I first heard of what would be called 9/11 on the drive home from my AM water class. The radio report of a plane crashing into one of the twin towers in downtown New York had interrupted whatever ambiguous music played. The report was brief and sketchy.

I assumed it was a fluke, an improbable accident, a �perfect storm� concurrence of bad weather and bad directions from one or more of the N.Y. control towers, something explainable. The black box would be found, the FAA would examine the wreckage, in due time the pronouncement would be made.

I drove the short distance home and turned on the small television in the dinette to find that that anomalous accident was not. There was no storm, no relieving answer, no closure.

It is hard now to recall all the details but I watched with proverbial tightened gut as the second plane came from a clear blue sky to hit the other tower. I watched explosions and fires followed in an anguished hour or so by the impossible collapse of first one burning tower and then the next.

In my memory is a wrenching jumble of images of those towers in flames and then falling over and over and over. The pictures are interspersed with voiceovers telling of the Pentagon attack and the unknown fate of the missing fourth flight.

I remember trying to go through the motions of daily life - sweeping up dog hair, putting wash on, trying to figure what I should get out of the freezer for dinner. Several times I took the dogs outside where I attempted to hang on to normalcy by playing with them. I kept telling them it was going to be all right, that whatever happened I would take care of them and they would take care of me.

That memorable day was a typical boring hot dry mid September Houston day. The skies were clear. At one point three military helicopters flew over in the direction of Ellington but that in itself was not remarkable. It all looked so normal, so incongruously the same.

Then I would go inside and there they would be, those awful scenes on that little television. I could not turn it off. Nor could I turn on the large one.

A friend called later in the day and wanted to meet for dinner. I probably hurt her feelings but I could not, did not want to go. I could not leave my refuge, my walls, my barrier to that bad bad world

I sheltered at home that day and night. I kept to my cave, I hugged the cave dogs that kept me from harm and I watched the planes crash. I watched the explosions, the burning, the collapses over and over again.

Queens developed more slowly than Brooklyn. Its ocean shore was considerably further than Brooklyn`s coast from the business distracts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, while northern Queens, before the development of midtown Manhattan, was even more isolated. One of the earliest sections to attract attention from New York City was Far Rockaway, which had a large seaside hotel called the Marine Pavilion. Built in 1833, it was famous enough by 1850 to have attracted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving.-- Robert A.M. Stern, et al, New York 1900 (1997)

I suppose that if the development of New York City has proceeded differently over the past two centuries, New York could have become not just a port city but a beach city, much like Rio de Janiero, whose black and white mosaic path between the street and the beach becomes a popular promenade for everyone, even businessmen discussing deals that are then consummated when someone pulls out some paper or, nowadays, a laptop computer for recording details. More modestly, the Rockaways could have been the New York City equivalent of Miami Beach, the suburb within the city, attracting the wealthiest people because of its attractive proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. The Rockaways could also have become a literary colony attracting the successors to Washington Irving and Longfellow, not to mention Walt Whitman who likewise patronized the baths at the Marine Pavilion Hotel before its 1864 fire. However, as rich New Yorkers summered further east on Long Island, while New York City writers and artists went elsewhere, the Rockaways remained a seedy outpost that no one passed through as a stepping stone to somewhere else, because it was for most of the twentieth century a dead end in decline.

The Rockaways is the collective name for several neighborhoods strung successively along the 11-mile beach that runs from due west to due east along the southern edge of the borough of Queens. A late addition to New York City, the Rockaways are publicly connected to its patron not by a ferry, like Staten Island, but by two car bridges and the A-train of the metropolitan subway (aka MTA). For the same fare that can take you a few stops in Manhattan you can also ride for over an hour over magnificent Jamaica Bay to the Atlantic Ocean.

The several Rockaway neighborhoods are quite different from one another. Running from west to east they are called Breezy Point, aka Rockaway Point, which is a gated community, officially a coop of single-family houses, whose residents are almost entirely Irish. Many are or were firemen or policemen; some are or were nuns or priests. It has its own lifeguards and its own unarmed police called the Dinkeys. Here I`ve been offered on the street a cup of hard liquor by a cop who would have arrested me for carrying an open beer car on a street of Brooklyn or Manhattan. Next stop, moving east on the peninsula, is Roxbury, a bungalow community on the bay side that is legally affiliated with Breezy Point. On the ocean side of Roxbury is Fort Tilden, the remains of a military base that is now waiting for another use. (Here in the 1960s were the Nike missiles aimed at a Russian air threat.)

