History

Jacob Riis Park takes its name from Jacob Riis, the Danish-born New York journalist whose 1890 work How the Other Half Lives exposed the tenement conditions of the Lower East Side and helped reshape American attitudes toward urban poverty. When Robert Moses redeveloped the area in the 1930s as part of his transformation of the New York waterfront, naming the public beach after Riis carried a deliberate populist message: this was a beach for the poor, not the privileged.

The bathhouse, completed in 1937 with New Deal funding, was designed to handle the enormous daily crowds that ferries and buses delivered from Brooklyn and Queens during summer weekends. It offered changing facilities, showers, and a covered arcade where visitors could shelter from the sun. The scale of the project—one of the largest public bathing facilities in the United States at the time—reflected Moses’s conviction that great public works required architectural ambitions, even in a utilitarian structure.

In 1972, Jacob Riis Park became part of the newly established Gateway National Recreation Area, one of the first urban national parks in the country. The bathhouse passed from New York City to the National Park Service, which has maintained and partially restored it over the decades. Its Art Deco brick facade retains much of its original character, weathered but intact above the waterline.