A Decade after Sandy, The Rockaways Are Reimagining Themselves in the Face of an Uncertain Future
Rockaway Beach, Queens — surfing, skating, boutique hotels, and a perpetual conflict between the forces of gentrification and climate change
I was sitting on my towel drinking a beer and watching the tide come up after paddling around a crowded and mushy knee-high Father’s Day swell when I overheard two men speaking on my right.
“I have to make it out to Ventura,” one said to the other.
I stood up and walked over to them.
“Excuse me. Did you just say Ventura?”
The man confirmed, and I told him I was from there, at which point his friend’s face lit up as he said, “I live there!”
The two were in The Rockaways to check out the new skate park that had just opened in September — one aspect of a recovery and revitalization effort that arose after Hurricane Sandy hit the area in 2012. The skatepark, and the new concrete boardwalk that replaced its wooden predecessor, comprise two components of the $400 million allocated toward the effort so far. Even the sand on which we stood was new — a small patch of the 3.5 million cubic yards (enough, according to The New York Times, to fill the Empire State Building twice over) trucked into the area to replenish the peninsula’s ten-mile stretch of storm-desiccated beaches.
The skate park itself was the culmination of years of local advocacy efforts, which initially raised money to construct what would become known as the Skatelite bowl, a plywood skatepark that stood for seven years before it was razed once the Mayor’s Office and the Queens Borough President secured $3.5 million in funding for the new park.
With its pristine white concrete nearly blinding passersby, and its winding snake run, bowled out corners, new grind rails, curbs, hubbas and ledges, the hope is that the park will attract greater crowds of sports enthusiasts and spectators. And it’s hard to deny that the park, along with the new boardwalk, all nestled along New York’s only public “surfers only” beach, is reminiscent of the Venice Beach I’d visited when I still lived in California. It’s not hard to imagine that last year’s marijuana legalization legislation in the state might produce a new cottage industry of dispensaries along the beach, not unlike the head shops of Venice. And the presence of our man from Ventura was a very, very, very small indication that word was spreading.
The two men looked like they were in their mid- to late-twenties, each of them about six feet tall. And the one who said that he lived in Ventura looked very much like most any guy I’d grown up around. He was shirtless and wearing a trucker cap, holding a Styrofoam tray with a burrito in one hand while balancing his bike, which had his skateboard strapped to the handlebars, with the other. I’d be lying if I said I remembered either of their names. It was that sort of conversation rooted in nothing but a common place of origin. We exchanged references to some hometown haunts, but soon realized we shared nothing else in common.
Still, his presence was a memory of home, and a moment of serendipity. Even though I’ve lived in New York for more than seven years, this summer was the first time I’d ever really spent much time in The Rockaways. It wasn’t until the lockdown that it made any sense for us to own a car, and my father decided he wanted to give me his old ’92 Jeep as a present for having completed my master’s degree. We paid to have the car shipped out from California, and soon the Jeep granted us access to the world beyond our immediate neighborhood without the heightened risk of public transit.
In fact, our first post-vaccination trip was to The Rockaways. My girlfriend Danielle is a social worker at a hospital in Brooklyn, and when she’d heard that they’d recently opened The Rockaway Hotel, the peninsula’s first boutique hotel, it was both just close enough and just far enough to and from home to feel like an escape from the city.
When we arrived at the hotel and stepped out onto our room’s balcony, I couldn’t help but feel a shock of nostalgia — a jolt of homesickness. The squat bungalow houses, the cyclists along the boardwalk, reminded me of the older beachfront neighborhoods in Ventura. But it was when I looked just beyond the infrastructure and noticed the waves breaking along the shore that all these feelings became a yearning.
It’s always been hard for me to articulate why I can’t call places like Coney Island a real beach. Ask anyone who grew up on the California coast about it, and they will tell you how confused they become when they fly to some gulf or east coast state, or even further inland, and hear someone describe a trip to the beach, only to learn that they’re referring to a lake or a river. For a Californian, there are lakes and there are rivers, but lakes have shores. Rivers have banks. For us, the term “beach” is pretty much reserved for the stretch of sand that rests against the open sea.
To be clear, these shores are beaches. But a Californian’s platonic idea of a beach is something in flux, a force of nature — sound and fury signifying something deep within our psyches. Yes, there is the same nostalgic memory of running through the sand as a naked baby with a plastic bucket and shovel; and there’s the same perception of the beach as a site of recreation, rest and relaxation. But on top of that there is the near-constant sound of waves crashing against the shore. And it was the absence of that sound when Danielle first took me to Coney Island, where the ocean is as flat and quiet as a lake, that made the beach feel as strange and foreign to me as Danielle must have felt when I first took her to visit my family in New Mexico, where the silence we experienced our first night there was so absolute that we could hear our own blood pumping in our heads.