Then comes Jacob Riis Park, a state recreation area, that includes a beach directly accessible from Brooklyn over the Marine Parkway bridge that was later renamed after Gil Hodges. (As always in New York, oldtimers tend to favor the previous name.) Next to it, again moving east, are respectively Neponsit with its expensive private houses on spacious plots and Belle Harbor, a more modest residential suburb that came into national news when an American airlines plane destined for the Dominican Republic crashed in the wake of 9/11. Rockaway Park to the west of 116th St. resembles Belle Harbor; to the east of that shopping thoroughfare, it resembles Rockaway Beach with its mix of private houses, industrial spaces, and cottages used only in the summer (aka bungalows).

At the eastern edge of Rockaway Beach are the first of several public housing projects that dot the eastern third of the island as well as the first of several Mitchell-Lama high-rise cooperatives that, by contrast, tend to be located closer to the beach.

Arverne is comparatively empty with a scattering of private houses and a good deal of empty land. Plans for the last have been called Arverne-by-the-Sea Development for the past few decades, but remarkably little has actually been built. East of Arverne is Edgemere and Far Rockaway. (The last includes, on its Jamaica Bay side, a classy residential enclave called Bayswater.) The streets perpendicular to the Ocean have numerals, running from the lower 200s in Breezy Point to the single digits in Far Rockaway. Look at the crime blotter once published weekly in the local Wave newspaper, and you`ll notice that a preponderance of the arrests happen east of Arverne. Indeed, most residents believe that everything to the east of them:that every Beach street with lower numbers than their own:is more problematic and they are all probably right.

Each Rockaway town has a distinctive minority identity. If Breezy Point is almost exclusively Irish, Neponsit residents are predominantly Jewish. In Belle Harbor to its east Jews live beside Irish with a smattering of Italian-Americans. At one time I was the only Jew on the St. Mary`s Star of the Sea Catholic Little League Baseball team, Alan Berliner remembers. The classic memoir about growing up Jewish among Catholics is Donna Gaines` Misfit`s Manifesto (2003). The principal employer for many people residing in Mitchell Lama coops constructed east of 106th Street during the 1960s, as well as the more recent housing built over the ruins of Playland, is New York City.

In Jamaica Bay are many islands, some much larger than others, only one of which is legally occupied. Broad Channel, as it is called, is the connecting pathway not only for the automobile bridges from Queens to the Rockaways but for the Metropolitan Transit which is the official moniker for the subway that runs all night into Rockaway Beach. To outsiders Broad Channel is best known for its bird sanctuary. Though not in the Rockaways proper, it nonetheless shares the same community board, among other characteristics. As New York City had always owned all the land in Jamaica Bay into the 1980s, Broad Channel was a squat, as we would say, on which modest people, mostly of Irish ancestry, built bungalows. A New York City guidebook from around 1980 recommends observing all the home renovation tools lying about, explaining that since the people residing there didn`t own their land, they couldn`t get homeowner`s loans from any bank. Sometimes the shabbiness was simply an exterior front. I`ve been reliably informed that one pubic building that looks run-down on its outside actually has an elegant interior known only to those entering inside it.

In 1990, Mayor Edward I. Koch persuaded the City Council to let the Broad Channel people simply appropriate the land on which they lived. This move enabled the residents there not only to fix up their houses but to sell them, often at a handsome profit. Until 9/11, the World Trade Center was visible from the east side of the island; the lower Manhattan skyline, albeit less impressive, still is. Though no Jews or African-Americans are known to reside in Broad Channel to this day, this ‘hood too has certainly revived over the past two decades.

Nothing would vitalize Jamaica Bay more than permitting people to use, if not occupy, the other islands in a kind of homesteading familiar from the 19th century, where someone inhabiting an island previously unused, fortifying it against the threats of Nature, could claim title to it. As most of the islands are small, developers wouldn`t bother with it. More than once I`ve dreamed about declaring another island in Jamaica Bay to be an Independent Republic with myself as its King. However, until the status of these islands is civilized, the legitimate fear is that the Federales would take me away before sundown.

