the look
To love New York’s beaches is to love the people, too.
Some beaches in New York City were formed by glaciers. Others, by Robert Moses. The sparkling sands of Coney Island and the Rockaways predated him, but much of the way we experience the city’s beaches today is a result of Mr. Moses’s four-decade reign presiding over the New York park system.
It started with Jones Beach, his first public work, which was born of a personal obsession and virtually dredged into existence out of a bunch of marshy sandbars.
In the spring of 1927, Mr. Moses ordered the largest floating dredges in the United States to be brought to New York City; crews worked for months pulling up sand and piling it into dunes over 10 feet high. The workers tried to break for the winter, when ice began to set in, but Mr. Moses insisted they press on. He made them set up camp on the dredges to keep the pumps running.
What Mr. Moses hadn’t considered were the elements.
The dredged-up bay bottom of his beach dried into a beautiful layer of fine-grained sand, but the slightest breeze sent it into violent flurries, severe enough to strip the paint off cars.
The solution, landscape architects soon found, was beach grass, which has roots that spread vertically, holding sand in place. The catch: It had to be planted by hand, and there would need to be a lot of it. Thus, hundreds of workers spent the summer of 1928 hunched over, planting Jones Beach.
When the park opened in 1929 — complete with two bathhouses and a nautical-themed boardwalk — the crowds far exceeded expectations, and Mr. Moses was praised everywhere he went. The success of Jones Beach won him the credibility he needed to keep carving out state parks, many of them sandy.
The paradox of Mr. Moses’s beaches was the contempt he had for the people who would enjoy them. He opened up the coastline, but he also worked hard to block access to black and low-income families, often in violation of the law.
In Robert Caro’s 1975 biography of Mr. Moses, “The Power Broker,” there is an anecdote about Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, realizing with “shock” the extent of Mr. Moses’s disdain for the very people he served.
“To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach,” she said.
“The public is just the public” to Mr. Moses, Ms. Perkins added. “He loves the public, but not as a people.”
But anyone who has passed a summer afternoon on New York’s shores knows that to love the beach is to love, or at least tolerate, the people — the sprawling families with tents and coolers, the old guys in Speedos, the entrepreneurial types selling homemade cocktails, the kids jumbled up in the surf.
Because on a sunny weekend day, the beaches of New York are packed. At the most popular spots, virtually every inch of sand is occupied. It’s not a public you can experience at any sort of remove.
The first time I went to the beach in New York City, in 2011, I took the subway out to the Rockaways from my apartment in the East Village, riding the L train to Broadway Junction and transferring to the A. I got off at Beach 90 after an hour and 30 minutes in transit and followed my fellow travelers to the sand.
I grew up going to the beach in Virginia, a trip that always meant at least a four-hour car ride with my family. So there was something delightfully novel for me about the fact that at the other end of the subway system that delivered New Yorkers into the heart of Manhattan each day, there was sea and sand. And more people than I had ever seen on a beach.
I’m not sure what I expected. An empty vista? Leisurely shell gathering? I definitely hadn’t accounted for the fact that my idea of an escape from the city was the same as everyone else’s.
I found myself a small patch of sand and settled in, realizing, slowly, that despite the overwhelming numbers, the large mass of people wasn’t self-consciously a crowd. Sure, people were sprawled out as if they were in their living rooms, nearly naked, practically on top of each other. But most of them seemed to be in their own little worlds.
There’s an unspoken code of conduct: Give each other space, if not physically then psychically. Everyone deserves a breather — everyone needs to soak up some vitamin D, swim in the salt water and let their kids tire themselves out. It may be a little odd that we have to do it crammed together under the blazing sun, but it is what it is.
Every one of these excursions is an education in How to Beach. You learn which snacks best serve your dehydrated body. (Watermelon is good. Chocolate bars melt. Salami is … a choice.) You discover that things like hats and extra clothes and coolers improve the experience significantly. The journey back home is always longer than you remember, so bring a change of underwear.
This summer, I took a Monday off work and made another solo pilgrimage to the Rockaways on the A train. I wandered down the coast until the crowds began to thin out — only a person or two every couple of yards — and spread out my towel. I had a book to read, a granola bar to sustain me and container of cubed watermelon. My phone was tucked away in my bag. I felt, for the first time in weeks, pleasantly alone but also together with the many strangers who had chosen the same day to take a break.
In the moments when I needed to feel alone alone, I stared at the horizon. Because out there, at the end of the sightline, there isn’t anybody at all.
