Dead Horse Bay: Shoes + Bones

Like my first-ever visit to Dead Horse Bay, I returned home from my most recent trip with a backpack full of horse bones. Because I collect bones, I now consider this the mark of a very successful day. I mentioned in my first post that we found a lot of pieces that we considered keeping, but in the end we came back with only a few things. It's just as rewarding for me to take photographs of the treasures without needing to keep every cool thing we find, which my small apartment definitely appreciates.

My favorite part about Dead Horse Bay is the variety of things that you find. Everything is constantly getting churned up and spit out in different places, so it's a new experience every time you visit. In addition to the bottles, we saw tubes of paint, an iron, a record, bits of printed china, tires, a ceramic cow foot, a plastic duck toy, a bathroom scale, a tube of toothpaste, rusty keys (inside of a wallet), a cash register, roll of film, can opener, toilet seat and of course, a kitchen (or bathroom) sink.

At a place like DHB you start to notice similar types of items when you start seeing them over and over, and this time it was forks. I guess I didn't really see that many of them, in comparison to bottles, bones or shoes, but for some reason they really stuck out to me.

The second most prevalent type of trash at DHB (after bottles, before bones) is shoes. I haven't been able to find a good explanation as to why there are so many—maybe shoes take a particularly long time to decompose? There's something so sad about the shoes—the "old soles"—strewn about without their mates. They make me obsessively wonder who once wore them and what stories they would tell if they could.

The only things that came home with me (in addition to the bones and one jar) was the plastic duck toy and a few broken bottle bits. We talked about the duck ("Look at his jaunty little hat") while we ate our picnic lunch and I couldn't bear to throw him back. Now he sits in my pencil cup at work, where I can look at him daily and daydream about my next trip to Dead Horse Bay.

Dead Horse Bay: Bottles + Boats

Last weekend my dude and I biked 24 miles—my first time on a bike in a looooong time, and my first-ever experience with city biking. We had planned to go to Fort Tilden, but when he mentioned that we could stop at Dead Horse Bay on the way I immediately agreed.

Trent and I had gone to DHB last year for the first time (read about that visit here and here) and I haven't stopped thinking about how amazing it was and wondering when I would get to go back. This time we spent nearly four hours combing through trash, treasure and everything in between, during which I said "this place is SO cool" so many times that I lost count.

With places like DHB—places so amazing that I wonder how they even exist at all—I'm constantly terrified that they'll disappear, and wary of them becoming too "popular." A major appeal of DHB is its abandoned, other-worldly feel, which is always a precarious thing to maintain—especially in a city as crowded and visible as New York. Luckily, DHB hasn't seemed to change much in the year since I first went, although we did see a lot more people this time.

Dead Horse Bay is alternatively referred to as "Bottle Beach," and it should be immediately obvious why. It's so fun sifting through the bottles to find remnants of sodas I've never heard of, pieces of beautiful typography and colorful graphics. Not wishing to go full-on Collyer Brothers, we did end up sifting through what we had picked up and made some Sophie's Choices before we left—unfortunately none of the bottles made the cut, but I did keep the jar from The F.W. Fitch Co.

One difference that I did take note of was the amount of beached boats we saw—there were at least four new ones from the last time I was at DHB. It's kind of a mystery to me how or why the boats get abandoned, but they are fascinating to look at and really add to the abandoned, post-apocalyptic beach feel.

Dead Horse Bay is definitely in my top five favorite New York places and I still can't believe that it is so accessible and consistently awesome. Knowing how easily (and quickly) I can bike there just makes me want to go more frequently—I'm sure I could go to DHB once a day for the rest of my life and still find something new every time.

Dead Horse Bay: Part Two

I finally had some time this weekend to clean and sort through the treasures that I brought home from Dead Horse Bay, one of my very favorite New York adventures to date. I tried not to go crazy grabbing bottles and trinkets to take back with me, both because I didn't want to carry a ton with me all day, and because living in a teeny tiny city apartment has made me super picky about any new non-essential acquisitions.

When I read about the abundance of horse bone pieces leftover from the bay's history playing host to horse-rendering plants, I half-joked that I wouldn't be happy if my backpack wasn't overflowing with skeletal remains by the end of the trip. I say half-joked because that's basically what ended up happening, minus the "overflowing" part.

When we arrived at the beach and started poking around, I was initially worried that I wouldn't be able to find any horse bones at all, but once I found the first one they became much easier to spot. I was actually so excited when I plucked that first bone out of the water that I yelled to Trent, who had gotten ahead of me, and did a crazy dance as I waved the bone over my head — which I assume is a totally normal reaction to have when finding 19th-century equine remains. I set the bone on a rock with the intention of coming back for it before we left, but I failed to account for the rising tides, which eventually swept the bone back into the ocean before I could grab it. Luckily we found more and more bones the further down the beach we got — so many, in fact, that I was able to sort out the better ones to keep, and leave the rest behind.

While Dead Horse Bay is most known for its bottles and bones, there were plenty of other interesting tidbits to keep us fascinated — irons, tires, basketballs, floor tiles, chairs and heaps of unidentifiable rusty parts, including what looked like it may have been a safe at some point. I lost count of how many different items I spotted and Trent and I had fun trying to identify some of the more puzzling pieces. Spark plugs, enamelware pots, railroad spikes, old metal signs, lawn chairs, bottle caps — there's probably no end to the different types of things you'd be able to find, depending on the day.

Horses weren't the only animals to meet their end at DHB either — we found plenty of carcasses in varying states of decay, including totally creepy/prehistoric horseshoe crabs, a seagull and a few very pungent fish. Horseshoe crabs don't just look prehistoric, they actually are prehistoric — they originated 450 million years ago and are thus considered to be 'living fossils.' None of the ones we saw were currently living (unless the one above was just sleeping off a Doritos binge), which was probably a good thing because look at that thing.

Even though the trash on the beach comes from an actual landfill, I was annoyed that people seem to think this gives them a free pass to leave their current-day trash behind. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective, but I feel bad for the people of the future if all they get to scavenge for is our left behind Doritos bags and plastic Gatorade bottles, while we get intricate glass soda bottles and beautifully patterned bits of china. Aside from the bones, my favorite beach discovery of the day was definitely the baby doll leg that I photographed, but didn't disturb, in hopes that it will continue to creep out visitors to Dead Horse Bay for many more years to come.

Dead Horse Bay: Part One

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.

Dead Horse Bay: Part Two