Beachcombers and urban explorers flock to the shores of Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn to explore the amazing stash of vintage trash. The beach is strewn with broken glass and intact bottles, ceramics, and rusty metal from a bygone era, but not all that much in the way of plastic. Or at least they did up until this year. The beach is now closed to the public due to radiation.
The surprisingly pretty trash spews from the site of an old landfill. Casually capped by the 1950s, it is now eroding, unpacking its contents onto the beach. “It’s easy to imagine [the trash] being brought in by the tide, but it’s the opposite,” says Miriam Sicherman, author of Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History. “It’s getting almost burped by the land where the reeds are, and moving toward the water.” Named for the foul-smelling factories on Barren Island that once made glue, fertilizer, and more from horses and other animals (and then discarded their carcasses in the water), Dead Horse Bay is a popular place for urban archaeology enthusiasts with strong stomachs and closed-toed shoes. Part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, it is managed by the National Park Service, which means that visitors have been able to look but not take. But as of August 2020, even gawking is off limits. After detecting chemical contaminants back in 2002 and gamma radiation in 2019, the Park Service recently declared part of the area closed to everyone but authorized personnel.
Read what is causing the radiation and how dangerous it could be at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Flickr user edwardhblake)