The Best Beachcombing in Manhattan

There is one decent beachcombing spot in Manhattan, if you like your flotsam local: a 100-foot-long wedge of sand beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. You can only walk the beach if you’re willing to trespass, squeezing through a narrow opening in the balustrade. It’s not the sort of beach most people dream about. You wouldn’t want to sunbathe there, or walk barefoot. But I like it. It’s one of those accidental places that make the city feel a little wild.

A dozen years ago, I gather, this beach didn’t exist, making it the perfect beach for New York, capital of change and chance. It came into being when tides began depositing sediment behind a little pier built not long ago as a kind of scenic underlook, a good place to take snapshots guaranteed to resemble postcards, the great bridge looming in the background. At the northern end of the beach are the remains of a derelict pier, concrete posts topped by tentacles of twisted rebar. The sand at the southern end of the beach is silty. At the northern end it’s gravelly. A trellis supporting FDR Drive rises out of the gravel, and on the steel of the trellis some latter-day Hart Crane has spray-painted a couplet: 

DN UNDER THE BRIDGE

BIG CITY OF DREAMS.

You can hear the surf of traffic on FDR Drive overhead, tires clicking rhythmically across seams in the concrete, but you can also hear the actual surf—shattered shells and sea-glass tinkling as a wave recedes, the slosh of little breakers among the pilings and rebar. Three or four times a week the jumpsuited custodial workers who patrol the waterfront with rolling trash cans will climb down and rake the sand clean, leaving a patchwork of furrows. Visit the beach before the custodians come, and you will find windrows of debris—Styrofoam containers, tennis balls, sneakers, deflated balloons, water bottles by the dozens, hewn timbers, some of them studded with rusty spikes or bolts. You won’t find any Japanese fishing floats under the Brooklyn Bridge, nor anything else you’d want to decorate a bed and breakfast with, but I never went there in search of maritime baubles. I went to fix my bearings; to see more clearly where I’d washed up.

Once, walking the strandline of my little beach at low tide, practicing the beachcombing techniques I’d learned from Amos L. Wood, author of Beachcombing the Pacific, I noticed a half-dozen colorful plastic tubes that I was unable to identify. Here is another riddle in the sand! I thought to myself. Like a naturalist discovering a new variety of nudibranch, I made a careful sketch in my little notebook. After bicycling home, I showed the sketch to my wife. She gave my drawing one glance. “That’s a tampon applicator,” she said. Its provenance was no mystery. After heavy rain, New York City's storm drains and sewage systems overflow into the harbor—which explains most of what you'll find DN UNDER THE BRIDGE.

It also explains why anti-littering campaigns and beach clean-ups, well-intended or otherwise, are more futile than their sponsors tend to claim. As I write in Moby-Duck, 

At least today there aren't equine carcasses putrefying beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, or feral pigs scavenging slop from the gutters of lower Broadway, gutters that during those unplumbed, horse-drawn times flowed with shit, equine and porcine and human. Yet since the mid-1800s, not only has the volume of New York's household refuse grown, to four million tons a year; its chemistry has changed. Depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today's marine debris--the preferred bureaucratic term for flotsam and jetsam--is made of plastic. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, according to a 2004 EPA report, the United States still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, and in that sewage are what the EPA charmingly calls "floatables"--buoyant, synthetic things: Q-tips, condoms, dental floss, tampon applicators. (90)