In the wake of WWII Arverne`s populace was predominantly Jewish, many of whom had Communist or fellow-traveling politics; now it is mostly Caribbean, which is the most general term occurring to me to neighbors from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Belize, and Guyana. Russian immigrants, so visible in Brighton Beach across Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, are scarce in the Rockaways; the only Russians known to me reside in one large Edgemere apartment building. Far Rockaway itself, once predominantly secular Jewish, now accommodates mostly African-Americans and Latinos, along with some orthodox Jews whose large families dominate the Bayswater mansions. ``If you want to make enemies quickly,`` Vince Castellano once told a New York Times reporter, ``go into one neighborhood and refer to it by the name of the next neighborhood. You can`t go to Neponsit and refer to it as Belle Harbor. Curiously, no one known to me can identify any White Anglo Saxon Protestants currently residing in the entire Rockaways, though all agree that at least one must. (East Asians, Chinese and Japanese, are also scarce.) Given that people in the Rockaways constitute less than two per cent of the City`s population, it was shocking to discover that a much larger percentage of those killed in 9/11 lived there, mostly as firemen and back-office finance workers.

Another way to locate the Rockaways is to consider it the first of the four sandbars that run parallel to Long Island. The second has Atlantic Beach on one end and Long Beach on the other. The third includes Jones Beach, and the last is Fire Island, which has Robert Moses State Park on its western end. None more disadvantaged than the others, all face the same Atlantic Ocean with roughly the same sand as, say, the Hamptons. If Long Beach is accessible by train from Penn Station (and Fire Island by a Penn Station train that takes you to a bus that takes you to a ferry), only the Rockway beaches are served directly by the metropolitan subway and buses.

My family probably went to the Rockaways when I was young, because we summered in nearby Lido Beach just after WWII. I particularly recall Ski Ball at Playland. Not until1990 did I rediscover the Rockaways. As Kate Yourke, the granddaughter of Nicolas Slonimsky (whose choice writings I edited), told me that the beach at 67th St. (Arverne) was empty during the summer, I remember going on a very hot July day and finding perhaps five people along with two lifeguards in the early afternoon. By the end of the day, perhaps 70 people had shown up, nearly all of whom looked dark-skinned. My Greenwich Village friend Peter Andros later told me of growing up in Arverne in the 1960s and 70s, noting that when New York City condemned all the housing between the elevated subway tracks and the beach, between 80th St. and 35th St., the result was for nearly two continuous miles the only empty oceanfront property in North America.

I returned to Rockaways in the summer of 1999, searching for an ocean beach in lieu of the bay at Coney Island. Noticing again the scarcity of people, even on a hot July day, I soon afterwards began to consider relocating there. Since the Rockaways looked cheap as well as déclassé, much as SoHo did in the late 1960s (and the Lower East Side did in the 1970s and Williamsburg did during the 1980s), I was surprised that bohemians who worked mostly at home, such as myself, hadn`t discovered it long ago. Preferring to spend my remaining years close to the ocean and yet in New York City, I figured that Coney Island-Brighton or the Rockaways would be most appropriate places. Property in the former was scarce and too expensive; in the latter, it was far more plentiful.

At first I looked in Rockaway Beach, tentatively considering building in an empty lot behind an existing structure and then in an entirely empty lot. For one reason or another, these were not feasible. A second disadvantage concerned the subway route. To get to Rockaway Beach from the A-train, you had to change to a shuttle at Broad Channel in the Jamaica Bay, and this could be an unpleasant nuisance, especially in fearsome weather. That made me want something closer to the A-train that runs from the eastern Rockaways directly to Manhattan. Around here, recall, I bathed on Kate Yourke`s advice a decade ago. When I heard that a plot of land with an optimal location was available, I purchased it. Now I am building a studio with twice as much space as I`ve had in SoHo.

In the heart of Arverne, my house sits on the same street as three churches, including a kind of megachurch whose pastor is a local celebrity. (When I entered the church property to visit him, a cop cruising by told me that he was away. When I saw the pastor later, he told me that the cop said a gray-bearded white guy was looking for him.) Most of my neighbors on the streets to the north are dark-skinned Caribbean homeowners with two-family houses (and thus tenants). Some descend from Hispanic ancestry; others South Asian; most African. One reason why this west Arverne neighborhood is rarely mentioned in the crime blotter might be the lack of population. A second might be the complete absence of taverns that are so plentiful in other parts of the Rockaways.

