Glass Bottle Beach (Patreon)

My musician boyfriend took me to Glass Bottle Beach to shoot some b-roll for a new music video. Well, I wasn't really involved in the shooting, I just really wanted to see this place.

This place was the site of bottle factories and a horse rendering plant, then it was a landfill which was capped off in the 50s so it could go back to being a beach. But it wasn't properly capped off and trash from the landfill escapes and washes up on the shore. So much trash, in fact, that it's closed off to the public due to pollution. But, you know, it's vintage trash so it looks cool.

The result is what you see in these photos. A desolate kind of beauty. A feeling of seclusion that doesn't seem possible in New York City. A truly eerie quiet, with no rustle of animals in the underbrush. Even birds seem to avoid the place.

I was careful not to touch anything and don't plan on going back regularly but I'm really glad I got to go this time. Despite my aesthetic fascination with decay and the ways in which nature erodes all things manmade, I'm generally not someone who goes to abandoned places. But that's usually because they're hard to get to without a car and/or I'm scared of going alone. So I'm glad I jumped on this chance. I really like the shots I got from it.