At first glance, the photographs look almost impossible.
People lie in the sun on blankets.
Others wander barefoot across dunes of sand.
A beach umbrella rises from an enormous open shoreline.
And towering over everything in the background are the unmistakable Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
It looks like someone dropped a seaside resort into Lower Manhattan.
But the photographs are real.
For several strange years in the 1970s and early 1980s, New Yorkers really did sunbathe, play volleyball, make art and gather for concerts on a vast sandy expanse immediately beside the World Trade Center.
They called it a beach.
Technically, it wasn’t one.
And that is what makes the story even more remarkable.
The “beach” was actually part of the enormous landfill that would eventually become Battery Park City.
To construct the World Trade Center, engineers had excavated tremendous quantities of earth and rock from Lower Manhattan.
Some of that material was dumped into the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western edge, helping create roughly 92 acres of new land for the planned Battery Park City development. Sand dredged from waterways was also used to complete the reclaimed shoreline.
Then New York City ran into serious trouble.
The city’s financial crisis during the 1970s slowed the ambitious development plans dramatically.
The towers were already standing.
The new land was there.
But much of Battery Park City had not yet been built.
What remained was an enormous open stretch of sand, rubble, weeds and dirt sitting beside some of the most expensive real estate on Earth.
New Yorkers did what New Yorkers often do.
They claimed it.
By the middle of the decade, residents from nearby Tribeca had begun using the empty landfill as an improvised recreational space.
People climbed fences.
They brought blankets.
They set up volleyball nets.
They read newspapers in the sun.
Some simply lay there for hours beneath the massive towers.
The empty construction site became, unofficially, Manhattan’s strangest beach.
One of the most famous photographs was taken by New York Times photographer Fred R. Conrad on May 15, 1977.
It shows a young couple lying casually on a sheet in the sand.
Behind them, the Twin Towers rise almost vertically into the sky.
The scale is surreal.
The couple look tiny.
The buildings look enormous.
And because we now know what happened to those towers on September 11, 2001, the image has acquired an emotional weight Conrad’s subjects could never have anticipated.
Suellen Epstein was among the neighborhood residents who regularly used the site.
She later remembered spending sunny Sundays there because trips to places such as the Hamptons were beyond her budget.
It was not exactly Caribbean-quality sand.
It was coarse and gritty.
No ocean waves washed across it.
But that hardly mattered.
People played volleyball, relaxed, read and escaped the city without actually leaving it.
“You felt like you were not in the city,” Epstein later recalled.
It was, she said, almost like being in the “Manhattan countryside.”
The strange landscape soon became much more than a sunbathing spot.
Artists discovered it.
Beginning in 1978, the public-art organization Creative Time staged its Art on the Beach program on the Battery Park City landfill.
The location could hardly have been more dramatic.
There was the Hudson River on one side.
The Manhattan skyline on another.
And the Twin Towers looming overhead.
Creative Time described the sandy dunes as creating the sensation of being far outside the city even though visitors remained in the heart of Lower Manhattan.
Sculptors constructed enormous temporary works.
Dance companies performed outdoors.
Musicians played.
Artists treated the undeveloped landscape like a giant experimental studio.
By 1980, ten acres of the landfill were being used for sculptures, music, dance and conceptual art.
Among the artists was young sculptor Nancy Rubins, whose work used discarded everyday objects.
The program continued through 1985, by which point dozens of installations and performances had appeared on land that developers were steadily preparing to reclaim.
Then came one of the most extraordinary political gatherings in New York history.
On September 23, 1979, the sandy landfill became the site of a massive anti-nuclear rally organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy.
The movement had formed following the Three Mile Island nuclear accident earlier that year.
Nearly 200,000 people reportedly gathered at the Battery Park City landfill for the rally.
Musicians and activists including Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash and Pete Seeger participated, while Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader were among the speakers associated with the wider event.
The photographs from that day look completely different from the quiet sunbathing shots.
Instead of two people lying alone in the sand, the landfill appears covered by an ocean of humanity.
The accidental “beach” had transformed into a political stage.
Its most visually astonishing transformation was still to come.
In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted two acres of wheat on the Battery Park landfill.
The project was called Wheatfield — A Confrontation.
Denes and her helpers brought in hundreds of truckloads of soil, dug 285 furrows and planted the field by hand.
For four months they weeded, fertilized and irrigated it.
When the crop was harvested that August, it produced more than 1,000 pounds of golden wheat.
The photographs became iconic.
A golden wheat field stretches across Lower Manhattan.
The Statue of Liberty sits across the harbor.
And skyscrapers rise immediately behind the crop.
Denes deliberately created the contradiction.
The land was valued at billions of dollars.
Yet there it was being used to grow food.
For her, the project represented questions about commerce, hunger, energy, land values, environmental priorities and the way societies decide what land is worth.
For a brief moment, one of the most financially powerful pieces of urban land in America looked like rural farmland.
It could never last.
Development accelerated during the 1980s.
The first residential construction began around 1980, and thousands of people soon moved into the emerging Battery Park City neighborhood.
Apartment towers, offices, streets, parks and the World Financial Center gradually replaced the open landfill.
By 2000, almost all of the land visible in those old sandy photographs had been developed.
Today, walking through Battery Park City, it can be difficult to believe the photographs were taken there.
The neighborhood has landscaped parks.
Luxury apartment buildings.
Office towers.
Restaurants.
Promenades along the Hudson.
There is no giant improvised beach beneath the skyline.
And, of course, there are no Twin Towers.
That is what makes the photographs so haunting.
The people in them are not posing beside a memorial.
They are not thinking about history.
They are simply having an ordinary Sunday.
They are sunbathing.
Reading.
Laughing.
Playing volleyball.
Going to concerts.
Making art.
None of them could know that the casual backdrop to their afternoon would eventually become one of the most emotionally charged images in modern American history.
Fred Conrad’s 1977 photograph now contains several lost versions of New York at once.
The beach disappeared.
The empty landfill disappeared.
The Twin Towers disappeared.
Even the gritty, financially struggling Manhattan that allowed such a strange temporary landscape to exist has largely disappeared.
Yet for a few years, at the foot of the World Trade Center, there really was a place where Manhattanites could spread out a blanket in the sand and pretend they had escaped the city.
They had not gone anywhere.
The city simply had not reached them yet.
