The following article appeared in NEWSDAY, March 4th, 2001
IN THE STILL OF WINTER, ROCKAWAY BEACH WONDERS WHEN THE ECONOMIC TIDE WILL RISE AGAIN

By Patrick Fenton. Patrick Fenton is a freelance writer.

TO WALK THROUGH Rockaway Beach in the winter is like listening to a Van Morrison song. A sense of sadness hangs over it, the empty beach, the alleys laced between the last of the summer bungalows, the weary faces of old men and the bored faces of young barmaids.

Here, the past is omnipresent. And in the grayness of winter, long-time denizens sit in the last Irish bars, oases such as the Palm Gardens on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, where the best whiskey is on the top shelf, and on Saturday nights, couples slow-dance to the Everly Brothers' "Let It Be Me." "I used to be a manager for the arcades in Rockaway Playland in the '70s," says Margie Romanski. "I ran 'The Bonanza,' 'The Shooting Gallery,' the 'Skee-Ball.' I was about 17 then. A lot of memories there. A lot of my family worked there. It was a community thing, you know? It was the only thing we had in Rockaway." Her friend, Denise Durant, 46, pipes in.

"I operated the kiddie rides there when I was a teenager," Durant says. "I thought it was so huge when I worked there, and then when they tore it down I couldn't believe that it all fit on one block." It was impossible to have been brought up in Rockaway and not have been touched, in some way, by Playland. It ran like a constant theme through life there. The evening of July 15, 1985, a single blast fired from a shotgun during a robbery rang out there, and a woman lay dead behind a food concession stand.

That was the beginning of the end for Rockaway Playland.

Tom Zamplione, 18, who works at Last Stop luncheonette, remembers another lost fixture - Surf Side Cinema.

"They closed it down about eight years ago," he says. "They could have kept that open. It's not just the young people, there's really not much to do for anyone around here during the winter." As you drive on side streets, parts of the hidden Rockaway emerge.

You see grand, old three-story buildings that once were boarding houses teeming with vacationers from more urban parts of the city. And cozy Irish saloons that still serve a glass of tap beer for a dollar.

On Beach 101st Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard are rows of historic summer bungalows dating from the early 1900s called the Hollywood Cottages.

Next to them is the Irish Circle, a roadhouse from the same period that's now a popular bar.

And if you go further along Rockaway Beach Boulevard to Beach 98th Street, directly across the street from the sight of the old Playland, you'll find another Rockaway landmark, Boggianoes & McWilliams, recently renamed the Tap & Grill.

The owner, Andy Cholakis, who lures customers throughout the winter with tall glasses of beer for $1.50 and corned beef cooked in stout, plans to restore it to its original appearance.

Long-time customer Pete Leonard, 75, still calls the place Boggianoes.

"It's like what the Statue of Liberty is to New York, this is what Boggianoes is to Rockaway," he says.

Asked about the future of Rockaway, he points a finger toward Rockaway Parks Estates: rows of new homes - ranging in price from $235,000 to $275,000 - that rise from the ashes of Playland. "It looks like it's getting better. I heard that they have sold every one of them," he says.

John Baxter 63, an Independence Party member recently elected as district leader in the 23rd Assembly District, has a "show it and they will come" approach to reviving Rockaway.

"The city is not promoting Rockaway," he tells a visitor on a drive on the Shore Front Parkway. "We have without a doubt one of the best beaches on earth here, clear white sand. All they have to do is show it to people and they will come here." "You have beautiful oceanfront property that has been laying vacant for more than 35 years. It's horrendous," says Mirian Couglin, who is the tour director at the Rockaway Museum, housed in the offices of the Wave, a weekly newspaper since 1893.

"Where can you live in New York City where you have seven miles of boardwalk and a beach? There is no place like it. The hope is that maybe the city will open its eyes," she says.

It's hard to roam Rockaway in the cold months without hearing stories from the locals about the one-time destruction of the Arverne neighborhood by the City of New York.

Joel Hamberger, 53, who grew up on Beach 54th Street, remembers it as a teenager in the 1960s - the day he watched his entire neighborhood being bulldozed to the ground.

He remembers hearing a sound like wood cracking, and men who "hooked up huge hoses and they started to water the houses down to keep the dust from rising. And then they just took a John Deere tractor and they mowed it over, block by block." They started down on Beach 28th Street, and when they got up to his neighborhood they took out Moe's Candy Store, Pat's Pizza Parlor, Milder's Drug Store, the local barber shop, and all the rows of summer cottages and boarding houses.

All you could hear for miles was the cracking of wood and glass. And then they didn't stop until they got as far up as Beach 73th Street.

"It happened so fast," he says. "And then your whole childhood was gone. They did it all in the name of 'urban renewal.'" Almost 40 years have passed and the city still hasn't built anything on the scarred acreage known as Arverne by the Sea.

"I call it plastic-bag land now," Hamberger says, "where all the discarded plastic bags of Rockaway seem to wind up." Even now, the city is seeking proproposals from developers for a new Arverne by the Sea - with housing, stores a school and open spaces - but many in the community remain skeptical.

The empty lots of Arverne remain, an awesome sight that can take your breath away when you see them for the first time.

They start on Beach 28th Street and run all the way to Beach 73rd Street - 41 blocks of desolation, like a town devastated by a bomb.

The old sidewalks remain, and rows of black and silver fire hydrants dating from the 1940s, forged with the words "Made in America by the A.P. Smith Co. East Orange N.J." Stumps of wood from razed houses stick out of the earth, and here and there stand the remains of the homes' concrete foundations.

No houses, no mailboxes, no stores. But the streets are still numbered, Beach 54th St., Beach 55th St., Beach 56th St. At their end, in most cases, are the wooden ramps leading up to the boardwalk.

You choose a ramp and walk, past broken glass and litter, to the edge of the beach. And as you look toward the ocean and the raw beauty of it-a dark green sea welling up, rolling then crashing on empty sands-you realize John Baxter might be right: Show it, and someday they will come.
 

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