Beach Story / Venue History
Tom Fox and the Water Taxi Beach experiment
Tom Fox's public Waterfronts page places the Long Island City beach inside a larger idea: use waterborne transportation, public access, and a temporary waterfront attraction to make the East River feel usable again.
Opening the waterfront.
Tom Fox brought an operating idea to the Long Island City waterfront: give people a reason to cross the river, spend the day by the ferry terminal, and come back again. Water Taxi Beach turned weekend ferry service into a destination.
Fox describes Water Taxi Beach as an experiment beside the ferry terminal, permitted as a temporary passenger amenity and built from sand, a tent, a dance floor, a bar, grills, picnic tables, and volleyball courts.
The LIC idea.
The public account credits Tom Fox and Mark Baker with shaping the empty waterfront lot into a place that worked at different speeds: daytime food, drink, sun, reading, volleyball, and relaxed neighborhood use; evening DJs, live music, skyline views, and dancing.
That mix of transportation, public access, food, music, and open space became the operating idea behind the Beach and the events that followed.
Later expansion context.
Fox's page also follows the concept as it expanded to two additional Water Taxi Beach locations. This story stays with the original Long Island City experiment and the waterfront it opened.