Celebrating Pride by swimming in the salty Hudson within sight of the Statue of Liberty may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Indeed, if it had coincided with England getting to the final of the Euro soccer tournament, I might have had to ditch it as I, regretfully, did the Voices of Peace concert a week or two later. But it didn’t, and for the 60 of us that did so in late June, it was an absolute blast. Even those swimmers doing the front crawl — who didn’t seem to know where they were or where they were going most of the time — seemed to love it.
I used to be a marathon runner and soccer player but am easing into tri-sports and enjoying plenty of swimming — including in the open water. From my marathon years, I am used to road races with the massively subscribed New York Road Runners, so it was a pleasure to turn up at 9am instead of the normal brutal 6am. It was also a relief to arrive to weather in the 80s not the 40s (or 100s!), and it was delightful to meet a manageable group of a few dozen friendly faces, not a faceless few thousand.
We were lucky, too that it was a beautiful weekend morning, just hours before the famous Mermaid Parade down on the Boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Coney Island. As swimmers on land, we felt kinship to the older, amphibious, event and some of our splashmates were even appropriately attired to go from one to the other. I had hosted an event a few days earlier for Refuge America, an organization I co-founded to tell the stories of LGBTQ+ immigrants, but a costume parade was going to be a step too far! My friend David and I had signed up for PRIDE Swim Manhattan as swimmers and allies, but we are not that fabulous!
All the swimmers put on bright silicone swim caps and jumped into the water between Piers 25 and 26. The water was refreshingly cool, not warm like a swimming pool, but not bracing like a spring river. It was going to be a pleasant swim at any pace. We were being timed, but no one was really racing and, anyway, the famed Hudson tide had failed to turn up significantly — just as it had let me down on various other Hudson swims I’d done.
I have swum upstate a few times at the Sleepy Hollow Sprint, once in the NYC Triathlon and am looking forward to swimming across the river in late July with my friend Keith for the annual Great Newburgh to Beacon Hudson River Swim (you can sponsor me here) made famous by the late, great Pete Seeger.
“Three, two, one, pheeeep!” and we headed out, under supervision of Urban Swim, into the unsheltered waves.
The Hudson River has been dumped in by humans for centuries and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has listed various of its section as having “impaired water quality.” But near the city, where there has been a concerted effort to clean the water and where the tide sweeps in an out of the estuary regularly it can be quite clear. The Lenape called the river Shatemuc, meaning “the river that flows both ways” because of this exact tendency. And, though sometimes, such as just before 2023’s New York City Triathlon, rain deluges can wash sewage into the water making it unsafe, mostly swimming in the river is fine, if a little murky.
For safety we swam in cohorts of about 15, each cohort sporting the same bright colour swim cap. David went earlier in the pink group but my group – though I suppose in a dad joke way you could call it a wave — had red hats, all of us with neon yellow buoys strapped to our waists. That meant for 45 minutes or so of breaststroke, it was head down into the Hudson and kick, glide; then arm-pull and head up into bobbing neon yellow and red to breathe and look at the shore. Head down, glide, head up, breathe, look. Head down, head up. Head down, head up.
Our route along the storied waterway was the choppy mile and a half to Gansevoort Peninsula: an old pier reclaimed and turned into an urban beachlet complete with sand and everything! Aiming for the gentrified beach pier sticking out from where an industrial Meat Packing District used to exist meant that we were heading away from Lady Liberty and right toward the Whitney Museum of American Art. For those following inland, that’s from the Ghostbuster’s Headquarters to Stonewall.
From a vantage point of four inches above sea level, the far west of downtown has relatively few visible landmarks. New Jersey likewise — it’s difficult to even see the iconic Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken from the south. But there’s a sense of presence, of inching your way into history, of knowing that you are swimming in the shadow of significance, a mile away from the World Trade Center and 400 years after Henry Hudson’s scouting trip.
Gradually we passed the great gate to nowhere that is the Holland Tunnel ventilation shaft and approached the raised outpost of Pier 40 — 15 acres of playing fields that jut out over the water and where I played footie on Wednesday evenings for a decade. On the side of the southern wall of Pier 40 a series of large red letters became clearer despite my fogging goggles. “I Want To Thank You” is actually a public artwork by Stephen Powers (ESPO) commissioned by the (RED) foundation and The Global Fund as part of their campaigns to eradicate AIDS worldwide. But it felt like a message from the city to us — to me — just thanking us for being here, representing the LGBTQ community, and appreciating it from this angle.
Slowly slowly, head up, head down, head up, I reached the inflatable red arch that marked the finish line. I could see my friend’s family barefoot on the beach. I could see the other finishers clambering out into the New York sunshine. Without the need, anymore, to finish, I felt like lingering in the water and drinking in — if not the river water, at least the occasion. But I did get out, the Billion Oyster Project and PRIDE Swim posters were up at their tables and I was glad to have, in some small way, allied with them both.
Many people outside New York City, I think, assume that it is a massive megalopolis totally unlike the rest of the world. And, to a certain extent, that’s true. But that misses how, for most people living here, it is a network of tightly knit neighbourhoods and a place where intersecting identities can reach critical mass. The 2024 PRIDE Swim might have taken place in one of the more famous rivers of the world and in the reflection of one of the most iconic skylines, but it also felt like a lovely weekend neighbourhood swim in one of the few places in the world where scores of people would turn out at the intersection of open water swimming and celebrating Pride.