Brooklynites Greet 2026 With Chilly Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge

by Kirstyn Brendlen and Erica Price, Brooklyn Paper

The new year arrived windy and freezing in Brooklyn, but bone-chilling weather couldn’t stop tradition as thousands of people welcomed 2026 at the Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge.

After a few years of warm weather, New Year’s Day this year was bracing. When the plunge began at 11 a.m., temperatures hovered around 25 degrees Fahrenheit — with wind chill in the teens — and the Atlantic Ocean was a near-Arctic 39 degrees.

While the crowd was a little smaller than in past years, around 5,000 people took the Plunge, said Coney Island Polar Bear Club President Jarred Lustgarden, and the energy was “electric.”

“I loved the energy this year because people were really committed because of the cold weather,” he said.

They were committed to a fresh start, too.

“A lot of people had a rough 2025, and they couldn’t wait to wash that off,” Lustgarden said. “I heard that more than anything else. ‘2025 was the worst because of A, B, C … and I just need this.’”

It was lifelong Brooklynite Adrienne Lerner’s third time taking the plunge with friends.

“I started doing it as something to start the year by doing something a little brave, and setting a tone for a new year that way,” she said. “A little strength, a little bravery, take a risk. That’s how it started.”

Everyone at the plunge is there to start the year on a positive note, Lerner said, and to support each other, and the excitement is palpable. Some swimmers dress up in ostentatious costumes, and Lerner has joined in, this year donning wings and a head dress as a fairy.

“This year’s costume was kind of inspired by yin and yang. I dressed as a white fairy, my friend was dressed as a black fairy,” she said. “The thought was just how there’s two sides to everything … there’s always light with dark and dark with light.”

The winds helped out, Lerner laughed, keeping her wings flapping the whole time she stood on the beach.

Sean Sweeney, a Staten Island resident, has been plunging for nearly 30 years, he said. He’s only missed it once in that time — New Year’s Day 2000, when he celebrated the centennial in Disney World.

For Sweeney, the Polar Plunge can be bittersweet. After he and his friends decided to participate for the first time, one friend was hit by a drunk driver and lost both of his legs.

“I said to myself, being able bodied, how can I say no to this?” he said. “It’s the kind of thing that really makes you remember that you’re alive, and that you’re capable.”

Decades later, the swim has taken on more meaning.

“It reminds me of the people we lost in 9/11, it reminds me of the people we lost during Covid,” Sweeney said. “As you go through life, there are reasons that surface that cause me to go in again. I always say if it’s the worst I feel all year, I’m way ahead of the game.”

Still, the event is more celebratory than it is melancholy. Over the decades, Sweeney has been joined by an array of friends and family, many taking the plunge for the first time.

“I’ll always say, it’s the most New York thing ever,” he said. “It’s the diversity, it’s the camaraderie, it’s the friendship. You see some people who will learn that either they’ll never do this again, or learn how to do it. Because year upon year, you get better at it, you get smarter at it.”

Sweeney’s decades of experience let him truly appreciate just how cold it was this year. January 1, 2026 was one of his “top three coldest,” he said.

“I have gone in when there’s been eight inches of snow on the beach, and yesterday was colder,” he said. “That wind was biting.”

In 2025, when it was about 50 degrees out, Lerner said she ran in and out of the water several times. This year, diving in “felt like a moment like when the Titanic went down.”

Her only strategy was to wait to enter the water until she was ready to leave the beach. Hanging out to talk and enjoy the energy after the swim was not an option.

“Once you went in and you came out and your body hit the air, you had to go,” she said. “It was too painful. I think the harder one was when we got back to dry off, I couldn’t feel my toes for a good five or 10 minutes. I literally could not move them.”

As Lerner, Sweeney and the other swimmers defrosted their extremities, Lustgarden and the Polar Bears were tallying up donations. The Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge is free, but everyone is encouraged to donate, and the proceeds are distributed to various community groups in the neighborhood.

By New Year’s morning, they had already raised almost $80,000, Lustgarden said. It will take some time for the full tally to come in, but by the end of the day, people had donated almost $140,000.

Coney Island is “one of the last real Brooklyn neighborhoods,” Lustgarden said, and raising money for orgs like the Coney Island library, the New York Aquarium, and Coney Island USA feels good.

“It’s a real neighborhood with real people who need real resources,” he said. “It’s nice to be impactful for that.”

Both Sweeney and Lerner encouraged their fellow New Yorkers to give the Plunge a try — whether it’s to dip a toe or go all in, Sweeney said.

“The message for the year is just, if you have enough confidence in yourself you can accomplish anything,” Lerner said. “It was a lot of mental toughness, particularly yesterday because of the cold. I know many people backed out, so making the decision to show up for yourself, and then just to believe that you can do something and achieve it.”

Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran in Brooklyn Paper. Click here to see the original story.

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