"Fat Beach Day... is being held to coincide with Pride month at Jacob Riis Beach in New York, a location deeply ensconced in the city’s activism space..."

I'm reading "New York’s Fat Beach Day gives plus-size people a space to be themselves/Jacob Riis Beach hosts the day of body positivity and fun, in the city at the heart of the fat acceptance movement" (The Guardian).

I didn't know that fat acceptance was part of what Pride month is about or that New York had something it wanted to call its "activism space." 

... New York has, for decades, been at the heart of the fat acceptance movement. In the 1960s, about 500 protesters held a “fat-in” in Central Park, burning diet books and photographs of the supermodel Twiggy, to publicly encourage body positivity and liberation.... 

Jacob Riis Beach is named after Jacob Riis, the "Danish-American social reformer, 'muckraking' journalist, and social documentary photographer" (Wikipedia). There is some criticism of Riis, you know. This doesn't have to do with fatness. The people in Riis's photographs were skinny — poor people living in tenements.

Libertarian economist Thomas Sowell (2001) argues that immigrants during Riis's time were typically willing to live in cramped, unpleasant circumstances as a deliberate short-term strategy that allowed them to save more than half their earnings to help family members come to America, with every intention of relocating to more comfortable lodgings eventually. Many tenement renters physically resisted the well-intentioned relocation efforts of reformers like Riis, states Sowell, because other lodgings were too costly to allow for the high rate of savings possible in the tenements...

The harshest criticisms that Riis faced was for his depictions of Eastern European Jews.... Fried (1997)... argues that the undertone to [much] of Riis' work was “the image of Jews as alien, exotic, unassimilable race, and a people resistant to the promises of Christian universalism." Riis' written work about the Jews invoked anti-semitic tropes such as saying “money is their god.” Additionally, Riis saw the Jews as antiquated and mysterious. He called the area of the Lower East Side with the most Jewish immigrants, Jewtown, with a “omnipresent and unfathomable peddler” harking back to the trope of the Jewish usurer, and that entering a Jewish house of mourning meant “going back 2000 years."...

The Jews weren't the only immigrant group he stereotyped in his work in an effort to explain why these groups “hindered the growth of a uniform culture." In Riis's books, according to some historians, "The Jews are nervous and inquisitive, the Orientals are sinister, the Italians are unsanitary." For example, early on in his career he stated that “the Chinese must go” and then 20 years later “only as regards to the Asiatic we have made a flat verdict of exclusion” Riis also criticized Italian immigrants stating that they “reproduce conditions of destitution and disorder.”