What The Hell is the New York City Beach Guide?
A behind-the-scenes look at the writing and creation of a book: The New York City Beach Guide. Currently being written, by Gordon MacRae.
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.” — Mark Twain
My name is Gordon Macrae and I’m writing a guide to the beaches of New York City and around. The book is a work-in-progress, so check out our blog for updates and sign up for our newsletter for more details about the book. I’m aiming to publish the book at the end of 2017.
Our Story
Our aim in writing a guidebook to New York City’s beaches is to do more than write another travel guide that tells you where the best ice cream is and the beaches with the most convenient public toilets. Because, let’s face it, you can look that up on TripAdvisor. We want to tell the stories of the people who live, love and work at the beach.
My name is Gordon MacRae and, together with Caitlin Seymour, we are writing a beach guide to New York City. We relocated from London to New York in October 2014 and spent every weekend of our first summer visiting the various beaches of New York. We couldn’t find a guidebook, so we decided to write one.
Neither of us have been featured in a surfing video. We don’t run a locavore restaurant that only serves seaweed and we’ll likely never be lifeguards. But we love the beach, and we want to share that through this newsletter and our book.
Our aim is to chronicle every part of the writing process. From finding our audience, to designing the website. Finding a photographer, to interviewing people. The focus of our writing, in addition to our own tips and experiences of going to the beaches, will be able the people who live and work here. The people who run surf schools, swim in the winter and own businesses. Because they’re as much a part of New York’s beaches as the sun, sea and sand.
The Background
Maybe it’s because I’m an islander living in an overcrowded city where outside space is in short supply, but I love seeing the beach and, in the distance, Manhattan, from the plane as it descends into JFK airport. This is a purely selfish pleasure, but after seeing the Rockaway Peninsula for the seventh or eighth time I made it a goal to learn how to surf when I moved to New York City.
Before I left, an old friend told me in passing “You know you can surf there, right?” I remember the clear sky the first morning I took the subway out over Broad Channel. The endless blue of Jamaica Bay (still the only national park in the United States that you can reach by subway), the tumbledown houses around Broad Channel station, the Truman Show housing developments once you got down to the shoreline at Beach 67 street.
Getting Started
These discoveries were mundane. Of course there are beaches in New York. It’s a coastal city. Still, it seemed incongruous that you could arrive into Penn Station in the morning and be standing next to the Atlantic Ocean, with (fairly) soft sand and surfable waves (sometimes) in the afternoon. And that both these places were in the same city.
In 2015 I lived for a while with the sole purpose of surfing those waves. It was a brief period, almost immediately after I moved here and, knowing nobody, was forced to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that came by.
Learning to Surf
With each passing weekend I discovered more, that these beaches were huge (over 14 miles of coastline in NYC alone), with all manner of things to see and do. I was hooked. Last summer, as we spent every weekend taking the A train to the coast, the plan to write a book began to take shape.
Exploring New York City’s beaches began to seem less like a jokey side project and more like something substantial. Perhaps even an anthropological experiment. Because while New York isn’t your typical ‘beach city’ like San Diego or Rio de Janeiro, there is still something remarkable about taking the subway to the end of the line and finding the ocean.
Writing the Beach Guide
New York may be the most densely populated city in America, but it’s also surrounded by water. Despite what you might think, there’s a beach to suit everyone from the heavy surf of the Rockaways, to the desolate spots on Staten Island.
And the best part? For most places, the only things you’ll need are a towel and a metro card. We’re writing a book to guide you through the beaches of New York City and share tips, stories and local history.
We spent our first summer visiting the various beaches of New York every weekend, wishing someone had written a guide. After we realised nobody was going to do it for us, we decided we were the people to make it happen.
This site is the (ongoing) story of how we are writing that book.
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Beaches visited: 15
Needles stepped on: 0
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