News about Arts & Culture from the New School perspective
Dating back to the 1850’s, Dead Horse Bay’s obscure history is both a little gruesome, and mysterious . In the era of horse-drawn buggies and streets absent of skyscrapers, this marshland functioned as an industrial land mass in which horse carcasses were manufactured into glue and soap products. By the 1920s, when cars replaced horses as the primary mode of transport, the bay was converted to use as a landfill. Thirty years later, the landfill cap exploded, leaving decades worth of trash scattered about the beach. Today, that trash is still dispersed throughout the shoreline, leaving what Dead Horse Bay enthusiasts consider something of vintage treasure. Anything from soda bottles and mason jars to shoe soles and tires can be found buried within the sand.
This piece, by Elle Brosh, Paley Martin, and Sean Steele, explores this topographic oddity and investigates what treasures lie beneath its surface.
