NEW YORK CITY’S DIRTIEST BEACH
Brooklyn’s Dead Horse Bay looks about as appealing as it sounds, resembling something out of a postapocalyptic movie. On most days it is devoid of people, yet an improbable amount of debris blankets its shores. Glass bottles, old leather shoes, car tires, broken dishes, children’s toys—along with mysterious sun-bleached bones—are everywhere. As waves splash against the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of glass fragments on the beach, and then retreat, a sound almost like wind chimes can be heard. This otherwise quiet and remote peninsula juts out into the mouth of New York’s Jamaica Bay. Given its prominent position at the bay’s entrance, one might assume that this barrage of material came to rest on this sandy spit through the idiosyncrasies of tide and current. But larger, heavier items such as metal safes, car parts, chunks of flooring, and bathroom fixtures suggest that it was not chance that bore these artifacts here.
The sea- and sun-stained appearance of objects, the rust, the faintly legible labels bearing the names of unfamiliar and long-defunct companies, and, of course, the bones, suggest that this material is not new. In fact, these objects were buried here decades ago but are now gradually reemerging along the beach. They are not just rubbish, nor flotsam or jetsam, but the remnants of little-known chapters in New York City’s history.
The shores along today’s Dead Horse Bay were once part of a place called Barren Island. Although Barren Island is nowhere to be found on most modern maps of New York, this peculiar little place played an integral role in the city’s history. “It’s archaeologically very rich, but also very tangled and complicated because of the many
