Thursday Morning in Far Rockaway: Friends of Rockaway Mark Third Anniversary of Superstorm Sandy with 24-Hour Build

(Video courtesy JTeenLeadership)

Late Sunday Afternoon in Belle Harbor: "Rockaway Rising: Hands Across the Sand" Commemorating Anniversary of Hurricane Sandy on the Beach

(Video courtesy Absurdity Today

Sunday Afternoon in Broad Channel: The View West from Broad Channel

 

Driving off the Rockaways peninsula, we stopped off at a car rest and fishing site in Broad Channel for a while, to check out the beach and Jamaica Bay across from Kennedy Airport.  

The A train trestle looked fine from a distance and service to Far Rockaway is promised to start again this Thursday for the first time since Superstorm Sandy. Floodwaters from Sandy washed out 1,500 feet of track, destroyed miles of signal, power and communication wires, and completely flooded subway stations.  Debris removal from the track beds alone, which included removal of a boat that washed onto the beds, took four weeks, so it's been a long recovery, but hopefully Rockaway residents and beachgoers can soon take the A train to the ocean again.

Sunday Afternoon in Rockaway Park: The Boardwalk and Beach Are Not Quite Ready Yet at Beach 106th Street

Despite Superstorm Sandy's devastation to the Rockaways in general and to the destroyed boardwalk in particular, the city said the beaches here, as in other parts of New York, would be open this Memorial Day weekend.

On the first nice day of the unseasonably cool weekend, we were in Rockaway Park, putting the car right in front of our Grandpa Nat's and Grandma Sylvia's apartment building at One Beach 105th Street, facing where Grandpa Nat had the front parking lot space closest to Shore Front Parkway and  the beach (he paid extra for it, but the corrosion of the seawater just ate away at the right side of his Buick Century; by 1980, we were driving around North Miami Beach with more rust than paint on one side) -- and just across from Dayton Towers West,

where we lived in our Grandpa Herb's and Grandma Ethel's apartment, both when they were still alive and living there, and in 1991 by ourselves after Grandma Ethel had gone into a Woodmere adult health-related facility.

We took this weird curved (temporary?) concrete ramp past a lot of construction up to a short concrete (temporary?) boardwalk by the Beach 106th Street concession building, still not open for business but painted a wonderfully bright yellow-green.

The "steps" going down to the beach -- which was wide and clean and as beautiful as ever -- also seemed to serve as places to sit, like benches on the bleachers.

The parks department people taking a break on the steps told us this was all technically off-limits but they kindly allowed us to stay to take some pics.

 

We're grateful we got to see that the beach and boardwalk in Rockaway Park will be ready soon: not quite the way we remember it from our childhood going back sixty years, but a newer, more interesting, and hopefully sturdier kind of beachfront and boardwalk experience for generations of New Yorkers to come.

Thursday Morning in Coney Island: Breakfast on the Riegelmann Boardwalk

On our last morning in Brooklyn before we head to Arizona for the winter, we took a brown bag breakfast and got on the R train from 95th Street to 59th Street, where we caught the N train to the Stillwell Avenue terminal in Coney Island to enjoy a sunny December morning on the Riegelmann Boardwalk and see the ocean again.

Just four weeks since seeing the destroyed Rockaway boardwalk on Thanksgiving, we were grateful that the Coney Island boardwalk was still basically intact.

On our way home, we saw what looked like some sort of press conference

at the still-shuttered Nathan's,

which will reopen this coming spring. Although we're glad to be getting out of a cold Northeastern winter, we'll still be missing Brooklyn while we're in the warmer desert Southwest.

NBC News' "Meet the Press" features Wall Street Journal Photo of our Occupy Sandy Thanksgiving Dinner at St. Camillus in Rockaway

This morning, near the end of NBC News' Meet the Press, in an interview with Rep. Gregory W. Meeks about the cleanup from Hurricane Sandy, the screen showed Friday's front-page Wall Street Journal photo of us at Occupy Sandy's Thanksgiving dinner outside St. Camillus in Rockaway.

Wall Street Journal Front Page Features Photo of Occupy Sandy's Thanksgiving Dinner at St. Camillus in Rockaway (with us included)

The front page of The Wall Street Journal today, Friday, November 23, 2012, features an above the fold photo of yesterday's wonderful Occupy Sandy Thanksgiving dinner outside St. Camillus in Rockaway with the headline: "A Sunny Thanksgiving Feast for Storm's Victims."

At least one person pictured was a volunteer taking a break to eat a delicious apple muffin.

We're a little embarrassed (but not that much) to be pictured when so many of our fellow volunteers and the regular crew at Occupy Sandy in Rockaway aren't. But we are proud of being a tiny part of such a good effort. And we also like that at the extreme left of the photo you can just make out the Dayton Towers West building at 102-00 Shore Front Parkway.

For thirty years our beloved Aunt Tillie -- our grandfather's sister -- and Uncle Morris Metz, had an apartment there on the second floor, where we spent several holiday dinners (Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashona) with them and our Grandma Ethel back in the 1980s. That was the last time we were featured on the front page, albeit of the second section, of The Wall Street Journal. A story by Brooks Jackson about our presidential campaign was published on November 28, 1983, just about 29 years ago.

It ran with the headline "This Presidential Candidate Wants Jane Wyman as His Running Mate," It ended:

So what's next for Mr. Grayson?

He's running for President as a Democratic candidate and accepting public financing, sort of.

"When I go down to the unemployment office, I have to prove that I'm looking for work," he says. "I figure that the presidency is a good job."

He would like Jane Wyman to be his running mate. "She has experience dumping Reagan," he says. The president's ex-wife hasn't accepted yet."

Thanksgiving Afternoon in Rockaway Park: Occupy Sandy Community Thanksgiving Dinner at St. Camillus R.C. Church

After working inside sorting,

stacking,

but mostly dealing with garbage and gratefully getting answers and taking orders from a 10-year-old boy much more experienced at Occupy Sandy Recovery efforts than we are,

we went outside to help with Thanksgiving dinner outdoors in the St. Camillus Church parking lot, facing the beach and ocean and what was the boardwalk that we loved so much. At one point we were manning dessert table #2 with Elliot, serving pumpkin pie and other pastries and giving out coloring books, crayons and playing cards.

We did some other stuff like serving drinks and cleaning up, but we also had time to talk with the incredibly hard-working people from Occupy Sandy -- people like Miguel and Christine and Diego and Kristina and many others -- and to enjoy our own dinner on a beautiful day at the beach.

Father Richard gave a nice toast after a number of Occupy Sandy people spoke.

It was a beautiful Thanksgiving day, and we are very grateful for all the people who worked hard to make it possible.

Before we returned to Brooklyn, we had some time to walk to the beach amid the ruins of the boardwalk. We spent so much of our lives on the Rockaway boardwalk going back to the early 1950s, it's hard to see it destroyed.

This is what our poor old block, Beach 118th Street, where we got our first apartment back in 1979, looked like after Sandy hit:

But in Rockaway, the ocean waves still roll in, and we're hopeful that in some form, the boardwalk will be rebuilt so that young kids can have memories of it the way we did. (Here is a photo our grandfather took of us 43 years ago in November 1969 when we were 18.)