffman and Swinburne Islands.