Soon after I rediscovered the Rockaways, it started to change. On the empty land left by the demolition of Playland three decades ago in Rockaway Beach, a developer named Jonathan Miller started to build a few two-family houses and then many more that were quickly sold at 250 grand apiece. Calculating that he had expired the number of possible buyers, Miller then built a complex with dozens of apartments to rent. Another large developer got a contract from New York City to develop the long-empty Arverne land between the elevated subway and the ocean. Though this builder was slower than Miller, the promise of its project prompted smaller developers to snap up the empty lots on the bay side of the subway, generally building two-family houses, often in attached pairs. Whole sections of land that had been empty, absolutely empty, for decades now had housing. The most likely customers were young families, many of them New York City employees, probably without children because the public schools were so disreputable.

Property values doubled; those for empty land, tripled, if not quadrupled. Even modest Breezy Point bungalows became so expensive that firemen and policemen can no longer afford to move there. The new co-op requirement of a down payment of at least 50 per cent of the selling price has made purchase even more difficult. A friend who owns there tells me that he can rent his bungalow for several thousand dollars during the summer to former residents who have such fond memories of their summers there. Every month I receive a letter asking to purchase my property whose value has appreciated by a multiple of at least three in the few years since I purchased it.

Neighborhoods that were dismissed only a decade ago as uninhabitable now have new buildings. A privately financed construction boom like no other in New York City has revived a long-depressed area. Jeffrey Gitter, who graduated from Far Rockaways High School in the mid-1970s, tells me that dozens of his classmates have recently purchased property here, as has he. In only the first several years of the 21st Century, the population of the Rockaways has increased five per cent. If the City has a plan for the Rockaways, I don`t know about it (and if it did I`d be scared.)

In advance of my arrival, I began to collect century-old Rockaway postcards that portray a lush and plush beach resort patronized by well-dressed Caucasians, with sprawling grand hotels some of which had over a thousand rooms before the advent of elevators. I now regard these cards as the best surviving representation of a lost world (much as I portrayed the Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin as representing a lost world in a film I made two decades ago). Trying to find a comprehensive history of the Rockaways, I have only a sociological essay, Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan`s Between Ocean & City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York (2003) exposing its decline.

Deciding that the shore-front bungalows were unsightly, as indeed they were, New York City`s Master Builder, Robert Moses, in the late 1930s planned the Rockaways initially by pulverizing the little houses adjacent to the boardwalk from 103rd to 73rd Street. In their stead the City built a four-lane, grass-divided highway, long scarcely used, that is now commonly called the highway to nowhere. (Robert Caro writes that Moses`s original scheme, long forgotten even by him apparently, was to continue the four-lane highway along the Long Island shoreline as far as Montauk.) Were car-parking permitted on its outer lane closest to the boardwalk, scarcely disrupting scant traffic, the public beach for two miles could become more accessible to those coming to Rockaway Beach by car. (Inauspiciously, in the Rockaway neighborhoods to the west, Belle Harbor and Neponsit, street parking is forbidden during the day from the start of May to the end of September, thereby making the beaches there inaccessible to drivers coming from elsewhere.)

In defense of Robert Moses I must note that though destroyed houses, he didn`t destroy beaches, instead sometimes creating them out of recalcitrant land, epitomized by Jones Beach further east along the Atlantic in Long Island, I assume for a reason only implicit to his critics but obvious to me. Like myself, Moses loved to swim, especially in the ocean.

The next major demolition along the Rockaway shore came during the late 1960`s when the City destroyed several hundred modest houses between 73d and 35th Streets in the name of urban renewal, except for a synagogue (later destroyed by fire), a medical center, and a few scattered industrial buildings, all of which the City came to own. For the remainder of the twentieth century, these nominally valuable lands remained empty except for weeds and garbage (as the City, unlike private landlords, cannot be fined by its Sanitation Department). The former houses, shops, and playing fields were demolished, the Kaplans judge. While such destruction was visited on other places in the United States, this area in the Rockaways was the largest of its kind.

