Dumbo Books of Brooklyn: Beach 116th Street

Monday, September 5, 2011

Monday Morning in Rockaway Park: Breakfast by Jamaica Bay at Tribute Park

On the last day of the summer, at least as far as psychologically and the beach season goes, we wanted to get out to the beach really early, before the predicted rain materialized, so we left Williamsburg via the L train at 7 a.m. this Labor Day morning, switched to the A at Broadway Junction and the shuttle at Broad Channel,

making our arrival into the Rockaway Park/Beach 116th Street terminal

before 8:30 a.m., when the sun was shining brightly.

We walked over to Broad Channel Drive and across from the post office where we had our first P.O. box in 1979,

we got a little takeout breakfast from Rockaway Bagels and then walked down to Tribute Park, overlooking the bay just at Beach 116th.

The park was created to serve as a tribute, not a memorial, to those Rockaway residents who died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Their intention was to provide a place where community members can reflect on lost loved ones and find comfort to move on with their lives.

The Rockaways lost more people than any other area of New York on September 11th.

The peninsula, as all of us who've lived here know, is heavily populated with police officers and firefighters.

About seventy residents of the Rockaways died on 9/11.

After years of debating on where to place a 9/11 memorial, the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce decided on this spot at the Jamaica Bay end of Beach 116th Street.

It's a little out of the way, but that's why we like it. There is a parking lot at the Duane Reade right next to it.

It's really peaceful and there are tributes to individuals everywhere, on benches, the firefighters' stone (which lists all FDNY personnel lost on 9/11),

on bricks. . .

We really like this star/compass

which has on it the ten neighborhoods of the Rockaways: Far Rockaway, Edgemere, Arverne, Rockaway Beach, Broad Channel, Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Roxbury, Breezy Point.

These little glass stars on the ground also have people's names on them.

This bench's plaque is from the Peninsula Hospital Center, which just a few days ago was saved from closing after a valiant campaign by Rockaway activists. Special thanks to Lew Simon and the many others involved in this effort.

The park faces lower Manhattan in the distance. You used to be able to see the twin towers from here.

There are a number of really nice parts to Tribute Park, but this is our favorite.

After eating our bagel and drinking our iced tea

and sitting thinking awhile,

we walked down Beach 116th Street to the beach.

From the beach, we could see the building (center) on Beach 118th Street where we had our first apartment,

well over thirty years ago.

We enjoyed the last rays of summer on the beach until the clouds and then rain came.

(Video courtesy of Gary Mann)

We will be teaching at Borough of Manhattan Community College this Sunday morning, September 11, and not able to attend, but Friends of Tribute Park has announced an unveiling ceremony of the World Trade Center steel on September 11, 2011. The piece of steel was recovered and used as evidence in the World Trade Center investigation. It was then awarded and released to the organization.

To date, it will be the only officially documented piece of steel to sit in a New York City public park. The 8:00 a.m. ceremony will include the reading of the names of residents lost, the placing of roses in their honor, the unveiling, and blessing of the steel. There will also be an evening ceremony beginning at 6:00 pm.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Friday Morning in Rockaway: Breakfast on the Beach

With the help of quick and early G and 5 trains and the Q-35 bus, we were at Beach 116th Street in Rockaway before 9 a.m. for breakfast on the beach and a long walk on the boardwalk from Belle Harbor down to Beach 84th Street, passing places which we've been going to since the 1950s but which the New York Times Style section discovered last month. This "Go Home Hipsters, The Midwest Misses You" addition to the standard beach sign is another indicator of the peninsula's sudden popularity from some oldtimers. (Not us!)

We walked back to our first apartment from 1979, at the building by the boardwalk at 129 Beach 118th Street (our studio, 5-J, has long since been combined with two of our old neighbors' apartments to create a big co-op), and then east over the route we must have followed hundreds of times. They didn't have these grassy dunes around Beach 108th Street back in the day.

We got some wonderful refreshment at Blue Bottle Coffee at Beach 106th. Behind it, and the benches were people sit and enjoy, is 1 Beach 105th Street, where our grandparents, Nat and Sylvia Ginsberg, lived from 1965 to 1977, when they moved to North Miami Beach. It was a rental back in those days, and their apartment was 11-F.

Grandpa Nat paid extra to get the first parking space next to the ocean, a big mistake, because the whole right side of his Buick Century rusted away from the salt air.

Still, we found the car drivable in Miami as late as 1981. Across Beach 105th Street was the Dayton Towers West Mitchell-Lama co-op, where our other grandparents lived. Now they could all sit at these tables for Blue Bottle Coffee and the empanadas and arepas at Caracas Rockaway. No Caracas traffic here today yet.

