Most legendary beaches are legendary for something nature did: a reef, a cliff, a break, a color of sand. Jacob Riis Park is legendary for an argument about who public space is for, and the beach has been living out both sides of that argument for almost a century. It is a Robert Moses civic monument built to hand the ocean to the working class, and it is the oldest gay beach in New York, claimed at its eastern edge by people the monument was never designed to welcome. The spike is that both things are true on the same sand, and the second has outlasted the first.

Start with the monument. By the early 20th century, reformer Jacob Riis had spent his career arguing that the tenement poor deserved light, air, and relief from a city that gave them none of it; How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, was the photographic case for it. When the city condemned this Rockaway oceanfront in 1912 and named the park for him in 1915, the gesture was explicit: a grand beach for the people Riis had documented. Robert Moses made the gesture concrete. His Parks Department built the bathhouse that opened on August 6, 1932, and expanded it across 1936 and 1937 with the Central Mall buildings, all under chief architect Aymar Embury II, in the same lean, confident Art Deco Moses used across the New Deal city. The materials were serious — brick, limestone, granite — and so was the scale: a 40,000-square-foot bathhouse with twin octagonal towers, a colonnaded mall, a street clock installed in 1941, and a parking lot curved to hold 15,000 cars so the masses could drive to their day at the sea. This was civic design as a statement that the state should build beauty for ordinary people and trust them with it.

Now the part Moses did not plan. A monument built for the public gets used by the actual public, including the parts of it the planners would rather not picture. The far eastern end of the beach, around Bay 1 and Bay 2, is the most isolated stretch, screened for decades by dunes and by the bulk of the abandoned Neponsit hospital. By the 1940s it had become a documented destination for gay men to sunbathe and cruise, the oldest such site in the city. Women claimed a nearby patch by the 1950s; by the 1960s the crowd had broadened to include Black and Latino LGBT New Yorkers. A 1963 New York Times article named it among the places a gay man could go. The activist bookseller Craig Rodwell recalled that around 1962 police harassed gay men there with citations over the supposed size of their swimsuits — the state that built the beach also policing who got to relax on it. The community held the ground anyway, gave it a name, Screech Beach, and turned it political: in 1971 the post-Stonewall Gay Activists Alliance ran a voter registration drive on this exact sand. Across eighty years it has been called the People's Beach, a claim on Riis's own word for the place.

The two stories collide over the bathhouse and over the dunes. The park went federal on March 4, 1974, absorbed into Gateway National Recreation Area, the National Park Service unit created in 1972. The NPS did not maintain Moses's monument; the bathhouse was used into the 1970s and then abandoned, a 1990s restoration stalled half-finished, and Hurricane Sandy burst through it in October 2012, tearing out doors, windows, and the courtyard wall. So the civic-monument half of the spike spent decades as a shuttered ruin behind chain-link — the grand New Deal gesture, defunded and left to the salt air. Meanwhile the queer half kept the eastern bays alive without any monument at all, because what made the People's Beach was never the architecture. It was the distance from the parking lot, the screen of the dunes and the old hospital, and the agreement among the people who came that this was theirs.

The modern chapter puts both halves under pressure at once. In October 2022 the NPS signed a 60-year lease with a private developer (Bathhouse Lodge LLC, doing business through CBSK Developers and Brooklyn Bazaar) for a roughly $50 million restoration of the 1932 bathhouse — restaurants, a bar, a pool, event spaces, and 28 hotel rooms. Restoring the monument means privatizing a slice of the most explicitly public beach Moses ever built, and the people of the People's Beach can read the bill: a place built for those who could not afford the Hamptons, getting a hotel. At the same time the city demolished the abandoned Neponsit hospital in 2023, removing the wall of brick that had screened the queer beach from view for generations. And the sand itself is leaving: a 2023 replenishment poured roughly 360,000 cubic yards onto the shore, much of which has already washed back out, with erosion forcing periodic closures of Bay 1 and Bay 2 — the exact bays the community depends on.

That is the spike, and it is sharper than a pretty coastline. Jacob Riis Park is the place where a reformer's name, a master builder's monument, and a marginalized community's eighty-year occupation all sit on one eroding beach. Moses built a temple to public leisure and the public took him at his word more completely than he intended; the temple decayed while the people it half-excluded held the eastern bays through harassment, federal indifference, a hurricane, and now a hotel. The reef beaches keep their reef. Riis keeps an argument — about who the ocean belongs to — that it has never finished having.