In the summer of 1936, beachgoers drove their Model Ts through Pelham Bay Park to the Bronx’s recently renovated Orchard Beach. After parking in the 8,000-space parking lot, they passed through a ceremonial plaza and up a broad staircase, arriving at a terrace with a panorama of the Long Island Sound. In the 25-foot-high arcaded base, locker rooms led to the mile-long, fifty-foot wide, crescent-shaped promenade. They banqueted in the bathhouse’s dining rooms with snowy tablecloths and polished glassware. The formal atmosphere was enforced through prescriptive control: anyone using a newspaper as a beach blanket was tried at a special court, and selling ice cream from a boat was punished by up to thirty days of community service.
Shoring up these aristocratic airs was the transformation of Pelham Bay Park. Located at the northeast corner of the Bronx, the beach was built by Robert Moses, the “master builder” responsible for over 1.1 million acres of parkland and beaches. Three times the size of Central Park, Pelham Bay Park is 13 miles of shallow bays, rock outcrops, and wetlands. Using 250,000 cubic yards of dredged sand from Jamaica Bay and Sandy Hook, the beach project created approximately 115 acres of dry land for active recreation accessible to thousands of local residents.
Yet in the 1970s, when New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, the city stopped maintaining the beach’s facilities. Some sections of the beach were occupied by illegal vendors; one was dubbed “Las Vegas Alley” due to rampant gambling there. This didn’t deter the crowds, as it was (and remains) the nearest respite from the naked heat of summer for the borough’s mostly working-class Black and Latino residents. Then, beginning in 1980, over $1 million was spent to refurbish the beach to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary. Today, the seaside no longer resembles its high-flown beginnings nor its sometimes turbulent journey—it is a unique destination among New York’s coastal attractions.
A far cry from the prim act of beachgoing in the 1930s, taking a dip in the Bronx now includes echoes of Aventura and Pop Smoke, old men playing the Spanish guitar, couples lazing in the sun, and salsa socials. Orchard Beach is defined by its local, human sensations, organically unfolding in the shadow of the grandiose, empty, barricaded bathhouse.
Marvel Architects, the New York-based firm restoring and reprogramming the monumental 280,000 square-foot bathhouse, faces a challenge. The structure has been barricaded since 2007 due to unsafe conditions caused by an alkali-silica reaction, saltwater degrading the building’s concrete. With $70 million available for the restoration, says Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., “It has the potential to be an even greater tourist attraction thanks to this forthcoming renovation … Orchard Beach will undoubtedly attract visitors from all over the region, if not the world.” These ambitions aside, the design should reflect community input. At a public meeting held last year, votes for Salsa Sundays on the upper level of the new building and infrastructure for the winter months echoed the demand for a year-round leisure center. More than a revival, this may be the first time the borough’s underrepresented population is reflected in its beach’s architecture. Indeed, it may be the first time they’ve been consulted for a civic project of this scale.