The city never should have torn down those bungalows. Today, they could have been summer shares for people who can`t afford Fire Island, never mind the Hamptons. I can recall the names of all the ‘courts` between Beach 56th Street and Beach 56th Pl.: Washington Court, Lincoln Court (where we lived), Washington Court Annex (where a great-aunt, my step-great-grandmother, and my uncle`s mother-in-law lived), Woodrow Cottages, the writer Richard Grayson (b. 1951) remembers. It was an incredible time, very golden in memory now. There were fireworks on the boardwalk one night every week, and we kids would walk to the amusement arcades on the boardwalk down at 35th St. and further up in the 70s. Around Beach 25th Street, evoking this earlier time, are street-front bungalows with modest interior gardens. One of their proprietors, Richard George, is petitioning the authorities to have this remnant designated a Historic District. For years and years, the New York City administrations entertained proposals for the empty confiscated oceanfront property. One scheme proposed the construction of gambling casinos that would purportedly change the Rockaways as they had changed Atlantic City, bringing some glitz to the otherwise dowdy shoreline. Though the singer Frank Sinatra was rumored to be involved, New York State voters defeated a referendum to permit private casinos. Another scheme, whose pictures I`ve seen, included high-rise apartments and a boat marina extending into the Atlantic. World-class developers proposed the construction of a waterfront recreation park that would revive the spirit of Playland with more contemporary sorts of attractions, but it never happened either. One recurring problem was that some of the schemes, particularly the more spectacular, required New York City to provide more infrastructure, as it was commonly called. This particularly meant more bridges and roadways from Brooklyn or Queens; but if only because the development of the needlessly destroyed Rockaways was never a high priority for City officials:not even for mayor Abraham Beame, who regularly rented in Neponsit:little was initiated at City Hall.

One exception to rebuilding in this oceanfront no-man`s land was Ocean Village, a low-rent housing constructed during the mid-1970s around 60th Street. Indisputably an architectural eyesore, this looks decades later like what it was:an experiment in shabby prefabrication. In 2004, the New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon discovered that the people residing there rarely went to the beach at the ocean end of their property because they thought it dirty (which isn`t true during the summer) and they didn`t swim. One truth (probably familiar to Moses) is that beach housing is most appropriate for people who love the ocean, who have that special taste (as I do), much as others like parks with trees (as I don`t); for those disliking the ocean are likely to resent the winter winds. (One of the great sociological distinctions rarely discussed should separate minorities that know how to swim from those that don`t. African-Americans rarely do. Jamaicans only less scarcely do, though immigrants from Belize and Barbados are more likely to swim.)

The first peninsula public housing in the early 1950s in the were the Hammel Houses in eastern Rockaway Beach and then the comparable Arverne Houses on the Bay side of the train. Apartment houses taller than the surrounding structures, they were solid and could be cheap, especially when rent was roughly a quarter of annual income. Grim on the outside, they could be spacious with two or more bedrooms. The initial projects, as they were called, were placed in middle-class neighborhoods to keep them from becoming isolated pockets of poverty. (From 1962 to 1966, when a graduate student at Columbia University, I lived in the low-rent General Grant Houses on the edge of Harlem. Since my wife and I had only fellowships, our rent was less than sixty dollars per month. Across Amsterdam Avenue was Morningside Gardens, a Mitchell-Lama coop. Their Congressman was William Fitts Ryan; ours was Adam Clayton Powell. We shared the same large grocery store.)