Herb and Ethel Sarrett lived in apartment 10-N, facing the beach, in the center building, 103-00 Shore Front Parkway, starting in 1966.

Both sets of grandparents had taken bungalows in Rockaway down around Beach 56th Street and Beach 56th Place since World War II; our parents met there (if an 18yo boy is hanging around with your 14yo daughter, they might still be married 66 years later)

and we all spent our summers there until they tore down the bungalows in 1965. This is our youngest brother, then 4, with our cousin, 12, that last great summer before they tore the bungalows down. Our parents went away to Europe for several weeks and we only remember it as being fun except for the egg salad sandwich that made us sick while we were reading an issue of The Brave & The Bold with Black Canary and Starman.

We were 14 and read books and comics and Mad Magazine, played ball constantly, listened to music on our transistor, did science projects with one kid and made model airplanes and mosaic ashtrays and got a black eye from our cousin and got our first set of weights (no coincidence) and watched the fireworks and put Noxzema on our sunburns and saw mayoral candidate John Lindsay at the beach (he went in the water!) and spent nights on the porch in our uncle's Coast Guard hammock and walked all the way to Far Rockaway with three girls one afternoon that we still remember sights, sounds and smells from. Then they tore our bungalows down and we went into tenth grade in a high school we didn't like.

So after that summer of 1965, a lot of our family just decided to move to Rockaway year-round, including Grandpa Herb's sister Aunt Tillie and Uncle Morris in 102-00 Shore Front Parkway, the next building on the right, on the third floor (Uncle Morris was afraid of heights.) After Grandma Ethel went into a Woodmere retirement home, we lived in their apartment in the summer of 1991 and closed it up during the final three weeks of that year, when we came there after our first semester of law school at the University of Florida.

We loved the terrace and spent many wonderful hours sitting there. Our middle brother, however, like our great-uncle, wasn't crazy about heights and wouldn't sit out with us. How we ever got him to pose out on the terrace like this, we can only imagine. (Cannabis is what we're imagining.)

Now there all these new housing developments on Shore Front Parkway (which starts at Beach 108th but which Robert Moses once envisioned as running all the way to the Montauk Point) and all over the Rockaways.

These prospectors with their metal detectors searching for coins and jewelry used to fascinate us in the 1950s and 1960s.

At 96th there's the world-famous Rockaway Taco, Motorboat & The Big Banana, the Thai food of Ode to the Elephant, AND Coffee, Babycakes, and Veggie Island for good food. We should only have been so lucky in the 1970s. Today we were a few hours too early for most stands to be open, but we made do nicely.

Even at 9:45 a.m., it was starting to feel hot.

Sometimes it's almost nicer here in winter, like the winter of 1968-69, when we were 17.

Our Grandpa Herb, the day he took that pic, was only five years older than we are now. Yikes!

We took this a few years later, when we were in Brooklyn College, and our grandmother is still younger than we are now. Double yikes!

At Beach 95th, there's Whaleamena, who wasn't here back then.

Whaleamena was donated to the Rockaways by the Parks Department and was originally in the childrens zoo in Central Park. Local volunteers restored the badly deteriorated structure. So says Rockaway's newspaper since 1893, The Wave,

which in the 1950s covered one of our youthful Lincoln Court bungalow theatricals, produced by our neighbor Murray Sherman.

We can recall being on the radio and we do have 16mm film of these things somewhere, including a funny boxing match between two four-year-olds in which the fighters (us and our best friend Brucie) did a shaving cream commercial between rounds. (The one thing we refused to do was drag: we were one future gay kid who would not under any circumstances wear a dress and didn't like to see other boys dress up as girls, either). All in all, we have really happy memories of our childhood and adolescent summers in Rockaway.

We think everyone knows that Beach 90th is the surfing mecca of New York City, but our friends who used to surf were there decades ago. The more challenging waves (as the New York Times says on this very day! with non-crappy photos!) are in the winter, but the best surfing waves we ever saw was in the summer of 1976, when we were working at New Haven Manor in Far Rock and had to cut out early because Hurricane Belle was coming. We stopped off at Beach 90th to catch the action as the storm approached. (It never did much damage in the city, though it made landfall around Jones Beach and caused a lot of rain.)

Before getting off the boardwalk a couple of hours after we arrived, we stopped at the very cool Rippers (for some reason this typically incompetent pic looks more Di Chirico than in real life) for a cold drink. Then, after passing the building where our Great-Grandma Bessie Shapiro used to live, drink still in hand, we managed to run fast and catch the Q22 bus at Rockaway Beach Boulevard at Beach 84th and take it to the stop near the Marine Parkway Gil Hodges Bridge, where we changed for the Q35 over the bridge and up Flatbush Avenue past our old neighborhood to the Junction and the first leg of our subway rides home to Williamsburg.