{"id":288324,"date":"2026-07-06T18:25:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288324\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T18:25:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:25:49","slug":"life-death-and-sex-on-orchard-beach-in-the-1950s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288324\/","title":{"rendered":"Life, Death, and Sex on Orchard Beach in the 1950s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hell Gate <a href=\"https:\/\/hellgatenyc.com\/life-death-and-sex-on-orchard-beach-in-the-1950s\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">originally published<\/a> this story on September 7, 2022.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve basked on many beaches, near and far. But I was shaped by a crescent of sand on the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound. The beach where I summered as a teenager was mostly landfill. It had been built by the government, like the housing project where my family lived and the city college I would soon attend. This largesse allowed us to pretend that we were middle class.<\/p>\n<p>Air conditioning wasn\u2019t allowed in the projects when I grew up, and I was a fat kid, so heat waves had a dramatic effect on my body. I could sit home in a lagoon of sweat, cool off in a theater that showed a movie I didn\u2019t want to see, or go to the beach. That\u2019s where you would have found me in the 1950s, lazing away the afternoon with whatever literary classic I thought an aspiring writer (with a picture of Hemingway above his bed) should read.<\/p>\n<p>There wasn\u2019t much for a fat boy to do on the beach. I was too self-conscious to show off my body, and the water was less than beckoning. It was a sallow, brownish green, with clumps of seaweed and bits of jellyfish that grazed me when I swam. These impurities struck me as the likely reason why the place had such a bucolic name: Orchard Beach.<\/p>\n<p>          Give us your email to read the full story<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-cta__description mb\">\n          Sign up now for our free newsletters.\n    <\/p>\n<p>      <a href=\"https:\/\/hellgatenyc.com\/newsletter\/\" class=\"passata color-hg__text background-hg__background p-match radius-match border text-2125 text-decoration-none mb\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n        Sign up<br \/>\n      <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hell Gate originally published this story on September 7, 2022. I\u2019ve basked on many beaches, near and far.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-288324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}