Essye’s wanted to visit the area around Bottle Beach and try to figure out where things were in relation to some old maps.
Since March, she had been sending me maps, and it was amazing to see the places that I knew so well covered in water.
We set out from a pretty little beach at the end of Gerritsen Avenue.
This would have been the site of a dozens horse rendering plants in the 1850’s.
My idea was to let ourselves be washed out into the bay by the tide. We would travel just like the all the horse parts that were dumped here 150 years ago.
But once we got out into the Plum Beach Channel, we just wanted to paddle and explore.
The sun was just coming up in the marina,
and it was a pleasure to float quietly by the houses.
We even found one for rent,
and saw some of the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
Ghostly wrecks extended silently into the water under our boat.
It was turning into a pretty day, filled with contrasts.
The sky was like a painting.
I wanted to visit White Island, part of the Gerritsen Marine Park that was made from landfill in 1917.
On old maps of the area, it is just an unnamed bit of shifting sand,
but now it has a name, a solid shore, a wikipedia entry,
and a fine view of One World Trade Center.
The whole island is part of a New York City Parks Department regeneration project to bring back native birds and plants.
Little sprigs of delicate sea grass were shooting up in even rows.
There was someone else enjoying the fresh shoots though, before any human visitors could see them.
The island was covered with small fuzzy cocoons.
It was great to be out with two artists who liked to look at everything so closely.
For a long time we watched a strange formation of oil and sand float by the coast of the island.
There was something about the way the light clung to the edges of these forms that looked like a computer generated image,
or like something Beverly would paint.
It was time to push off.
We passed by dense, healthy stands of invasive phragmites. I couldn’t help but think that in a few years, the moths will wipe out the native grass on White Island and this stuff will be all thats left.
It is hard not to admire the unloved weed, happy to step in when others fail.
The wind was pushing us along well,
and in no time we were out under the Belt Parkway,
moving into Dead Horse Bay just like all those horse parts in the 1850’s.
The shore of Barren Island lay ahead,
another landfill island and the site of New York City’s very first airport.
The shore of Barren Island is famously awash with bottles from the 1920’s that erode out of the landfill there.
We paddled close to the shore of ‘Bottle Beach’.
The wind pushed us at a perfect pace,
it was like beach combing from the boat,
but Essye wanted to get a closer look.
Our mission was not just to observe the beach.
Just before the Marine Parkway Bridge,
we pulled the boat ashore.
The tide was in, but there was still plenty of stuff to see.
We imediatly began to find the bones of the old rendering plants,
and the bottles that make this beach famous.
We felt like archeologists, digging up the not-so-distant past.
Nothing seemed to paint a picture of the 1920’s better than this perfume pump that Beverly found,
or this medicine bottle with the directions still visible.
It was fun to see interlopers from the present too,
like strange ghosts living in the ruins of a lost civilization.
As we rounded the peninsula, we found somehting amazing.
Hurricane Sandy had taken off another few feet of shore, to revealed huge chunks of the actual landfill.
It formed dense walls of silk stockings, bottles, shoe parts, fabric…
As we picked through the debris with sticks, I fought back a wave of revulsion.
There was something scary about digging into this hundred year old trash,
perhaps it was possible to uncover the evidence of a long ago crime.
We weren’t the only contemporary folks who had been exploring the landfill.
Bottle Beach is a famous site, and people come here often to collect things that our forbearers dumped,
or leave it behind again in pretty arrangements.
We stopped to look at everything we had collected.
“If we were Gabriel Orozco, we’de be done right now.” said Essye.
But we weren’t done. We had a few miles to travel to get back to my truck.
The wind changed direction and it was possible to row back instead of ride my bike.
It was still morning, but we felt like a century had passed since we were on this beach at sunrise.
Thank you Beverly and Essye for a great day of treasure hunting!
↑ Return to Top of Page ↑