Manhattan Beach Park

I've been to Coney Island and Brighton Beach plenty of times over the decades – in the case of Coney, since I was a wee kid. Still I had never sojourned further east on that same peninsula to Brooklyn's Manhattan Beach Park. This lapse was finally remedied on Labor Day Sunday, thanks to Mrs. Odyssey who knew the lay of the land (and sea).

Far fewer folks hit Manhattan Beach than crowd its better-known neighbors, in part because this beach is a bit of a hike from the nearest subway station (Sheepshead Bay). But that's where the adventure begins, with a walk down lively Sheepshead Bay Road, ending up at Emmons Ave. which runs along the northern edge of Sheepshead Bay (the bay itself).

The bay is really more of a channel cut into the bottom of Brooklyn, frequented by water birds (including swans) and home to leisure craft and chartered fishing boats.

A long, clattering wooden footbridge clad in fading blue paint takes you across the bay to Manhattan Beach, the neighborhood.

The Hidden Waters Blog reports that the bridge has the rather funny-sounding distinction of being the "longest pedestrian-only bridge across a waterway that is inside a borough."

The same post has a drawing of a much more substantial bridge, never built. Probably the residents of the tony Manhattan Beach neighborhood wouldn't have welcomed Coney Island-sized crowds scrambling down its streets on the way to its beach. Manhattan Beach, I am told by a reliable source, is one of New York City's five most expensive neighborhoods.

The strand was sparsely populated although it was a warm late morning on Labor Day Weekend.

Few concessions had yet been conceded.

But slowly more people arrived.

By the time we left two hours later the lunchtime crowd at the picnic area had started to take on a festival atmosphere.

Walking through the park's eastern side back out towards the street, we encountered a tree that really, really wanted to be playing handball, a field of rocks that was a pure mystery, and a little boy hoping against hope to be hit by a tennis ball.

There's actually another, tiny beach even further out near the end of the peninsula called Kingsborough Beach, but it's restricted to the good people of Kingsborough Community College.

The sun got hotter and hotter as we headed back to town along Shore Boulevard Mall – also a Parks Department responsibility.

Signs on a building visible from the elevated subway station broadcast the multiethnic nature of Sheepshead Bay. A Russian tailor, a Turkish Hair Salon, and a law firm with Italian roots doing business in English and Spanish.

Finally: To partake of that festival atmosphere I mentioned from the comfort of your domicile, please enjoy John Philip Sousa's "Manhattan Beach March."

Pier 57 Rooftop Park

Exhausted from a jostle through the tourist-thronged Little Island? You'd never know it, but right next door is a quiet new oasis with great views and far fewer people.

As of this writing, to reach Pier 57 Rooftop Park you have to follow crude signs a long way around to the side of huge Pier 57.

Privately financed by arrangement with Hudson River Park, the pier's redevelopment is to result in "a mixed-use development with retail, office and public open space, among other uses."

Google's new offices are already here. City Winery has settled in. And perched atop it all is a weird new two-acre park.

Not too much green space up here. But folks are colonizing what there is.

Not a lot of shade either.

A few springs of color liven the place up.

But it's mostly a place from which to look at the river, the lower Manhattan skyline...

and Little Island.

You could definitely get in your stair-climbing exercise here. (There are elevators to the main level, though.)

Pier 57 is a huge blocky building with, to my amateur eye, no redeeming architectural value. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, however. In the 1950s it was the terminal for the Grace Line's ocean liners and cruise ships. Later the Transit Authority used it, but it was closed up in 2003. It's nice to see places like this come to life again.

Manuel Plaza

I was walking to the Kraine Theater recently to see and review the excellent 2022 edition of The Fire This Time Festival. Along a stretch of East 4th Street that I've probably walked down a hundred times in my years of covering NYC theater, I stopped short. There on the north side of the street was something that hadn't been there before: a flat tract with a sparkling new Parks Department sign telling me that this was Manuel Plaza.

But is this a park? Evidently it's now a Department of Parks and Recreation property. Wisely they've designated it a "plaza" and not a park.

It does have a few park-like features, though, including landscaped greenery around the fringes and a central turf oval topped by what I at first took to be a lifelike sculpture of a dog.

It was a real dog. But what are those big flat stones? In fact, as of now, pretty much everything about this plaza is a mystery to me.

Which "Manuel" is it named for? [Update: I found the answer in researching Manuel Plaza's sister location, Rapkin-Gayle Plaza. Find it in my post on that location here.] At whose urging was this recently empty lot converted to a public space? (See the "before" photo below, courtesy of Google Street View.) Is the graffiti on the surrounding walls to be cleaned off, or preserved as cultural artifacts?

A web search for "Manuel Plaza" yields no useful information at present. Not about this place, anyway. I did learn a little about Manuel Plaza, the person – a Chilean Olympic long-distance runner from the 1920s. Manuel Jesús Plaza Reyes served as his country's flag bearer at both the 1924 and the 1928 Olympics, where he competed in the marathon and won the silver medal on his second try. Not too shabby. (There's also a newsworthy Manuel Plaza in the Philippines; he's legal counsel to new president Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. So there's also that.)

I'm sure more information about Manuel Plaza will be available at some point. Meanwhile, you heard it here (almost) first.

Gowanus Waterfront Park and Gowanus Canal Sponge Park

The waters of the Gowanus Canal may never be pristine. But the neighborhood around it has sure shined up. Case in point: along the canal's west bank, abutting sparkling new condo buildings, now lies Gowanus Waterfront Park.

This two-block stretch of walkways, plantings and benches has already suffered some weathering in its few years of existence. But it's quiet and peaceful, with waterfront views that are actually quite nice, and even a few young oak trees blazing bright green on a sunny day in June.

New residential development has erased most signs of the immediate area's industrial past, though graffiti in sight reminds us of the rough edge that remains. (Though also not to hate.)

Still, the retractile (or retractible) Carroll Street Bridge at the park's northern end, though currently closed for testing and repairs, vividly reminds us of Brooklyn's history. The bridge opened in 1889. An official city landmark, it is, according to Untapped Cities, the oldest of the three remaining retractable bridges in the United States. Seeing it in operation is a real thrill for an infrastructure-history buff. I really hope it returns to working order eventually.

And speaking of infrastructure, at the south end of Gowanus Waterfront Park is another little "park" called the Gowanus Sponge. It is, according to the American Society of Landscape Architects, "a multifunctional public open space system that slows, absorbs and filters surface water runoff to remediate contaminated water, activate the private canal waterfront, and revitalize the neighborhood."

The idea, I gather, is to sponge up dirty water from the streets and buildings so it doesn't flow into the canal and further muck it up. (I'm not sure what is meant by "private canal waterfront" as this is a public park, but let that go.) Anyway, here's what the "sponge" looks like:

One block south of the park, you can walk or drive across the canal via the (intact) Third Avenue Bridge to a new Whole Foods Market, complete with a covered parking lot with wind-powered lighting. Here is old Brooklyn, this place seems transplanted from an alternate universe.

From a real estate point of view – and New York City is all about real estate, after all – Gowanus Waterfront Park is "the dynamic waterfront park at 365 Bond...the living center of the new canal ecosystem and the Gowanus community."

Take that for what it's worth, but do visit Gowanus Waterfront Park and its spongy appendage. The water is still murky and green, but the evolution continues.