When New York City Housing Authority received yet more federal funds in the 1960s to construct additional low-rent housing, politicians learned that middle-class voters objected to locating a project beside them. Neighborhood streets became increasingly dangerous, they claimed; public schools declined. Deciding that additional long-rent apartments couldn`t be constructed in Manhattan or residential Brooklyn, the City placed them in the eastern Rockaways. One result was that these projects became an opportune dumping ground for people who could not be easily employed, who therefore did not need not to reside near jobs in Manhattan or industrial Brooklyn--particularly single mothers living mostly off welfare. Because Vincent J. Cannoto scarcely mentioned the Rockaways in his The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (2001), he wrote me recently, As wrong as we can agree that it is, policymakers at the time thought they were doing the right thing by getting these poor people out of slums and into modern apartments. Because of the social dysfunctions associated with low-income housing projects, one result was a general lowering of property values on the entire peninsula. One of the simplest explanations for juvenile delinquency in densely populated housing is that local gangs encounter little resistance in recruiting youngsters who lack protective fathers. Once a teenager joins a gang, he`s likely to commit crimes that will land him in jail, perhaps leaving more children with absentee fathers along the way. The official statistics for unemployment in the Rockaways have always been alarmingly high in the past decades; so is the figure for the percentage of residents on welfare, implicitly identifying those who would not be employed. So bad did street-level business become in Far Rockaway proper that even Off Track Betting closed its storefront there in the early 1980s. Even today, nowhere in the Rockaways can be found a shopping center, a bookstore, a moviehouse, a coffeehouse, an appliance store, or any of many other amenities associated with places whose population tops 100,000, as does that on the entire Rockaways. Mostly in Rockaway Beach, in the middle 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` aged parents. If near the Atlantic Ocean, some of these offered magnificent views and fresh air that were otherwise unknown in New York City, but also in their isolation kept their occupants away from their children and grandchildren. (Granny can see us only when we want, because she can`t visit us.) According to the Kaplans, the occupants of these caretaking homes have recently constituted as much as 6% of the year-round population. Some of these institutions provided opportunities for entrepreneurs collecting government moneys. Richard Grayson remembers, I actually was hired by a crooked accountant who had a string of foreign MDs who would go into these adult homes (released mental patients from places like Creedmoor) and see them and I`d take them over to have unnecessary lab tests and x-rays done. It was all a Medicare Medicaid scam.

Another of these nursing homes figures in a scandal, still remembered, in the history of the City`s abusing the Rock. One night in September 1998, few hundred frail and disabled people in the city-owned oceanfront Neponsit Health Center suddenly were bundled off, some still dressed in their nursing gowns, to nursing homes and hospitals elsewhere. No advance notice was given, say to concerned relatives. The inmate`s belongings were speedily stuffed into plastic garbage bags. Neighbors recall that many of these nominally helpless people were visibly crying, in part because they didn`t know where they were going. The City attributed the relocation to buildings reports issued months earlier describing structural defects in the decrepit buildings, but one credible rumor circulated at the time was that the mayor wanted to deliver empty oceanfront buildings on the edge of the wealthiest Rockaway neighborhood to a favored developer. The complex still belongs to the City and is still empty. However, in 2003, New York City agreed to pay $18,000 apiece to 278 victims of its caprice, five million bucks in sum, in addition to educating nursing home operators to care for transfer trauma. In truth, the bucolic beachfront, lying beyond the vision of common scrutiny, had become an open arena for government-assisted scams and ripoffs. No one expects them to remain empty forever. Other factors contributing to the decline of the Rockaways included the noise that camein the wake after WWII of the construction of Idlewild Airport, later called JFK, on the mainland side of Jamaica Bay. Jet planes took off over the Bay at various angles, sometimes flying over Belle Harbor (until one fell down onto land), other times over Far Rockaway proper. On cloudy