It’s officially blog canon now, how much I love the coastline of New York City. And with so many islands to choooooose from, there’s plenty of opportunities to smell the salty air and feel the water’s wind whipping your hair back and forth. But let’s say you want a more immersive experience. Let’s say you really want to get your feet wet. Let’s say you want to risk infectious diseases of unknown severity and get in the water.
East River State Park, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If you’ve been to Smorgasburg lately, you’ve been on the blacktop right next to it. And if you wandered over to the shoreline, to sit in the sand and eat your Ramen burger, then you might have felt the pull of temptation towards those refreshing waters.
See, when it’s HOT-HOT-HOT out, and you’re slammed into the outdoor food festival of Smorgasburg, waiting in line far too long for oysters or poké, this beach is jammed. But I was fortunate enough to visit on a relatively cool Tuesday afternoon, and to my surprise, I still yearned to cool my heels in the gently lapping waves of the beach. Beach – HAH! It’s so full of rocks (and, tbh, broken glass), I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.
Anyone… except the truly die-hard obsessed New Yorkers. If you love this city so much that you would risk grievous injury to your feet or infectious…whatever’s in the water…just to say you bathed in the shores of Brooklyn. Well, not so much bathed, as —
— dipped your toes into gentle waves, buried your feet in the gritty shores, and then walked around the rest of the day with tiny remnants of gravel in your shoes! It’s worth a little suffering to have a truly legendary experience. Isn’t that what NYC is all about? As a New Yorker/a Brooklynite/a Williamsburger — I feel inclined to say yes. And this is where I must put my foot down.
Leave a Reply