Best Kept Secret

It was during a run along the east side waterfront near 20th St. on a bright morning this past summer when I first came upon it: a beach?yes, a beach, in Manhattan?complete with sand, pebbles, driftwood and sun lovers sitting in lounge chairs and lying on towels near the murky water's edge, taking in the view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge.

It's not very big. At low tide, it can maybe accommodate 30 to 40 people comfortably, while at high tide 10 people are lucky to fit on it?though the large rocks and peculiar cement blobs that punctuate it could fit still more people. To listen to some local residents, the spot has become a wildlife refuge, too, attracting all manner of marine and bird life?as well as fishermen and crabbers, some of whom, it is said, actually eat the creatures they catch. The fishermen used to be mostly the usual older Asian and Hispanic men you see fishing the waterfront all over the city. But lately I've spotted young, pierced and tattooed East Village types casting lines in the water there.

The "rocky outcrop," as it is also known, seems to have different uses to different people. "I watched a homeless man take off his clothes, down to a pair of shorts," Randy Blackner, a retired Stuyvesant Town resident and a volunteer who cleans the little beach, told me one day as we gazed across the river to Hunter's Point. The man washed his clothes, put them on a rock to dry, waded into the water, took a bath and then lay out on the sand. After a couple of hours, he put his then-dry clothes on and left. "I don't know if he was any cleaner after coming out of that water," Blackner recalled, "but he seemed happier."

Like every other quirky spot in the city that you think you've discovered for yourself, the tiny beach turns out to have a striking story of its own as well as a battle looming over its fate. It's a product of?what else??industrial waste. In another place, in another time, residents would be calling it a mess and pushing government to clean it up. But this is New York City, where tastes run more toward the adventurous and where newly uncovered waterfront and open space of any kind are like buried treasure. The state wants to remove the accidental beach while the folks who live nearby are trying to save it.

"It's the refuse of concrete trucks," explains Jonathan Cramer, director of special projects at the Community Environmental Center, a Queens-based nonprofit. "There was a concrete plant there [more than 30 years ago]. At the end of the day the concrete trucks would drive in and they had a little pier and would dump the concrete into the water."

Thus, the beach has been there for quite some time, Manhattan's best-kept secret, hidden by a lot of weeds, abandoned cars, garbage and the FDR Dr. "Some intrepid souls made their way there in the past, but there was a lot of debris and the FDR is somewhat daunting," Cramer says.

The beach has only now become more visible?and more popular, to the chagrin of some?because of the creation of the recently opened Stuyvesant Cove Park. A 1.9-acre strip along the waterfront under the FDR between 18th and 23rd Sts., the well-designed new urban park encompasses the beach and includes a gate along the waterfront railing that offers an entrance onto the beach from the esplanade. (Currently, the gate is locked most of the time, as the powers-that-be decide just what to do about the beach, but people simply climb over the relatively low railing.) Community Environmental Center oversees the park, a space that some Stuyvesant Town residents worked for more than 20 years to create and that will eventually include the solar-powered Environmental Learning Center, housed in a building to be constructed at the water's edge near 22nd St.

The cement dumping that created the beach was "probably not" legal, Cramer says, but of course the law hasn't stopped lots of cement objects from being dumped into the waters around New York, including the notorious gangster-era cement shoes with bodies attached to them. The East River, Cramer explains, is not really a river but a tidal strait, "a regulating valve that allows tidal action to slosh back and forth between Long Island Sound and the harbor." That, it is theorized, created a silting action against the many feet of dumped concrete, the result of which is the sandy little beach, buttressed by lots of rocks, remnants of the old pier that the cement trucks used to drive out on, and oddly shaped blobs of the hardened poured concrete jutting out of the water and piled on top of one another.

Now, as happens often, the former site of industrial excess has become one of marine reclamation. "It became a habitat for many marine and land animals, like mourning doves and water birds, various ducks," Joy Garland, executive director of the Stuyvesant Cove Park Association and a longtime Stuyvesant Town resident, explains. A former science teacher at the United Nations International School, Garland taught at an environmental center on the Upper East Side; the Environmental Learning Center at Stuyvesant Cove Park, which will include a section focused on the East River's ecosystem and history, is her brainchild.

"We had a baby Canada goose there and cormorants, and a mallard family there," she goes on, talking about life on the rocky outcrop. "The green algae forms with barnacles on the rocks and that has attracted glass shrimps and crustaceans and periwinkle snails. When the Boy Scouts came and did a cleanup they found baby blue crabs. I've even seen seahorses and jellyfish."

Of course, all of these lovely creatures are swathed in a certain kind of New York charm. "There are many CSOs?combined sewer outflows?on the East River, and one is right on the rocky outcrop," Jonathan Cramer tells me. "When it rains very hard, in great volume, waste that is in holding tanks to be treated at the sewage treatment plants goes into the storm sewers, diverted there so it won't go into the streets. You'll see raw sewage floating in the river after a rain storm and some of it lands on the rocky outcrop." This bit of charm may in fact sustain life on the beach. "Some people will tell you that marine colonies do thrive at the CSOs," Cramer says.

Still, too much charm is obviously not a good thing. Garland notes that "a lot of people from Stuyvesant Town go fishing there?there's very good fishing, huge bluefish and striped bass?but the state advisory is that you should not eat more than one per month."

The state of New York has had a few other things to say as well. According to Cramer, the Dept. of Environmental Conservation wants to remove the beach entirely. "The DEP doesn't call it a beach or a rocky outcrop?they call it a violation," he explains. "Our argument is that the beach provides a 'get to'?it's a way to experience the water. We really need access to the water, not just for recreation, but for understanding of the environment."

The city's Economic Development Corporation, meanwhile, wants a pier at the park?and a site close to the rocky outcrop has been discussed as a possible pier site?with a ferry stop, part of a master plan to link up various points in Manhattan via ferry. Garland says that many local residents want the pier, but most want to preserve the beach as well; community activists have put forth plans to locate the pier at a site in the park away from the beach, and they certainly don't want the DEC to remove the beach.

"No one really knows what they're up to," Cramer says. "They have said they would consider a reconstruction of it that is not a violation, but it's hard to know what they're doing." He notes that there's been little movement at all, since the events of Sept. 11 and funding problems have slowed down many such proposals, by both private and city agencies.

For now at least, the sun worshippers and the baby blue crabs appear to have some time.