days, the favored route was directly over Arverne, where lessons in the public school on 66th Street would regularly pause until the noise subsided. For as long as the supersonic Concrd Jet ran, Rockaway residents in wood-frame houses would also feel the vibration. When Fort Tilden closed down, stores lost customers. As while people fled into the 1970s, the quality of the public school plummeted. Recalling the early 1970s, the filmmaker Alan Berliner remembers a diverse sociological milieu:Irish, Italian, Catholic, Jewish, Black; the full spectrum of lower, middle, and (lower) upper classes, all in the same school. The City constructed a second high school on the peninsula, Beach Channel High in Rockaway Beach and thus closer to the nicer precincts. Though BCHS was meant to specialize in oceanography, by the 1990s it lost that focus, as both high schools had become jail for kids, mostly dark-skinned, who didn`t much want to be there. Outside of Rockaway, the Kaplans write, the impression has persisted that the peninsula is an undesirable place to reside or even visit. By the 1980s, most of its eastern precincts resembled other outer-borough slums. The middle of the peninsula offered beach towns so seedy that, except for 116th Street, they visibly lacked the summertime stores reflecting an invasion in July and August. Only the western precincts of Breezy Point, Neponsit, and Belle Harbor, all visibly Caucasian, survived the otherwise pervasive decline. Long stretches of Atlantic beach have been officially closed in the summer times for a lack not only of lifeguards but bathers. At the beach around 60th Street mentioned before, it`s not uncommon on a perfect beach day to find only two dozen bathers within an area two hundred yards by fifty (or four hundred square yards per bather!) Most come from houses nearby. Favoring this last beach especially for body-surfing, I`ve often found myself and my guests the only non-Hispanic Caucasian (aside from some lifeguards). Most of the other Caucasians coming here speak Polish and little English, I assume because some guidebook for Polish tourists must be recommending 60th Street as a great beach, as indeed it is. For nearly all New Yorkers except those already residing there, not just the Rockaways but even its ocean beaches have long been invisible :off the perceptible NYC map. Oldtimers remember that until 1956 the Long Island Railroad provided faster public transportation to the central Rockaways. In contrast to the current MA express train that takes between 70 and 90 minutes to get from midtown Manhattan to the Broad Channel connections, because it winds through Brooklyn before turning south to the Rockaways, this earlier LIRR car went directly from Penn Station through Queens to a point a few blocks east of the current Rockaway Boulevard MTA station and then connected to the tracks currently used by the MTA over Jamaica Bay and through Broad Channel, reaching Rockaway Beach proper in less than forty minutes. (This differed from another LIRR service, still available, that goes from Penn Station around through Nassau County to reach Far Rockaway in less than one hour.) As the track to Rockaway Boulevard still exists, mostly outdoors, even if rusted, this route could still be revived, more than fifty years later, to deliver the long-promised faster connection from Manhattan to JFK. From time to time private bus companies have offered direct service from Manhattan to the Rockaways, while ferryboats have now and then run from the western Rockaways to Sheephead`s Bay, but these services have so far succumbed from a lack of customers. As the population of the Rockaways increases, one or another of these superior routes will no doubt succeed. Another sign of the fall of the old Rockaways was demolition in the mid-1980s of Playland that was an amusement park similar to that at Coney Island across the Bay but smaller. It had a spectacular roller coaster called the Atom Smasher (that was featured in the 1952 scream-inducing film This Is Cinerama), early versions of fast food, arcades with pinball games and ski ball, which is a kind of bowling that I remember fondly, and much else associated with boardwalk culture. Around 1955, Steve Allen, then a prominent New York City television personality, covered the season`s opening. In its heyday from the 1920s into the 1960s, Rockaway Playland, as it was commonly called, attracted crowds. It was the centerpiece of Rockaway Beach immortalized in a pop song by the Ramones. (Rock, rock, Rockaway Beach, etc.) However, so seedy had Playland become by the 1970s that people stopped coming from elsewhere and it closed. When the price of insurance climbed prohibitively, it was simply leveled, leaving yet more open ocean-front property that persisted for over a decade as another eye-sore sign of Rockaways decline.

