The Weirdest Beach in New York City

The path to New York City’s weirdest beach is actually quite pleasant.

After walking some distance along the quiet trail, the trees gradually disappear, replaced by reeds swaying gently in the breeze.

When you finally arrive at the beach, perhaps passing a couple of bikes leaning against an old wooden bench, you might feel as though you’ve somehow been transported to the shores of Cape Cod.

Then you step onto the beach…

…and notice the bottles…

…and more bottles…

…and still more bottles…

…and more bottles…

…and even more bottles:

There’s a pretty good chance no one will ever send a post card from Dead Horse Bay.

A few weeks ago, while scouting for a post-apocalyptic landscape, I took a trip out to shoot Dead Horse Bay. Honestly, I don’t think you can do much better than the appropriately nicknamed “Bottle Beach.”

Dead Horse Bay’s odd monicker dates to the mid-19th century when the area was was home to dozens of horse-rendering plants, which used the harbor as a dumping ground for horse bones.

Located on the southwest shore of what was then Barren Island, the isolated area was infamous for its lack of water and sewage lines, and for the vile odor perpetually wafting in from the nearby factories, which later included fish oil plants, waste refineries, and a city dump. Below, a horse plant in 1931:

By the 1920s, most of the plants were gone, and the city had begun the process of connecting Barren Island to the mainland using sand, coal and garbage as landfill. Unfortunately, one of the landfill caps burst in the 1950s, and 100+-year-old garbage has been spewing into the harbor ever since.

While one might expect to find the beach riddled with equine bones, the most common items are actually bottles and jars.

This includes your run-of-the-mill soda bottles, some of which you’ll recognize…

…while others are long-forgotten. Below, a beverage called King’s, “The Crown For Fame Of Flavor.”

The label on this one reads “Old-Fashioned Tasty Creamy Root Beer – You’ll Love It!”

Of course, you’ll also find jugs…

…and perfume bottles…

…in fact, pretty much any type of bottle you can imagine…

…all delicately deposited onto the beach without a single chip:

The next most common items are probably shoes and leather soles…

There are tons of these strewn about the beach…

For fun, try and imagine a person still wearing the shoe buried upside-down in the sand! Actually, this might not be so far-fetched on Bottle Beach…

Equally prevalent are the endless tangles of synthetic nylon stockings, found wrapped around anything they can cling to:

Of course, you can stumble across pretty much anything, and artistic beach combers can be found here every day of the week. Someone even reportedly found a handgun from a 1902 Sears catalog. Anyone need a new juicer?

But beyond its surreal assortment of early-1900s trash, Dead Horse Bay is easily the most haunting beach I’ve ever been to – the sort of place that would feel at home in the world of HP Lovecraft.

Did you ever have that one nightmare, where you’re on a eerie, forlorn, and seemingly endless beach, and the sky is overcast, and you’re alone, and something just feels very, very wrong? If so, you will have an unsettling sense of deja vu when you first step onto Bottle Beach.

One of the creepier bits is this tree…

…to which visitors have been stringing bottles for some time:

It’s a neat art project; it also feels like the kind of thing you’d find in the backyard of that serial killer from True Detective:

The remnants of Dead Horse Bay’s piers poke out of the sand like broken bones:

Near the edge of the beach is a layer of something that feels too crumbly to be rock, but too hard to be sand. Appropriately, its covered in a puke-green colored growth:

And then there are the bits of trash that seem as though they’ve come from an alien world (seriously, does anyone know what the hell this thing is? I kept my distance for fear that a facehugger from Alien would pop out).

There are certainly ghosts in Dead Horse Bay…

The rusting, ragged remains of things that once had a purpose to someone, somewhere, at sometime…

The details of which have been lost long ago to the sands of…well, Bottle Beach.

Now that the weather has finally gotten warmer, I’m sure these pictures have made you want to dig out the bathing suit and head for a sunny day at beach! In all seriousness, a walk across Bottle Beach examining trash from a century ago can actually be a really fascinating – and intensely surreal – experience. Just be sure to bring good shoes, as there’s broken glass everywhere.

You can see the trails leading to Dead Horse Bay clearly marked on Google Maps here. A few trains can get you pretty close, but I recommend picking a nice day to bike across Brooklyn, maybe paired with a trip to Coney Island?

Just watch out for old Cthulhu.

-SCOUT