Rockaway Peninsula: Beach 26th (Far Rockaway) to Beach 116th (Belle Harbor)

In my head, I had worked it out so perfectly.

The name Rockaway . . . it just fit: breezy, descriptive and to the point. Many, many jetties spike out into the ocean (that explains the rock part) and I guess you could say that it’s kind of away (from the city that is.) It’s Rock-Away. Of course. It just makes sense.

Well, not surprisingly, my derivation was a bit too simplistic. Like a lot of the place names that we encounter in this part of the world, Rockaway doesn’t come from English, but rather from the language of the area’s original residents: the Lenape. Three of the possible English translations for the original name “Reckouwacky” that I found being bandied about are:

1) neck of the land
2) place of waters bright
3) the lonely place

Seriously? It’s hard for me to see how that one name, long as it is, could possibly mean each of those three things. At the same time, they all make as much sense as my interpretation, so I’m going with it.

1) “Neck of the Land”

Rockaway is the first of the two barrier spits that I will be covering on my barriers walk: an almost 11-mile-long peninsula — jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean from Long Island’s “mainland” — running east to west and ending just to the south of Coney Island. It is the longest urban beach in the United States. This whole area is startingly (at least to me) close to New Jersey. The Jersey side of Gateway National Recreation Area lies a mere 5.5 miles directly across the bay.

I was surprised to learn that the Rockaway spit has grown several miles to the west since the English first settled here, through both human intervention and natural accretion. That means, that in the 17th century, Rockaway Point was several miles east of where it is now. It’s an illuminating reminder of just how dynamic the coastline really is and how much humans have to do to keep it from kicking us out for good. We can’t just keep moving Rockaway Point. It will wind up in New Jersey. No one wants that. We want to live by the sea but we want the sea to behave itself, which it clearly doesn’t want to do. So we try to make it behave best we can — like a tired toddler who found the sugar stash. We all know how that goes. It’s pay-back time.

2) “Place of Waters Bright”

The weather was quite warm for October the weekend that Stan and I stayed in Rockaway Beach at Beach 87th Street (As an aside, every numbered street in the Rockaways starts charmingly with the word” Beach.”)

We rented an adorable bungalow that we found on AirBnB. It felt like a little ship. Be forewarned, however, should you decide to stay at the bungalow for a visit at some point: I can’t tell you what it would be like there in the summer, but I think we got a little preview when the Rockaway Beach Surf Club next door decided to open on Saturday night. What I can tell you that trying to get to sleep before midnight would be rough.

Like its neighbor to the west, Coney Island, Rockaway was a popular 19th-century summer vacation spot. Nineteenth-century beachgoers seemed to have had a madness for seemingly impossible large hotels on slivers of land that seem barely wide to contain them or sturdy enough to support them. The Rockaway Beach Hotel, whose price tag was close to $2 million in 1879 when construction began, spanned six city blocks, boasting it could host 7,600 guests. And when it opened — unfinished — in 1881, it remained open for precisely one month. It’s not exactly clear why it never opened fully but it wasn’t fire or hurricane as is so often the case with these behemoths. By the late 1880s, it was completely gone —torn down and sold off in pieces.

*One of many sea dogs on the beach, Miles now knows how to tell time by the sun. He is also a fan of Patti Smith, citing her as the reason he moved to New York from California.*

As I was walking the boardwalk (no longer made of boards but rather concrete, sadly but wisely), which, certain points is some distance from the swash zone, I kept seeing what I thought were seals playing in the water. (Alan, where are you?) But these sea dogs were of the human variety. Nowadays, it seems, Rockaway remains a popular destination for beachgoers, especially those equipped with boards and wet suits, as Rockaway is the only place where you can legally surf with city limits. And there were a lot of them. They were everywhere. At least two of them asked me if I knew the time as I walked past (cell phones and salt water don’t mix). With each request, I looked at the sun’s position in the sky and told them the time. They looked at me funny so I taught them how to tell time by the sun. We verified my estimate on my phone. I had guessed within five minutes of the actual time each time. They thought I was magic.

3) “The Lonely Place”

Like a lot of New York, Rockaway is a study in contradictions. But it seems particularly acute in Rockaway. The feel of the place changes block to block. Well-heeled folk live mostly in the further reaches of Belle Harbor, Neponsit, and Breezy Point (the latter two well beyond the Beach 116th Street terminus for the A train) while to the east in the oddly named Far Rockaway (odd as it is closest to the mainland) and Edgemere, acres and acres of housing, including former bungalow communities where the less well-off had lived, were razed in the name of “urban renewal” in the 1960s, only to lie dormant since, slowly succumbing to Mother Nature’s grasp. The day before we walked the eastern stretch of the boardwalk, a 15-year-old boy was shot to death on the A train in Far Rockaway – the eighth shooting within the New York City subway system this year.

As I walked west from the Far Rockaway Bungalow Historic District along the Boardwalk, I saw few others. I did meet a very cordial City Parks policeman whose badge read “V. Wilson,” who explained to me what those structures that looked to me like oil rigs — visible out in the ocean along the horizon — were actually doing.

In an effort to shore up the beaches, the Army Corps of Engineers is dredging sand from further out in the ocean and piping it back onto the beaches in huge piles. You can only imagine what might be in those piles. I would guess a lot of interesting stuff, especially if they are dredging anywhere near Hog Island. What is Hog Island, you ask? Another fascinating Rockaway story for sure, which I won’t delve into here but about which you can read in this recent piece in The New Yorker.

As I continued west, more and more people appeared on the boardwalk and on the beach. I passed the areas that were restricted to protect the endangered seabeach amaranth and the nesting plovers Access to the beach at some points is completely cut off. It’s a tough dynamic: protecting nature and providing much-needed recreation.

I learned a lot about Rockaway from an excellent podcast from the Bowery Boys on Rockaway. I recommend a listen at https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2012/06/rockaway-and-rockaway-beach-strange.html