I’ve seen pictures of the beach at Coney Island back when in the early 1900s, and it was, at times, wall to wall people. Did they have a way to periodically clean the sand back then? There must have been tons of cigar butts alone, not to mention garbage from picnics, bottles, papers, and even dog shit. Or did high tide take care of all that?
Can’t speak for the turn of the century, but one summer in the sixties I was Seasonal Park Helper (aka Shit Picker’s Helper) at Coney Island. They had clean up crews working 24 hours a day. I worked the 7 pm to 3 am shift. We formed a conga line stretching from the boardwalk to the water. We had canvas bags and stabbers (a stick with a nail at the end) and rakes. We either stabbed or raked everything up and dumped it into the trash cans - if we could find one that wasn’t overflowing. High tide wouldn’t come far up to clean anything on the beach, short of a hurricane. Some days we wouldn’t get past two or three bays because the beach was so dirty. Yes, we did make an effort to stab cigarette butts. We got everything you could imagine, including hundreds of Coney Island Whitefish. Very seldom dogshit - dogs were not allowed on the beach - but we did get occasional people shit.
Is that what I think it is? Ewwww…
It’s excellent pan-fried.
Better than Lutefisk?
Also as fish-food.