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Reconsidering the Rockaways: NYC's Beachtown (2003)

When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and surely there ought to be a world like this to express no place at all.—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1938)

A few years ago, I decided to move to the Rockaways, which is the New York City term for the Queensborough peninsula that extends west from southwest Long Island into the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side of Jamaica Bay from JFK airport. My motives were a desire to spend my remaining years near an ocean beach while staying in the city where I was born and have spent nearly all my life. Scarcely known or visited, even by New Yorkers, the Rockaways are the sandbarish land over which airplanes pass as they take off to the south from JKF. Notoriety came to the place when one of them crashed, unfortunately, into the section called Belle Harbor soon after 9/11. A few months before, in the summer of 2001, I purchased property close to the subway station of the MTA that goes for a single fare directly into Manhattan.

Looking for literature about the Rockaways I found remarkably little—a single Jill Eisensadt novel published fifteen years ago, a passage from the opening pages of Melville’s Moby-Dick, poems by Howard Moss and Delmore Schwartz, a pop song by a Queens punk group called The Ramones (“Rock, rock, Rockaway Beach”). There have been scattered mentions in general books about New York City, including references so thin in Robert Caro’s otherwise thick critique of Robert Moses, The Power Broker (1974), that I wondered if Caro had actually set foot in New York City’s most obscure domain. Even thinner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti titled a recent poetry collection A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997) to echo Henry Miller in signifying the end of the world (literally beyond A Coney Island of the Mind [1958]), though he never actually lived there. In addition to owning a Dover book of century-old photos, I’ve come across citations of two century-old histories that are hard to find and I’ve never seen: William Sage Pettit’s History and Views of the Rockaways (1901) and Alfred H. Bellot, History of the Rockaways, from the Year 1685 to 1917 (1917).

Against this background I eagerly approached Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan’s Between Ocean & City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York (2003, Columbia Univ. Press). The principal (male) author is a retired City College professor who grew up in the Rockaways, apparently in the section called Arverne where I’m planning to relocate and went to Far Rockaway High School whose more distinguished alumni include the physicist Richard Feynman, the pop psychologist Joyce Brothers, and the financier Carl Icahn. Not unlike others who came of age there before 1970 or so, Kaplan displays a genuine affection for the place.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Rockaways provided a resort for the city rich. Once connected to New York City by train, it became a bungalow colony, a gathering of unheated summer homes, mostly for lower-class New Yorkers desiring to escape the steaming city in the days before air-conditioning. (The rich had by then moved further out into Long Island.) I know a dentist now in the late 80’s who remembers that in the 1920s his Jewish father would move his Harlem grocery store to Far Rockaway for the entire summer, better to serve his regular customers. For decades, summertime life there was fine.

What happened was that “planners” epitomized by Moses decided that the bungalows were unsightly, as indeed they were, and thus should be demolished. Late in the 1930s, Moses began by building a four-lane, grass-divided highway adjacent to the boardwalk, incidentally pulverizing summer housing. Running from 103 rd to 73 rd Street, commonly called “the highway to nowhere,” Shore Front Parkway rarely has more than a few cars. (The original scheme, long forgotten, was to continue the four-lane divided highway along the Long Island shoreline as far as Montauk.) Though Robert Moses destroyed houses, he didn’t destroy beaches, instead creating them out of recalcitrant land, I assume for a reason only implicit to Caro and the Kaplans but obvious to me. Like myself, Moses loved to swim in the ocean.

“During the late 1960’s and early 1970s,” the Kaplans write, “several thousand people were evicted from these shacks [between 73d and 35 th Streets], and miles of beachfront property were leveled. Over time some construction appears on the vast sandy acreage, but for more than thirty years it remained empty except for weeds. The former houses, shops, and playing fields were demolished. While such destruction was visited on other places in the United States, this area in the Rockaways was the largest of its kind.”

