A Summer Resurgence for S.I. Beaches

The ritual is well-established by now, on summer Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings throughout the city: Pack up a car, or lug bags and folding chairs to a train, and speed away from the city as fast as traffic will allow, toward beaches in Hamptons or on the Jersey Shore, leaving silent, deserted city neighborhoods in your wake.

But this summer, with gas prices pushing $5 a gallon, some New Yorkers loath to fuel up are remembering an inescapable geographical fact — that the city is built on an archipelago — and heading to the beaches down the block instead. Anecdotal evidence in Staten Island, where I spent Wednesday afternoon visiting beaches for the Dispatches feature in this weekend’s City section, suggests that enough people are staying around for their neighbors to take notice.

Usually, the island gets quiet in July and August, as soon as school ends and residents head for Staten Islanders’ preferred beach destination, the Jersey Shore, said Vinny DeMarco, who owns an ice-cream truck that was parked at Midland Beach on Wednesday. But Mr. DeMarco, who has driven the truck for 39 years, added, “This year it seems like a lot of people are starting to stay around town, which is good for me.”

There seemed, on my visit, to be a certain skepticism toward the local beaches among many islanders, a feeling nicely summed up by The Staten Island Advance’s Jodi Lee Reifer:

Confession: For years I’ve lugged around a grudge against Staten Island’s “nasty” beaches. I grew up knowing the Jersey Shore had the beauty marks, namely long stretches of pure white sand and ice blue water.

Sure, there were mobs of people fighting for prime blanket real estate there. And painful traffic? Yep, the Garden State had that, too. Parking fees? Fugghetaboutit. Still, sun worshiping, swimming or even dipping my toe in the water at S.I. beaches? That was unthinkable (and potentially toxic) with the pollution.

In the review of local beaches that followed, though, Ms. Reifer concluded that several popular spots on the Island weren’t bad at all.

Still, on Wednesday, 11-year-old Elinette Vasquez, who was hanging around at Midland Beach by Mr. DeMarco’s truck, said she was sticking to the sprinklers, just off the beach by the parking lot, to cool off.

“I went in the beach water, and my body and my sister’s, they got real itchy,” she said.

The borough’s beaches, to be sure, have had their problems — though last summer New Yorkers for Parks, an independent watchdog group, rated Midland Beach as the only “satisfactory” beach in the five boroughs. South Beach, its more heavily trafficked neighbor, was rated as “challenged,” and islanders quoted in The Advance ranged from cautious optimism to disgust in their reviews of local beaches.

They have had their reasons, like two incidents last summer, at Midland and South beaches, in which visitors were poked with hypodermic needles hidden in the sand. The city Department of Parks and Recreation called it a “very unusual occurrence.”

Moreover, in 2004 a City Council report singled out South Beach as the dirtiest in the city — though The New York Times’s Dan Barry found on a subsequent visit that it was, in fact, “fairly clean,” and was told by a longtime parks department employee that the beach had come and long way since the bad old days of the early 1990s.

I can say, based on my trip to South Beach on Wednesday, that it looked fine, even inviting. The sand was clean and people seemed to be enjoying themselves, though not many were going in the water. The culprit, according to one lifeguard: jellyfish — nothing man-made.

South Beach has a lot to offer, too: a boardwalk, a fishing pier and a sit-down restaurant. Then, in past years, there were the Polish-American beauty pageant held there in 2004, and the advertising plane whose pilot executed a flawless emergency landing on the beach in 2006 — though those are not everyday occurrences.

Another local beach I was curious to see was the one in Tottenville, at the southern tip of the island, which is also, in fact, the southern tip of New York City and of New York State. There, just past the historic 17th century Conference House, is a canopied pavilion overlooking a narrow stretch of sand. Online reviews were mixed, from the strongly positive to the strongly negative.

I regret to report that on Wednesday at least, the second review was closer to the mark. Area residents spending the afternoon at the pavilion seemed mildly confused that a reporter was interested in seeing the beach, which was rocky and littered with debris. One woman, asked if people ever swim there, said, “I wouldn’t advise it.” And a man named Bill Kearns, who was looking out at the sailboats nearby in New Jersey, offered some advice of his own: directions away from Tottenville Beach, to Great Kills Park.

By Jake Mooney

New York Times