I am wondering if anyone reading this post remembers when the west side just above the battery was still just raw land-fill created from digging the foundation for the WTC? Before they built the World Financial Center (this would've been somewhere between 1980 and 1982), this fill stood exposed to the river and empty for a number of years(!!).

At some point a group of people created "Art-on-the-Beach" here in this sandy wonderland next to the river. For a brief while, this locale was home to a dozen or more wondrous works of art - I remember a rambling wooden structure by Alice Aycock that made me think of some old abandoned, post-storm rambling "Beach Cottage" out in the Hamptons somewhere and a wild, fire-engine red stairway to no where, which if you stood at the bottom of it, looked like it would take you right to the top of one of the wtc towers. I remember a long, open carport-like structure with a series of overturned 50-gallon oil drums resting on saw-horses, each with a cone at one end and a trio of fins at the other and up on the roof (over the corrugated, green fiber-glass panels it was made of, if my memory serves me correctly, and - well, hell - it could be waaaaaaaay off - I'm a old, old woman now, not all young and wild like I was back then) was foot-tall lettering that read: "WHY NOT ROCKETS?". It wasn't long before my pallios and I discovered that the drums had grills inside, and we had any number of beach barbeques and all kinds of good times down there!