Alive and Oystercatching in Dead Horse Bay

Before the intarwebs had stretched their infofingers into all corners of the world and long before there was such a word as "blog," an aspiring writer had to struggle to find an outlet. Back in the 1990s my friend Tim Hall worked at an alternative monthly paper called The New York Hangover (memorably fictionalized in his novel Full of It). Tim gave me a chance to publish in the Hangover a column I called "Dead...From New York."

You can't read those columns online anywhere—and maybe that's a good thing, I can't remember!—but here and now, in the early doldrums of what Paul Krugman is projecting to be a Third Depression, it seems like the perfect time to revive (or re-animate?) "Dead...From New York" here at Blogcritics. And what better place to start than Dead Horse Bay?

Dead Horse Bay is a small bowl of water on Brooklyn's underside. An old landfill leaches vintage 1950s bottles onto the bone-studded beach. (In the old days the city's economy ran on horses, and when they died they were dumped here, hence the name.) A springtime tramp through the area revealed one of the many fascinating, mostly-forgotten corners of the greatest city in the world.

Everything's always dying in New York City. Building's not tall enough? Rip it down and build a new one. Local stores and restaurants can't afford to stay open? Bring in a new (shudder) Friday's to Union Square. Legendary clubs closing? Turn 'em into stores that sell designer crap and regurgitate the old scene as a smarmy fetish. Dusty neighborhoods actually picking themselves up and building themselves into something? Eminent-domain 'em, tear 'em down, and give 'em to greedy developers in sweetheart deals (and then watch the developers renege on their promises before they even start digging).  The city's best blogs are all about how things are terrible and getting terribler. You can read it in their very names. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York chronicles the death by a thousand cuts of once unique, character-driven neighborhoods. EVGrieve grieves. Forgotten New York is more history-minded, but often sighs about what's dead and dying—some of the "old New York" sights it celebrates aren't very old at all.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics. As a writer he contributes most often to the Culture section, where he often reviews NYC theater; he also writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent music releases. …

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