Memorial Day Afternoon in Rockaway: Computer Magic at Riis Park Beach Bazaar

(Video courtesy George Stratigopoulos)

Memorial Day Afternoon in Far Rockaway: Dancers at O'Donohue Park on Beach 17th Street

(Video courtesy John Campbell)

Monday Morning in Locust Valley: Locust Valley Memorial Day Parade

This Memorial Day at 9 AM, we were standing by the Boys and Girls Club on Forest Avenue in Locust Valley watching the North Shore town's annual Memorial Day parade.

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.

"MEMORIAL DAY DIARY: 1970-2010" by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's MEMORIAL DAY DIARY: 1970-2010 is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢ from its publisher, Art Pants Company.

Here is the promo material for the 127-page $7.99 paperback edition from Superstition Mountain Press:

How does a person change over forty years? Suppose someone kept a diary every day starting when he was 18 through his late fifties? Richard Grayson, author of numerous books of short fiction, compiled such a record of his life: thoughts, actions, events, mundane details and reactions to the world around him for every Memorial Day -- the last Monday in May -- from 1969 to 2010. Here are the results.

Monday Morning in Belle Harbor: Memorial Day Parade at St. Francis de Sales Church on Rockaway Beach Boulevard

We were on Rockaway Beach Boulevard down the street from St. Francis de Sales this morning for the 2010 Memorial Day Parade.

It was a surprisingly hot day even just a block from the beach in Belle Harbor. Here's the start of the parade, which is, we think, run by the Daniel M. O'Connell Post 272 of the American Legion.

The Knights of Columbus Rockaway Council 2672 also had a lot of members there, and lots of people and flags lined the boulevard too.

Generally big parades freak us out, but Rockaway parades always seemed intimate enough to enjoy.

We think more city firefighters live in Rockaway than anywhere else. They are, after all, New York's Smartest.

The oldest vets rode in vintage cars.

Others just marched.

Then there were the drums

and woodwinds

and cheerleaders.

There were marchers from First Congregational Church,

and students from St. Francis de Sales School

and Scholars' Academy Seawolves, along with other Rockaway groups we didn't get decent pics of.

This was the tail end of the parade as it made its way down Rockaway Beach Boulevard.

Behind us was the St. Francis de Sales Prayer Garden, also a memorial - to those members of the parish who died on September 11 and November 12 of 2001.







Thirty years and three wars ago we lived in Belle Harbor, in a studio apartment (#5J) right off the boardwalk at 129 Beach 118th Street and we watched 1980's Memorial Day parade too.

Our apartment view back in the day wasn't the beach but the bay, and the ship's-bottom houses of Belle Harbor, St. Frances de Sales, the two bridges into Rockaway and the jets - twice a day the supersonic Concorde - flying by. But we could just basically fall out of bed, down the elevator, and onto the beautiful beach on a morning like today.

But we didn't pass this pretty garden at the end of the block in those days. It's maintained by this hard-working woman

and a couple of her friends

and it too is a memorial - to another local hero who gave his life for his country: FDNY Battalion Chief John Moran, who died in the 9/11 attack.

We were on the beach pretty early this Memorial Day morning but it took us forever to get there.

We'd left Williamsburg at 7:15 p.m. and so were at the Junction with the earliest-bird beachgoers at the bus stop to get out to Rockaway.

The Q35 finally came but we had serious time to wait in front of this poster for next Saturday's play Serious Business at Tilden High School and wish we had the $45 to see this Jamaican church satire with Keith 'Shebada' Ramsay. At its Kingston premiere a few months ago, The Gleaner said the performers "had the capacity-size audience convulsed with laughter."

But eventually found ourselves walking up the beach block of Beach 126th Street, where we'd often visit our friend Brant Matises' family in the 1970s. The west end of the Rockaway boardwalk is here.

And we got to have a couple of hours of fun on the beach where we grew up a long, long time ago.

Later we went to a parade.

After lunch, back on the beach, we still had the souvenir we'd been handed on the boulevard courtesy of the wonderful folks who made today's Rockaway Memorial Day Parade . . .

and also courtesy of, um, the good old USA's number one trading partner.

Happy Memorial Day!