The Best Beach in Manhattan

Jun 16, 2023
5 min read

by Erik Kennedy

The best beach in Manhattan was located directly south of Pier 76 on the Hudson, across from the Javits Center.

I say “beach” — and technically I’m right, because it was a flat, sandy area adjoining a body of water — but I don’t think it was commonly thought of as a beach. I doubt many people thought of it at all. From the seventies until 2021, Pier 76 was a police tow pound. That had a certain effect on the ambiance of the spot. Also impacting the vibes was the fact that the little triangular beach was almost entirely covered in garbage, the scrappy flotsam of the river (or the jetsam of the island). This was during the years around 2010, when I lived nearby, and the idea that a great city’s littoral zones could be beautiful and cherishable was still gaining traction.

The final issue was access. The beach was maybe ten feet below the level of Twelfth Avenue, the street bordering the river, and was reachable only if you hopped a railing and clambered down a concrete seawall and across big rocks and ankle-breaking obstacles like cracked square timbers and twisted pieces of rebar. I could never figure out if those large pieces of debris actually washed up on the shore or if they were just dumped there.

The beach was the size of a two-car garage, if one of the cars was a bike. It’s just as well that I was always alone there. It seemed important to me to get down to the surface of the river occasionally, to do more than just look at the water. It was a forlorn form of urban ecotherapy, a lifehack way of connecting with nature, of recentering myself. Some people get high-needs fancy houseplants, others lie on grass, and others hark to the call of the deep. I never committed to swimming there but I was obsessed with the thought, and in the warmer months I would offer my feet and shins to the river, stick my hands in too and lick the salt off my fingers. I’m told it’s generally pretty clean, but to me the Hudson always tastes a little bit like diesel. It’s part of the terroir.

I was in my drinking days. That played a part in my visits. Walking back north from the galleries and bars in Chelsea it seemed natural to hug the riverside. It seemed natural to make myself the main character in a story of shaggy-dog bohemianism, of excitement and discovery in the liminal Ballardian spaces of the city-world. Private, indulgent, consequence-less exploration. Intentional daydreaming. If I’d been drinking, and I often had, I might vault over the railing on the featherbrained theory that “it’s always party time on the beach.” Not true, of course. Easy to think of beaches where it has not always been party time. Dunkirk. Iwo Jima. Pompeii had a beach. But that’s not what I meant, and in any case I was less rigorous then in examining my thinking, such as it was.

There was much more of a surf there than you’d expect, especially on an incoming tide. Since it was west-facing, in the afternoon sun the slappy little waves would be backlit and the scurfy spume produced effects a pâtissier would admire. Little hovering blobs of haloed freeform foam against the gridded apartment blocks of New Jersey across the river. I found a few interesting things and many not very interesting things there. A Christmas tree. All the sticks in existence. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lots of balls: basket, tennis, foot, exercise, kick. (Balls float.) Milk jugs. (Jugs float.) If I’d found a corpse, I’d have rated my surprise a 6 out of 10. Shoes. An unopened beer. Porn. A vacuum cleaner. (Bag empty!) Buckets’ worth of microplastics and macroplastics — I’m not really sure of the size difference. Lighters. (Lighter than water.) A coconut and a bottle of sunscreen, which to me said “low-effort costume party” more than it said “tropical getaway.” A solitary blue crab, walking and living sideways as surely as I was! I never kept anything. As the hiker’s ethos goes: take only pictures, leave only footprints, make only friends.

Helicopters from the nearby 30th Street Heliport usually buzzed around, suspending some of the wealthiest people in the world irritatingly in the air above me. I read that one of the companies that operates out of the heliport is the biggest transporter of human organs in America. Choppers flying livers and hearts and the megarich, so much organic matter. When US Airways Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson in January 2009 no news crews went down onto the beach, and as far as I know no survivors landed there. (I went to see out of curiosity.) The beach was perceived as useless even when it might have been at its most useful. Or it wasn’t perceived at all.

When I moved away, I moved somewhere with an actual beach you can do beach stuff on, in another country, by the real Pacific Ocean. But there’s something to be said for both kinds of beaches. For the beach that is open and simple, and the beach that is difficult and arcane.

The development of the vertical billionaires’ utopia at Hudson Yards, just to the south of the beach, has changed things. Pier 76 has been taken into the generous embrace of Hudson River Park. The police have to store the cars they abduct somewhere else. To mark the occasion of the revamped pier’s ribbon-cutting, then-governor Andrew Cuomo said, “For years, Pier 76 was an eyesore that blighted the West Side. However, thanks to the hard work of so many New Yorkers, this gorgeous new park will provide residents and visitors with incomparable access to outdoor recreational opportunities and cultural attractions.” Maybe.

I’m not sure what effect all this has had on my beach. Satellite view on Google Maps shows that the beach is still there. I tend to think that money in the vicinity of a place always means that being there without a specific reason will be less tolerated, not more. What counts as an “outdoor recreational opportunity”? This is not a gentrification story, but it’s not not a gentrification story. And now Manhattan is acquiring other, more beachy beaches. This year, on Gansevoort Peninsula, in the West Village, the city is opening what’s being called “Manhattan’s first public beach.” There will be chairs and a dog run and a place to launch kayaks. No swimming.

I’m reminded of the cover photo of a hefty history book I read a few years ago, David Kynaston’s Family Britain, 1951–57. A couple of hundred people, about half of them children, are arrayed on a surprisingly sandy Thames foreshore, with Tower Bridge in the background. Some are in swimsuits, some in suit-suits. You can feel the heat of the day through the black and white of the picture. The scent of Protestant capitalism is in the air, yes, but at the same time there’s a Mediterranean tang; you almost want to call this Thames beach la plage or la playa, only half ironically. The sun is nearly overhead but also setting on the late empire. The beach is obviously a good thing, but also a very limited thing, trying, in a city, to supply deficiencies that it can’t be reasonably expected to. No one is more than a few feet into the water. Another place where you can’t really swim, with lots of other people. And where you’ll probably only find what you already expect to be there.

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand.