Long Island beach history, coastal communities, shoreline culture, and the stories behind the parks and shores that define the island.
The hardest-to-reach pocket beaches on Long Island’s North Shore — at Caumsett, Lloyd Neck, and the Nissequogue — are doing ecological work that no one is measuring.
Long Island’s horseshoe crab spawning beaches are a critical but overlooked node in the Atlantic flyway. Here’s why their decline matters far beyond our shoreline.
Suffolk County’s ORV permit systems at Smith Point, Cupsogue, and Shinnecock are accidentally creating some of the most effective shorebird habitat refugia on the Atlantic flyway.
The iconic white towers at Jones Beach were never just about drowning prevention. They were command infrastructure — and the story of who they watched is written into the 1929 plans.
Before Robert Moses built his causeway, a shell-and-sand road ran the length of Fire Island’s bay side. Storms took it. This is what it carried with it.
Before Sunken Meadow became a state park, the Kings Park shore was where New York sent people to recover — and sometimes to die — by the Long Island Sound. This history has been nearly erased.
Each November, loggerhead sea turtles wash ashore alive at Smith Point Beach. The data being collected by the Riverhead Foundation is rewriting scientific assumptions about cold-stunning and overwinter behavior.
Robert Moses didn’t just build a road to the beach — he rewired the sediment circulatory system of an entire barrier island chain. The western end of Jones Beach is still paying for it.
The wrack line at Jones Beach isn’t litter — it’s data. Marine scientists are decoding what tide-deposited debris reveals about Gulf Stream dynamics, coastal food webs, and the Atlantic’s ecological future.