Dead Horse Bay

Posted on October 28, 2011 by missalix

The 26th of October was my birthday, and I wanted to get out of the house and do something fun since I had the day off. A few friends had been to Dead Horse Bay the weekend before and I kept that in mind to be my next adventure. I was getting ready to go there by myself, but luckily Colin got out of work super early that day and we made it down to DHB during low tide, hooray!

Before we start, here’s a little background on Dead Horse Bay:

The bay was given its name sometime in the 1850s, when horse-rendering plants still surrounded the beach. From the 1850′s until the 1930′s, the carcasses of dead horses and other animals from New York City streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer and other products at the site. The chopped-up, boiled bones were later dumped into the water.

Around the turn of the century, the marsh of Dead Horse Bay began to be used as a landfill. Filled with trash by the 1930s, the trash heap was capped, only to have the cap burst in the 1950s and the trash spew forth onto the beach. Since then garbage has been leaking continually onto the beach and into the ocean from Dead Horse Bay.

Thousands upon thousands of bottles, broken and intact, many over 100 years old litter the shore. Though other hardy bits of trash pepper this beach of glass: leather shoe soles, rusty telephones, and scores of unidentifiable pieces of metal and plastic.

Makes you wanna go swimming, right? It’s not quite a traditional place to celebrate a birthday, but I thought it was pretty neat, and it was nice walking along the beach on a clear fall day, even if it was completely polluted. It was really interesting to look at all of the old glass, there were plenty of in-tact bottles that weren’t broken in various shapes, sizes and colors. We found old Coke and 7-Up bottles, and even glass Clorox bottles (actually there were a ton of these. I looked it up and plastic bottles had completely replaced glass in 1962, and the bottles with the name Clorox on the top of them started in the 30′s, which goes along with the history above).

There were so many pretty glasses in all shapes and sizes. I ended up having a plastic bag in my backpack that I used to collect small glasses that caught my eye. I wasn’t expecting to take anything home, but the old glass bottles and jars just look so neat, and I’m sure I can come up with something to put them in.

For starters, this will be a catalyst to get some nice fake flowers to display around the apartment. I also have grand plans to display some photos in them, as shown here (I love the vintage photo idea, I may need to make some copies of my parents’ old photos, or just turn some of my shots b&w).

Or maybe even paint the outside of them a la this post, though that might defeat the purpose since the glasses look so nice by themselves, but maybe I’ll paint those that didn’t clean up so well but have a unique shape.

I like the way the glass shards glitter in the background of this photo ^

The water in the bay is still really polluted, I think if anyone actually drank from one of these bottles they’d probably get really sick. I’ve rinsed all of the sand out and off of the bottles, so now I need to really clean these bottles with bleach, and maybe denture solution (apparently it’s good for cleaning old glass).

Birthday me in my new scarf, probably still happy from the brunch and bloody marys I had!

Once I get the bottles cleaned up and put either flowers or photos in them, I shall post again with the results! Below are more photos I took that day!