Welcome to Android Central! What phone are you using? Can you show us a picture of what the homescreen looks like now? You generally can't get rid of the bottom Favorites Tray in Android, unless you have an alternative launcher like Nova installed, and even then, you have to go into its settings to make that happen. You can remove shortcuts from the Tray, but the Tray should still be there. What happens if you try to drag an app shortcut to where the Tray should be?