It gets hot in New York over the summer. When the humidity, the honking horns, the short tempers and the burning asphalt are making you see red—or, above all, when your air conditioner breaks—the only thing to do is go to the beach. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as the cold water of the Atlantic, and fortunately you can get there on the subway. While some of the beaches closer to the city are crowded and have a (mostly undeserved) reputation for harboring raw sewage, other beaches in the area are quite pristine and are preserved as state parks.
