Hazard's Beach

A popular Palisades Interstate Park swimming area in the early 20th Century.

Hazard's took its name from the Hazard Powder Company, which had maintained a dock here for dynamite delivery to nearby quarries.

The actual original main area was the land directly beneath and immediately to the north and south of the George Washington Bridge. Prior to the bridge construction there was a direct access pedestrian ferry running in the summertime from 158th Street in Manhattan. The park's first bathhouse was built here in 1916. The bathhouse provided changing rooms and lockers, as well as an open-air upstairs picnic area with refreshment stand.

During construction of the bridge a temporary bathhouse had been constructed just to the north. After the bridge's opening (in October 1931,) cars and buses could now drive across the Hudson River to bring people to the park causing the pedestrian ferry service to go out of business. But park attendance remained high in the early 30's. This wasn't because of the bridge but because the economy was bad and people enjoyed escaping the city and their misery to spend a day getting away from it all at the beach and the park. When the economy got better, people worked more and went to the park less. Then during WWII, after the summer of '43, in fact, because of war-related pollution in the river, swimming came to end -- the last Palisades Interstate Park beach closed.

Through the More Info link to Flickr you can view 3 old photographs of the beach including one of the large stone bathhouse that once stood on the site.

(The official name for this location is Hazard Beach. I guess that's not really that important but it should be noted. "Hazard's," I reckon, was the popular name outside of the office of the United States Board on Geographic Names where, other than for five locations, they do not allow possessive apostrophes in place names.)