‘Terraforming’ a Scrap of Land in Queens

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Harry’s Bar, not the one in Venice but the one in Long Island City, is named for its founder, Harry Hawk. Though he occasionally takes drink orders behind the bar’s bamboo counter, he spends most of his time beetling around the manmade Water Taxi Beach, a dot of land at the lip of the East River. Mr. Hawk is in charge of just about everything, and rare is the moment when the stereo system doesn’t need to be fiddled with, or the hot dogs couldn’t use flipping, or the people sitting at the picnic tables wouldn’t like to be offered juicy chunks of watermelon.


At 43, Mr. Hawk has a silvery goatee and wears eyeglasses in front of brown eyes that playfully dart around. He wears houndstooth shorts and suspenders in 90-degree weather, and he grins after nearly everything he says. He may just be in a very good mood due to the recent success of the bar and grill. His cell phone message now says: “Hi, it’s Harry Hawk. Because of the popularity of Schnack and the Water Taxi Beach, I’ve used up all my minutes, so I’m not able to pick up my cell phone.”


The Water Taxi Beach, which takes up barely a third of an acre, holds the distinction of being not only a brilliant marketing ploy on behalf of the New York Water Taxi company, but also the least pretentious and most laid-back hangout in New York. The bar, a bright yellow cabin surrounded by a bamboo hut, hews to the form of the old-fashioned beach bar, with neon surfboards and colorful triangular flags as decorations. The beach consists of 400 tons of sand from the Jersey Shore, picnic tables, and a volleyball court. Just across the water is the United Nations, with the rest of the Manhattan skyline displayed stunningly.


Admission to the beach is free, and the only rules are no outside food and no swimming. Last year, not many people were taking the Water Taxi out to Queens.


“We weren’t getting the volume we wanted,” a veteran environmentalist who runs the Water Taxi company, Tom Fox, said. “We needed to create an attraction.”


Mr. Fox persuaded his business partner, Douglas Durst, heir to the Durst fortune, to cover the $18,000 it would cost to transport the sand. He worked out an arrangement with Mr. Hawk, who runs a roadside burger joint that Mr. Fox frequents, Schnack, in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, not far from the Water Taxi’s headquarters in Red Hook. In total, the project cost $80,000.


“I’d always asked Tom if he wanted a Schnack on one of the boats,” Mr. Hawk said. “And one day he said, ‘How about on the beach?'”


The plan is working, with the ferries enjoying double the ridership they had last summer. And the beach, which was originally intended to be open for two weeks in the beginning of the summer, is now planned to stay open until October.


Harry Hawk isn’t a professionally trained chef, but he’s always been passionate about food. The New Hampshire native recalls insisting, at 3, that his mother use a soup recipe of his invention. He started to cook seriously when he was in junior high school. After working on Wall Street as a technical writer and Internet consultant for almost 20 years, he found himself unemployed and ready to start over. In 2002 he convinced the managers at the Gowanus Yacht Club, a bar and grill in Carroll Gardens popular for its expansive patio and $1 beers, to let him run a 55-gallon barbecue. The following year, he opened up his own joint, Schnack, which specializes in deliciously greasy 99-cent hamburgers and overly familiar waiters.


Harry’s Bar on the Water Taxi beach is a close cousin, with backyard barbecue fare and an idiosyncratic waitstaff. On a recent afternoon, a sweet girl in a pink terrycloth sweatsuit, rolled up to expose her belly, was manning the bar. She had on her iPod and, as she rocked out to her own private music, called out to customers, “Hi baby!” or “Yeah baby!”


One of her colleagues, a punky blonde who carried her handbag with her as she wobbled back and forth between the bar and the picnic tables she was looking after, said: “It’s interesting walking through the sand.”


The bar’s menu is down-to-earth, with bottled water and turkey hot dogs for a dollar.


“Some people expect more of a restaurant,” Mr. Hawk said. “One gentleman said he didn’t want to come back because there were no tomatoes.”


The first weekend the beach was open, Harry’s did $30 of business. By now, though, it has already sold thousands of pounds of meat.


“It’s fantastic,” a security consultant, Vincent DeRogers, who had swung by the other evening, said. “All you need is to get rid of that.” He gestured to the chicken wire separating the beach from the East River. “I want to walk down and wet my tootsies.”


As the sun started to lower, Mr. Hawk brought out tubs of ice cream to serve to a group of park activists who had come for their summer office party. He reached his arm into a vat of chocolate ice cream and scanned the sliver of beach.


“I have a lot of friends who are into science fiction,” he said. “Have you ever heard of ‘terraforming’? It’s the idea you can create your own world. You can go to Mars, melt the ice caps, change it up there, and make it into Earth. You take a dead world and make it habitable. That’s sort of what we’ve done here.”


He handed a cup of ice cream to a girl and said: “I’m going to be really sad when it gets cold out.”


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use