Dead Horse Bay: Part One
On Saturday Trent and I made the trek to Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, a place we both just recently found out about but were very excited to check out. Dead Horse Bay is so named for the horse-rendering plants that lined the coastline from the 1850s to the 1930s. Around the turn of the century, the marsh was used for a landfill, and the beach flooded with trash when a cap on the landfill burst in the 1950s.
From everything we read about the beach, it sounded like a treasure-hunter's paradise and it definitely is — there are glass bottles, rusty car parts, chairs, irons, shoe soles, dead animals, horse bones, broken pieces of patterned china and endlessly fascinating bits of most anything else you can imagine. As usual, I took so many photos that I'm breaking them up into a few different posts.
The majority of the treasure is old glass bottles in every shape, size and state of intactness. I was fascinated by all of the different varieties, some I was familiar with — Coke, Pepsi, 7up — and some I had never heard of before. The pieces were sometimes even cooler than the intact bottles and I saved a few of the ones that had graphics or type that caught my eye. We even discovered a full wine bottle that still had its cork — it's probably still there if you want to take your chances. As the waves washed over the glass on the shore the bottles tinkled in a way that sounded like wind chimes. It was peaceful and wonderful in a strange, almost post-apocalyptic way, and I loved every minute of it.