The persistent shortage of lifeguards at city beaches and pools continues to pose danger to the New Yorkers of modest means desperate for ways to stay cool amidst grueling heat waves. The most obvious problem, of course, is one of public safety, as evidenced by tragic drownings such as those of two teenage sisters off Coney Island, where my own grandchildren swim. The city is estimated to be 200 lifeguards short of the 1,000 it needs to protect those going to the beaches of our archipelago. The prospect of shorter hours looms.
But the problem of reliable access to a beach or pool involves more than public safety. It touches on income and social class and core responsibilities of government to ensure that not only the affluent have access to the amenities that make for a high quality of life. This should mean not only safe, guarded beaches and pools but the amenities to go with them like those the affluent expect.
This is something that Robert Moses, now vilified for his role in building highways and in misguided urban renewal, understood well. In “The Power Broker,” his classic biography of Moses, Robert Caro, hardly sympathetic to the long-time city parks commissioner, details his ambitious commitment to parks and beaches. He tells of the building of Orchard Beach in the Bronx, where Moses himself swam regularly.
Orchard Beach was, per Caro, “New York’s most ambitious park project” requiring substantial spending on “bathhouses designed of granite paving stone and costing $84,000 each” in 1934, and a breakwater and retaining wall designed to turn a sandbar into a bathing beach.
Just as ambitious was Jones Beach, where Moses was known to swim a mile out (beyond the reach of lifeguards, one assumes). Behind beaches, says Caro, Moses kept a written “inventory” of all New York City’s parks and the condition of the “buildings, paths, roadways, statues and equipment in them, the condition of those items and the type and amount of labor and materials that would be required to renovate them.”
In other words, water and sand would not have been enough for Moses. As demonstrated by Orchard Beach, the city’s working class was to have access to clean bathrooms, safe places to don swimsuits, and cafes to buy hot dogs.
After a long decline, the Orchard Beach Pavilion will be renovated but swimmers at other beaches must crowd into grimy bathrooms to change. Providing good and clean facilities should be a core element of city services.
The risk here goes beyond safety to what, with some hyperbole, be called beach apartheid: one level of service for those with the means to join the private beach clubs that line metro Gotham’s coastline and those who rely on what economists call “public goods” — amenities provided by well-functioning governments. Along the coast of the Long Island Sound in Westchester County, initiation fees at private beach clubs can top $100,000; they can afford to pay the required wages for lifeguards during the current labor shortage.
Even some public beaches are actually quasi-public, requiring costly annual or daily admission fees and limiting access to municipal residents.
Such is life in these United States, I suppose. The lives we live will inevitably differ because of money, discrimination, self-selection, or a combination of the three. Status and social class matter a great deal to people — who prefer to cluster with those of similar socio-economic backgrounds, both in their residential choices and leisure ones. They are willing to pay for such preferences. These are facts of life that policy will not repeal.
What troubles me is less the fact that exclusive beaches exist but, rather, the condition of the supposedly public ones.
We are always going to have rich and poor neighborhoods. But government has a core responsibility to provide the public goods — policing, parks, recreation, education — that should ensure that any neighborhood, no matter how poor, can be a good neighborhood. That means good public facilities, affordable for all.
Growing up in suburban Cleveland, we would all head to Headlands State Park, on the Lake Erie shore in Mentor, the longest beach on that Great Lake. It’s lovely, well-maintained and draws a crowd of the kind we now call diverse. The entrance fee: zero. That’s government at its best.
Of course, I should be careful about exaggerating the problem, I actually went to the beach once in apartheid-era South Africa, near Port Elizabeth. There, when I ordered an ice cream, a Black attendant scooped from the freezer into the cone — but she then handed it to a white employee to hand to me. That was real apartheid.
Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