Between 149th and 169th Streets is Jacob Riis Park, another Robert Moses project from the 1930s, that the City in 1974 gave to the federal government, which in turn designated it as an affiliate of Gateway National Park that includes Floyd Bennett Field on the other side of Jamaica Bay. (From here Charles Lindbergh took off on his legendary flight to Europe). Built in the 1930s, Riis Park has a magnificent clock that evokes more luxurious earlier days (especially since clocks are rare at NYC beaches). Named after the crusading Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis, who lived in Richmond Hill on mainland Queens, it began as a park for Brooklyn people who came by car to its large parking lot (with over 5000 spaces) or by bus down Flatbush Avenue, preferring not only cooler temperatures in the days before air-conditioning but a oceanfront spaciousness and secure lockers more typical of a beach resort than, say, Coney Island. For the decades initially after WWII, the mile-long Riis Park beach has been as self-segregating as only public parks can be with numbered sections called Bays running from number one in the east, adjacent to Neponsit, up to number 14 in the west, adjacent to Ft. Tilden. Each bay attracts certain groups of people without officially excluding others. (The bay-numbered beaches at Coney Island are likewise self-segregating.) The New York Times reporter Alan Feuer wrote on September 1 2002 that the highest was favored by beer drinkers. In earlier times, it attracted male teenagers, ethnically identified, who would engage in fights and other macho activities daily. (A lifeguard at that time remembers that the tough guys would venture out to a sandbar in the Ocean during low tide only to find themselves embarrassingly unable to swim when the level of the water rose.) Those sections immediately to the east of it, numbered 7 to 13, have long been popular with white families, mostly Italian and Irish in the higher numbers and Jewish in # 7 (as distinct from the Russians who have since the late 1970s have predominated the eastern beaches of Coney Island). As at Coney Island, no signs direct patrons to the beach most appropriate for them. Once they survey the scene, they simply know where to go. Bay # 1 around 1980 or so was New York City`s only nude beach (which is a civilized amenity more common in northern Europe, even at lakes in the middle of the city) until closed down by New York State (forcing Manhattan`s naturist enthusiasts to take a ferry from lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook in New Jersey). In the early 70s, sado-masochists would pitch tents there; but since they didn`t swim, lifeguards didn`t work there. Unattached women would favor bay # 3, some going topless on bay # 2, doubting if gay men would hassle them. More recently, bay # 1 became popular with gay males while # 2 has been patronized by lesbians. Bays 3 to 5 have traditionally been hospitable to blacks, in part because they had African-American lifeguards from the 1950s onwards. The Feuer article mentioned before focused upon black former lifeguards who patrolled bays 1 to 6 during the late 1950s into the 1960s. The crew had more than 20 lifeguards at its height Feuer writes. It was made up of young men from the Bronx and Harlem. They met while swimming for the Porpoise Club swim team, which was run by the Parks Department out of St. Mary`s Recreation Center in the South Bronx. The founder of the crew was the coach of the club, a former Coast Guard officer named Charles Smith. Mr. Smith, universally known as Pops or Smitty, was the chief lifeguard at Riis Park from 1952 to 1964. The chief is still remembered for his discipline mania, such as making his men arrange the trash cans on the beach until they formed a perfect a line. On rainy days when the beach was empty, Smith had his crew run a half mile down the beach then swim back to the starting point. Run, swim. Run, swim, one of them remembered. "I hated rainy days. He was like a father to us. Some of us had fathers, but some of us didn`t. He made us into men." The gay Manhattan poet Edward Field recalls, Facing the ocean at Riis Park, the gay beach was to the left of the family beach, and beyond that, the furthest, was the nudist beach. They overlapped, of course. And plenty of ‘ family men` traipsed over to dig the gays and nudies. During my brief affairette with Frank O`Hara (1955?), Jane Freilicher and her husband Joe (Hazan?) drove us out and we went to the gay beach, where I remember seeing Merce Cunningham with friends on one beach blanket. Needless to say perhaps, Rockaway residents, particularly in Neponsit and Belle Harbor, customarily dismissed it as Grease Park in favor of their own Atlantic beaches which, though officially public, were less accessible to people from elsewhere in New York City. As on-street parking was limited, Richard Grayson remembers, we always made sure we had a friend or a friend-of-a-friend with a driveway we could park in. Also a bathroom and a refrigerator we could use, as none existed on the beach. As the Riis facility ran down simply over time, its magnificent upstairs dining room and interior courtyard both closed, it became less and less attractive, especially to those who could drive out of the City to the newer, better-kept facilities at Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park. Only rarely is the mammoth parking lot at Riis Park more than half full anymore. Bathers coming on public transportation from Manhattan or even most of Brooklyn must take a subway to a bus. Once transfers between the MTA buses and subways became free, more came. Were public transportation to Riis Park more direct, there might even be pressure to reopen its dining room with an ocean view. From time to time, one or another local politician promises to revive the Rockaways with a public swimming pool, if not at Riis Park, then somewhere else. By 2007, even Mayor Michael Bloomberg participated in breaking the ground for one on 73Rd Street. When it is finished, the beach town will become a year-round swim town, as it should be; and that development perhaps will become the leverage that would lead to the return (and arrival) in the Rockaways of other amenities typical of a place of its size and population, not to mention proximity to the Atlantic Ocean.

If the political theme of my SoHo book was that the development of an artists` colony succeeded precisely because it was not planned, no less but artists immigrating there than by City officials, my understanding of the Rockaways is that public officials contributed mightily to its decline in the late twentieth century and that, in the 21st, it is spontaneously reviving, thanks to many individual moves, with minimal encouragement and intelligence from City Hall. In that sense the Rise and Fall of an Artists` Colony resembles the Fall and Rise of New York`s Beach Towns.