For years and years, the New York City administrations entertained schemes for “urban renewal” of its confiscated oceanfront property. Some of them were quite spectacular, but all failed for one fault or another. One involved a gambling complex that would purportedly revive the Rock much as the betting biz revived Atlantic City, but New York State’s voters voted down gambling in a referendum. Another involved high-rise apartments fronting on a marina that extended into the Atlantic. Perhaps a decade ago, a friend who grew up on the Jamaica Bay side of the MTA subway told me about “oceanfront property in New York City that’s empty.” Impossible, I replied piously. I was wrong. Given what the Rockaways were, the devastation was almost unimaginable. Looking at the Rockaways now, the shoreline opulence of the early 1900s would be likewise unimaginable, so far had the beach town fallen.

Further eastward on the Rockaways, the City in the 1960s and 1970s built public housing that couldn’t be constructed closer to Manhattan or residential Brooklyn, because resident-voters in those places there would have objected. The result in Edgemere and Far Rockaway was an abundance of social dysfunctions associated with housing projects for the poor, along with a general lowering of property values on the entire peninsula. So bad did street-level business become in Far Rockaway proper that even Off Track Betting closed its store there in the early 1980s. Even today, nowhere on the Rock can be found a shopping center, a bookstore, a moviehouse, a coffeehouse, an appliance store, or any of many other amenities associated with places whose population tops 100,000, as does that on the entire Rock.

Toward the western end of the peninsula, private developers in the 1970s built cheap structures for mental patients recently de-institutionalized and more solid nursing homes mostly for New Yorkers and their aged parents. Near the ocean, some of these offered magnificent views and fresh air that were otherwise unknown in New York City. According to the Kaplans, the occupants of these caretaking homes have recently constituted as much as 6 % of the year-round population. “Outside of Rockaway,” the Kaplans write, “the impression has persisted that the peninsula is an undesirable place to reside or even visit.” Especially in the middle of the peninsula, the predominant atmosphere is that of beach towns so seedy that they visibly lack summertime stores because they aren’t “invaded” in July and August. For everyone except those already residing there, the Rockaways are invisible—off the perceptible NYC map.

What I found most valuable in Between Ocean and City is history previously unknown to me. The authors recall a German-American Bund that was active in Far Rockaway. I learned when the various public housing projects were constructed and how the racial composition of their residents changed, or why an elderly white woman should chair the Civic Association in my predominantly Caribbean neighborhood. (An old lefty, she collaborated since the 1960s with prominent black ministers in opposing racist policies.) The Kaplans explained how the traditionally Irish enclave of Breezy Point was able to thwart a developer approved by the City who had actually constructed buildings several stories high that were later abandoned and destroyed.

Otherwise, Between Ocean and City is limited. Too much of it is tedious; too often prominent authorities are flattered, as though the authors were assistant professors, rather than partly retired. The two ancient histories mentioned before aren’t even listed in their concluding bibliography. The “Rockaway” in the book’s title doesn’t exist except as Far Rockaway or Rockaway Beach, which are only two sections within the whole; the plural Rockaways or, simply, “the Rock” are the common epithets for the entire peninsula. “Millennium” is misspelled on p. 178, as it once was in stone (no less) on the hotel across the World Trade Center that succumbed on 9/11. “The St. Patrick’s Day Parade” in the Rock is celebrated not on March 17th, as the authors think, but a few Saturdays before, I assume so that the marchers can participate in the city-wide celebration on March 17 th. The Kaplans cite a NY Times report that Breezy Point is “98.5 per cent white” without explaining how the figure in an exclusive cooperative community of single-family homes could be anything less than 99.9%?

Worst of all, the elegiac tone was undone in the time it takes for a book to be published, for within the past year there was been a bit of a construction boom in the Rock. The City has finally released the oceanfront Arverne property to an approved private developer who promises to construct between me and the ocean 2300 units, none more than a few stories high. Meanwhile, other plots near me, long empty, are getting built by individuals and small developers, no doubt reflecting the intelligence of a mayor who succeeded not through climbing politicians’ ladders but by building a successful company. Property values have doubled, including mine. My former accountant tells me that he’s purchasing for rentals a townhouse on the other side of the subway from me. A few years ago, such investment would have been unthinkable.

Nearly a century ago, a proposal for Rockaway independence nearly passed through the New York State legislature. To my mind, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been revived since, so repeatedly has the Rockaways been screwed by its behemoth patron. Perhaps it will be. One reason for my practicing springboard diving so assiduously is the possibility of representing my new land in the next Olympics.