At the City's Edge

Between Ocean and City
The Transformation of Rockaway, New York
by Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan
Columbia Univ. Press, 237 pp., $35.50 A FEW YEARS AGO, I decided to move to "the Rockaways," which is New York City's term for the Queensborough peninsula extending west from Long Island into the Atlantic. Scarcely known or visited, the Rockaways are the sandbarish land over which airplanes pass as they take off from Kennedy Airport.

Looking for references to the Rockaways, I found remarkably little: a single novel written fifteen years ago, the passage from the opening pages of Melville's "Moby-Dick," poems by Howard Moss and Delmore Schwartz, a pop song by the Ramones, and scattered mentions in general books about New York (including references so thin in Robert Caro's otherwise thick critique of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," that I wondered if Caro had actually set foot in New York City's most obscure domain). Dover Books has in print a collection of century-old photographs, and I've come across citations of two old histories that I've never seen: William Sage Pettit's "History and Views of the Rockaways" (1901) and Alfred H. Bellot's "History of the Rockaways, from the Year 1685 to 1917" (1917).

With such thin resources, I eagerly approached Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan's "Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York." The male author is a retired City College professor who grew up in the Rockaways, apparently in the section called Arverne, and went to Far Rockaway High School, whose alumni include the physicist Richard Feynman, the pop psychologist Joyce Brothers, and the financier Carl Icahan. Not unlike others who grew up there before 1970 or so, Kaplan displays a genuine affection for the place.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Rockaways provided a resort for the city rich. Once it was connected to New York City by train, it became a bungalow colony, a gathering of unheated summer homes, mostly for lower-class New Yorkers desiring to escape the steaming city in the days before air-conditioning. (The rich had by then moved further out into Long Island.) I know a dentist now in his late eighties who remembers that in the 1920s his Jewish father would move his Harlem grocery store to Far Rockaway for the entire summer to serve his regular customers. For decades, summertime life there was fine.

WHAT HAPPENED was that the city planners, epitomized by Moses, decided the bungalows were unsightly, as indeed they were. Late in the 1930s, Moses began by building a four-lane, grass-divided highway adjacent to the boardwalk, incidentally pulverizing summer housing. Running from 103rd to 73rd Street, commonly called "the highway to nowhere," Shore Front Parkway rarely has more than a few cars. (The original scheme, long forgotten, was to continue it along the Long Island shoreline as far as Montauk.) New York's city planners have always had both a distaste for what people were actually doing in the Rockaways and no idea what to do instead. "During the late 1960s and early 1970s," the Kaplans write, several thousand more people were evicted from shacks between 73d and 35th Streets, and miles of beachfront property were leveled. "Over time some construction appeared on the vast sandy acreage, but for more than thirty years it remained empty except for weeds. The former houses, shops, and playing fields were demolished. While such destruction was visited on other places in the United States, this area in the Rockaways was the largest of its kind."

For years, New York City's administrations entertained schemes for "urban renewal" of its confiscated oceanfront property. Some of them were quite spectacular, but all failed for one reason or another. Further east, the city in the 1960s and 1970s built public housing that couldn't be constructed closer to Manhattan or residential Brooklyn, because voters in those places there would have objected. The result for Far Rockaway and Edgemere was an abundance of social dysfunctions associated with housing projects for the poor, along with a general lowering of property values on the entire peninsula. So bad did street-level business become in Far Rockaway that even Off-Track Betting closed there in the early 1980s. Even today, nowhere on the Rock can be found a shopping center, a bookstore, a moviehouse, a coffeehouse, an appliance store, or any of many other amenities.

Toward the western end of the peninsula, private developers in the 1970s built cheap structures for mental patients recently de-institutionalized and more solid nursing homes mostly for New Yorkers and their aged parents. Near the ocean, some of these offered magnificent views and fresh air that were otherwise unknown in New York City.

According to the Kaplans, the occupants of these caretaking homes have recently constituted as much as six percent of the year-round population. "Outside of Rockaway," they write, "the impression has persisted that the peninsula is an undesirable place to reside or even visit." Especially in the middle of the peninsula, the predominant atmosphere is that of beach towns so seedy that they lack summertime stores because they aren't "invaded" in July and August.

Most valuable in "Between Ocean and City" is the history. The authors recall a German-American Bund that was active in Far Rockaway. They explain how the public-housing projects were constructed and how the racial composition of their residents changed. They show how the traditionally Irish enclave of Breezy Point was able to thwart a developer who had actually constructed buildings several stories high that were later abandoned and destroyed.

OTHERWISE, "Between Ocean and City" is limited. Too much of it is tedious; too often prominent authorities are flattered, as though the authors were assistant professors, rather than partly retired. The two old histories I've seen cited elsewhere aren't even mentioned in their bibliography, "millennium" is misspelled, the Rockaways' St. Patrick's Day parade is not on March 17, as the authors think, but a few Saturdays before (I assume so that the marchers can participate in the city-wide celebration on March 17).

Worst of all, the elegiac tone was undone in the time it takes for a book to be published, for within the past year there has been a bit of a construction boom. The city has finally released the oceanfront Arverne property to a private developer, who promises to construct 2,300 units, none more than a few stories high. Meanwhile, other plots, long empty, are getting built by individuals and small developers. Property values have doubled. My former accountant tells me that he is purchasing for rental a townhouse on the other side of the subway from me. A few years ago, such investment would have been unthinkable.

Nearly a century ago, a proposal for Rockaway independence nearly passed through the New York State legislature. It's a wonder it hasn't been revived, so repeatedly have the Rockaways been mistreated by their behemoth patron. Perhaps it will be--I'd certainly vote for it.

The poet Richard Kostelanetz, having recently published "SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony," is currently working on a book about the Rockaways.