Jacob Riis Park

Jacob Riis Park is a 193-acre beachfront park on the western Rockaway Peninsula, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area managed by the National Park Service. Named for Jacob Riis, the Danish-American journalist and social reformer whose photographs exposed the squalor of New York's tenement slums, the park provides free ocean beach access without the commercial development of nearby Rockaway Beach.

Riis revolutionized American journalism with his 1890 book 'How the Other Half Lives,' which used photographs and vivid reporting to document the appalling conditions in Lower East Side tenements. His work helped spark the Progressive Era reform movement that produced housing codes, public parks, and playgrounds across the city.

The park's Art Deco bathhouse, built in 1932 and enlarged later in the decade with federal New Deal labor, is a striking architectural landmark featuring a grand entrance, changing rooms, and twin octagonal towers. The bathhouse complex is a contributing structure in the Jacob Riis Park Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, and serves as the park's central facility.

Jacob Riis Park's beach is a mile-long stretch of Atlantic Ocean shoreline that attracts sunbathers, swimmers, surfers, and beachgoers seeking a less crowded alternative to the Coney Island and Rockaway Beach boardwalks. A section of the beach has historically been popular with the LGBTQ+ community.

The park's naming for Jacob Riis is particularly fitting: Riis championed the creation of public parks and recreation spaces as essential infrastructure for the working poor, arguing that access to fresh air, sunlight, and open space was a matter of social justice. The free public beach that bears his name fulfills that vision over a century later.