In the past two months, I’ve biked around Jamaica Bay twice. It’s a wonderful scenic ride. Jamaica Bay straddles Brooklyn and Queens with JFK Airport to the east and Coney Island/Brighton Beach to the west.
Here’s a map:
(You can access the NYC bike map here.)
Two weeks ago, my girlfriend and I started our bike trip from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn (map) and headed east to loop around Jamaica Bay. We stopped at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, we biked the boardwalks of Rockaway Beach and Jacob Riis Park. Then we headed over the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge back to the mainland and past Floyd Bennett airfield.
Once we returned to Sheepshead Bay, we went back to Jamaica Bay yet again, this time on a three-hour, narrated boat tour organized by the American Littoral Society – Northeast Chapter. Our two tour guides, Mickey Cohen and Don Riepe, have a wealth of knowledge about Jamaica Bay’s history, ecology, developments and challenges. It was very informative, and it was fun to see the Bay by boat right after we had taken in the sights by land.
I’m including two slideshows of Jamaica Bay.
The first one is of our trip two weeks ago when we biked around the Bay and then took the boat ride:
And this slideshow is of pictures I took during my first bike ride around Jamaica Bay earlier in the spring:
