Friday Afternoon in Far Rockaway: A Train from Mott Avenue to Euclid Avenue

(Video courtesy Jordan Castro)

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

(Video courtesy JTeenLeadership)

A 25-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early August, 1976 | Thought Catalog

A 25-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early August, 1976 | Thought Catalog

Early Thursday Evening in Far Rockaway: York College Summer Jazz Program (SJP) 2015 at O'Donohue Park

(Video courtesy Averie Rivera)

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

(Video courtesy John Campbell)

Wednesday Night in Tribeca: At the Chambers Street Station, A Sign Announces the H Train Returns to Rockaway

After meeting with our wonderful Wednesday evening English 101 class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Murray Street building, we went down to wait for the A train at Chambers Street and found this sign, nostalgic to all those of us who remember the HH train in the Rockaways (and the CC to Rockaway Park before that).

To replace some of the service, since the Jamaica Bay tracks were destroyed by Superstorm Sandy, a free H train shuttle will run from Far Rockaway (the last stop, now served by a bus shuttle from Howard Beach/JFK) to Beach 90th Street along the rarely used Hammels Wye.

(Photo by the great Nathan Kensinger, whose amazing work we first came across in 2009 with "Abandoned Brooklyn.")

Richard Grayson's "LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY" Now Available as Trade Paperback or eBook at Amazon Kindle Store

This week Superstition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's Last Summer in Rockaway. It is available in a 204-page trade paperback edition for $12199, as well as an e-book published by Art Pants Company available at the Amazon Kindle store for 99 cents.

The promo stuff says in part,

Acclaimed short story writer Richard Grayson has been keeping a diary since the summer of 1969 when he turned 18, a time recounted in his first published book of diary entries, SUMMER IN BROOKLYN.  In LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY, it's 1991 and he's turning 40.

The diary entries begin in Los Angeles, where Grayson goes for the first time to lead workshops at a writers' conference overseen by his oldest friend, a writer and editor he met in a second grade class in Brooklyn's P.S. 203.In California, Grayson learns that his bankruptcy has been finalized and that he has been accepted to law school at the University of Florida.

After a brief stay in South Florida to complete his teaching career at a community college, Grayson flies to New York for three months, living in the now-vacant beachfront apartment in Rockaway that had been his grandparents' longtime home.

Between visits to his grandmother in a nearby Long Island nursing home and excursions to Brooklyn and Manhattan for long lunches, dinners and walks around his native New York, trying to take everything in, knowing he will probably never return except as an infrequent visitor.

Grayson also reflects upon everything from the death of novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer and conditions in Rockaway's ghetto neighborhoods to whether one day the computer, TV and telephone will merge into one device.

Richard Grayson's previous diary books include SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-75; MORE SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1976-79; WINTER IN BROOKLYN, 1971-72; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980; SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-84; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-87; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; EIGHTIES' END: 1987-89; SUMMER IN NEW YORK, 1990; and FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE, 1991.

The book is also available on Scribd and Lulu for free online reading.

Richard Grayson's "SUMMER IN NEW YORK" Now Available as Trade Paperback or eBook at Amazon Kindle Store

This week Superstition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's Summer in New York. It is available in a 234-page trade paperback edition for $12.99, as well as an e-book published by Art Pants Company available at the Amazon Kindle store for 99 cents.

The promo stuff says in part,

It's the summer of 1990, and writer Richard Grayson -- about to turn 39 and having recently lost forty pounds -- has come up from Florida to spend the summer in his native New York City, shuttling between a friend's Upper West Side apartment where he's lived for the previous six summers and his grandmother's apartment on the beach in Rockaway, where she is suffering from depression and other problems of old age and is ultimately hospitalized for weeks.

For most of the 1980s, Grayson has gotten by as a writer through combining literary grants and income from part-time college teaching and computer education workshops -- and a scheme relying on constantly moving cash advances from the over 40 credit cards that Grayson accumulated during the Greed Decade.

Now, as the national economy falls into an ominous recession -- and war in the Persian Gulf seems imminent -- Grayson's credit card chassis is spinning out of control, with him $150,000 in debt and meager unemployment benefits his only steady income.

Moreover, he recognizes that his career as a fiction writer, never quite viable despite numerous publications, good book reviews, and critical encouragement, is coming to an end. What to do?

He takes up the cause of the beleaguered Miami hip-hop group, 2 Live Crew, whose As Nasty As They Wanna Be CD has been declared obscene by a Florida judge. Grayson's efforts win him national publicity -- and some hate mail from those offended by raunchy rap music. And his satirical campaign to rescue billionaire Donald Trump from bankruptcy are highlighted on CNN and in The New York Post.

As he moves through the city, taking random graduate courses in computer education and creativity at Teachers College, running from bank ATM to bank lobby to deposit the money in his credit chassis, fretting about the future as he wanders around Brooklyn, desperately trying to stir up interest in his poorly-selling books of fiction, and going out to endless lunches and dinners with his many friends -- mostly other writers, theater people, artists, performers, politically-connected lawyers and religious activists -- Grayson recounts his days in the diary he's been keeping obsessively since he was an agoraphobic 18-year-old boy about to start Brooklyn College in the summer of 1969.

Grayson has published the first six volumes of the diaries of his late teens and twenties as THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, featuring SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-1975; WINTER IN BROOKLYN: 1972-73; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; MORE SUMMERS IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979; and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980.

The second six volumes of his diaries have been published as THE EIGHTIES DIARIES, which include SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-84; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-87; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; and EIGHTIES’ END: AUTUMN, 1987-89.

SUMMER IN NEW YORK: 1990 is the first volume of THE NINETIES DIARIES, immediately preceding LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY:1991 and FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE: 1991.

The book is also available on Scribd and Lulu for free online reading.

Monday Morning in Far Rockaway: Breakfast on Rockaway Beach

We got up early, and seeing it was sunny, packed some food and drink and took a trip to Far Rockaway so we could have breakfast on the beach.

At 7:37 a.m. the L train let us off at Broadway Junction, where we transfered to the A train to Mott Street.

We know Far Rockaway pretty well, having family living and working nearby and having gone to clothing stores

and kosher delis and Woolworth's

and St. Joseph's (now St. John's Episcopal) Hospital to visit sick relatives

and the Pix and the Strand movie theaters,

and in the summer of 1976, we worked at the adult home New Haven Manor helping our boss, an accountant who owned medical clinics, commit Medicaid fraud by giving unneeded tests to the released mental patients who lived there. Later we turned all our notes over to special prosecutor Maurice Nadjari and Councilman Antonio Olivieri's investigating committee. We're in the 1980 Roger Weisberg-produced documentary, Back Wards to Back Streets, discussing our experiences.

Here we are on the boardwalk in the last winter of the Johnson Administration.

Now we see the shimmering images indicating the end of a flashback.

Just before 8 a.m. we ran to catch the Q113 bus outside the station and took it on a brief ride to the last stop on Beach 9th Street and Seagirt Avenue, where the Rockaway Boardwalk begins. It was a thrill to smell the sea air and hear the sounds of seagulls again.

It's actually concrete for the next ten blocks. That's the Atlantic Beach Bridge in the background. We used to love to take drives to Long Beach back in the day.

The sand dunes here are really nice. This is actually O'Donohue Park.

We found a bench to sit and watch the ocean. Actually, there were only a few morning strollers or joggers around the whole time we were there.

That's Silver Point in Atlantic Beach across the inlet. There's a Nassau County park at the end of the barrier island.

Even though it was bright daylight, the lamppost lights were on for this seagull.

There was a bulldozer onb the beach around Beach 21st Street near where the construction begins.

In early March in Arverne, we walked to the west end of the closed boardwalk where the rehabilitation project begins and today we reached the end. There is also an elaborate park planned for this beachfront area.

So after hanging out a little, we got off the boardwalk and walked a few blocks to Beach 25th Street, where our Grandpa Herb Sarrett's brother Jack used to have the Sarrett Pharmacy on the corner and got the subway home to Williamsburg. We're grateful for our morning at the beach.

HEAT OF THE MOMENT by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Heat of the Moment is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢. "Heat of the Moment" originally appeared in the October 2004 issue of the webzine The Quarterly Staple (now defunct) and was chosen as one of the "Notable Stories of 2004" by storySouth's Million Writers Award.

The story is also available in an overpriced ($5.99) 57-page little paperback book edition from Art Pants Company and in the 2006 short story collection And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street.