Lonely on the Sand Bar

Yes, Gansevoort Peninsula features a sandy beach—about the only thing journalists seemed to have noticed—but the new appendage to Hudson River Park is far from gimmicky. There’s also a dog run, outdoor exercise area, wetland restoration project, and a comfort station, all circling around a regulation-size soccer field. Things, in other words, that people use. On a pair of consecutive weekday visits in late September, I noticed amateur fishermen casting off from the western seawall, yuppies setting up outdoor offices beneath the honey locusts in the Picnic Grove, tourists gawking at David Hammons’s anemic Day’s End sculpture, and middle-aged Speedo-clad men sunbathing on a gently tilting lawn. One afternoon, the calm was interrupted by the driving piano of Deee-Lite’s “Power of Love”; the deejay Lonely on the Dance Floor had set up his deck atop the stepped get-down at the park’s southern edge. These are the ridiculous and mundane activities that should animate public space, but it’s hard to imagine any of them happening over at nearby Little Island, which constrains …