Sous les paves, la plage

It's clear having read and heard about the dirty, dangerous yet fertile environment in which New York punk and no wave emerged that Manhattan was a very different place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But I would never have believed that for a time Battery Park City, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, was a beach - a sandy playground for artists and hipsters. The images accompanying this New York Times article are absolutely fascinating and superbly surreal.