The waves I saw that weekend were about head high — not insane, but clearly surfable, as made evident by the dozens of spear-shaped forms coasting and crashing along the wave’s faces. But I hadn’t seen waves like that since the last time I’d been home, nearly two years earlier, and the sight was enough to make me reimagine my east coast life as something that might look more like the life I would’ve had if I’d stayed in Ventura.
Two weeks later, I bought a 7’6” board from Station, a surf shop just a few blocks away from the Beach 90th Street — the primary break along the peninsula. Summer had finally arrived and the classes I’d been teaching the previous semester were finished, so I went out on a Wednesday morning and paddled beyond the modest shore break and into the line-up.
It was the first time I’d surfed in at least seven years, and I could feel my shoulders burn as they struggled to find some fluidity while paddling. The water temperature was probably in the low sixties. Cold, but not much different than what I remembered back home. Ventura, just north of Los Angeles and just south of Santa Barbara, is along California’s central coast, and the water stays moderately cool year-round. I definitely would’ve been more comfortable in a wetsuit — and I was pretty much the only person surfing without one — but the cost of a new suit that would be thick enough for the winter was nearly as much as a new surfboard. Since I was eager to get back in the water, I figured I could buy the board now and save up to buy the wet suit when I needed it.
You don’t have to work hard to catch a wave on a board like mine, which was why I bought it. It’s large enough to allow you to pick up speed quickly, and small enough to still allow some maneuverability — something I desired so that I could avoid hitting other surfers in the crowded line-up. Still, I wasn’t certain that I’d have any luck, and as I paddled out, I worried that I’d made a stupid purchase with money I didn’t have on a thing I didn’t need and that I would hardly ever use. But no sooner had I paddled out than did I find myself setting up for the first wave of a set, and before I knew it I was gliding on the face of an ankle-biter of a wave — the small sort of beach break a parent might push their kids into when they first start learning, and that I’d later learn was considered “Rockaway surfable.” But still, it was surfing, and it was enough to trigger a lifetime of memories and interests — a part of me that I had long ago become convinced I’d never get back.
I’ve been out in the water at least once or twice a week since then — as much as my responsibilities will allow, and every time I am reminded of the beauties and rewards and contradictions not just of surfing, but of humanity’s relationship with the sea.
And Rockaway Beach is a particularly complex satellite of the surfing world. Its culture and its shore have been shaped and reshaped by waves of neglect and gentrification; of natural disaster and revitalization; of the ebbing and flowing of surfing’s popularity. And beyond or in spite of all of those factors, the surf culture that has taken shape here over the decades is unique, vibrant, in many ways the antithesis of the culture I had experienced in Ventura. Here in The Rockaways, black-owned surf shops and black surf clubs define the culture — and the culture they have defined is one that is more tolerant and inviting than anything I’d ever experienced in California.
This isn’t to say that I don’t miss home. But speaking even for a brief amount of time with that guy from Ventura somehow also left me a little off balance, as if I’d seen something out of my subconscious wash up on the beach. The sound of the man’s voice, the way that he dressed, everything about him…
When I returned to my towel, I realized that the sight of him was unsettling because he didn’t remind me of a person from back home, but some simulacrum of so many people from back home — a being from out of the uncanny valley. I think part of that feeling came from the fact that somehow this guy from a beach town looked so out of place in The Rockaways, and it was only later that I realized that the reason for that was because there is a fundamental difference between the beaches and beach towns I’d grown up in, and the one in which we were currently sitting. And that difference is that in California every element of a small beach town is intended to signify the fact that you are currently in a small beach town. There are shops in Ventura dedicated to selling driftwood signs and baskets full of seashells for the bathroom. The city even invested thousands of dollars into a neon sign visible from the highway that contains the local government’s most recent branding campaign designating Ventura as “California’s last real beach town.”
In contrast to that, The Rockaways persists as a beach community with a vibrant surf culture in spite of the economic, environmental and other elements that suggest that no such culture ought to survive these waters.
In the summer months, the two worlds look almost identical — beaches crowded with tourists and line-ups crowded with soft foam surfboards and schools of casual learners. But come September, the tourists will vanish, and what remains of the Rockaway surfing world will simply be the people willing to shiver in the cold Atlantic waters. My hope is to be out there shivering with them, but I know that even then I’ll still be on the outside.
