Grab your volleyball — Manhattan is getting a beach!
The same firm that designed the High Line will soon plan out the borough’s first public beach just a block away — on the 5-acre spit of land jutting off Gansevoort Street in the West Village, The Post has learned.
When the $60 million Gansevoort Peninsula portion of the Hudson River Park Trust’s $900 million park renovation project is completed, after two years of construction, in 2022, it will be the largest single greenspace in the 4-mile-long Hudson River Park, planners said Wednesday.
The beach and its rocky Hudson River shoreline will be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, which until two years ago was the site of a Department of Sanitation salt storage building. An FDNY fireboat house and dock remain at the site, at least for now.
The peninsula will be developed by the trust, which on Thursday night selected the landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations to begin the design.
That’s the same firm that led the design and construction for the acclaimed High Line, which opened in 2009.
The future design will provide direct waterfront access to the public while serving as a protective barrier against flooding and storm surge, trust CEO Madelyn Wils said in a statement.
The trust and the design firm will solicit feedback from local elected officials, Community Board 2, before producing a final design, she said.
The construction money will come from a combination of state, city and private funding, she said, along with $152 million secured by the trust through three air rights sales, she said.
Plans for a sandy beach off Manhattan’s Hudson riverfront have been kicked around since at least 1997, when The Post broke news of an ultimately doomed city-state plan proposed by the Hudson River Park Conservancy.
That grander plan included a series of beaches from Battery Park to 59th Street, and featured “swimming-access stairways” and “swimming holes” created by floating barges with open centers at the end of piers, then-Parks Commissioner Henry Stern told The Post at the time.
But while the sunbathing may be delightful at the new Manhattan beach — despite the view of New Jersey — swimming would be an iffy prospect.
The Citizens Water Quality Testing Program routinely finds unacceptable levels of fecal bacteria in the waters off Manhattan’s west side.
The waterfront will be “unlikely to include swimming access,” said Wils.