The Last of the Bungalows
[nggallery id=”33327″ template=galleryview] How far Far Rockaway has fallen. (The Rockaways are technically in Queens but we’re making a rare geographic exception in this case.) In the 1920s, the seaside community was a popular summer spot for the New York elite. Now, as these recent photos from the intrepid photographer Nathan Kensinger show, the beachside…
[nggallery id=”33327″ template=galleryview]
How far Far Rockaway has fallen. (The Rockaways are technically in Queens but we’re making a rare geographic exception in this case.) In the 1920s, the seaside community was a popular summer spot for the New York elite. Now, as these recent photos from the intrepid photographer Nathan Kensinger show, the beachside bungalows that define the Rockaways in the public’s mind are largely abandoned, though some are occupied by squatters and others are being used for illicit activities like dog-fighting. Sad, indeed. Check out the Kensinger website for more interior and exterior photos.
Far Rockaway: Abandoned Bungalows [Kensinger]
My family and so many of our friends rented bungalows on Beach 24th – Beach 26th streets for many consecutive summers. I spent my summers there as a boy in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Many fond memories of great times living simple lives on the beach. There were men who would walk the beach carrying two brown paper shopping bags – one for potato knishes, and the other for kasha knishes.
There is no going back to those times, of course. But, the bungalows could still be heaven for middle class families if they had been preserved.
My grandfather had a similar bungalow on Midland Beach in Staten Island in the 20’s and 30’s and my father spent his boyhood there.
What a stupid waste of unique places to build priceless memories.
I hope this doc gets finished soon. There was a screening a while back at The Museum of the City of New York. Families who still live in bungalows there showed up and spoke. As mentioned above, there are some clusters of these building that are kept up.
http://www.thirteen.org/archive/historyanddocumentary/the-bungalows-of-rockaway/1537/
The neighborhood from Beach 117th to the edge of Riis Park is quite lovely. Not all the houses are in great condition but many are.
For shreds of former beach places gone bad, take a look in the Hammel area around Beach 90th St. There are also quite a few little buildings in rear yards that look like they were built as rooms at the beach. Many of them seem to now be inhabited year round.
The area around Beach 29th or so is quite weird, too. I went to look at the church hall there in the early 2000’s and due to serious flooding in the streets had to walk way out of my way through garbage filled open fields to reach the place. The church hall, really a gymnasium, had a sinking slab condition. The change in elevation from the edges of the room to the center was better than 4′. It looked like a great place to practice skateboarding, but instead of sports there were seniors from the community eating lunch at canting tables.
In the past few years there have been some nice and some not so nice condos built. There were some with cutaway upper corners mounted with pergolas that looked especially nice. It will be interesting to see how some of these new buildings fare over time in the salt air and rougher winters.
FYI, we owned two of these bungalows, in the 80’s and 90’s. We tried to make a go of renovating them and using them as a city retreat by the ocean. The beach and the boardwalk are quite nice there. We ended up renting them out, and finally selling them.
I don’t think Manhattanites without cars are looking for weekend homes on the subway line… anyway, why does it need to cater to them? Plently of people from all over the city enjoy going to Rockaway beach, Jacob Riis Park, etc
I wasn’t saying that they can’t go to the Rockaways. But having an affordable weekend getaway place accessible via the subway would have been a great way to sell people on the idea, especially Manhattanites without cars.
The end of the A line at Beach 116 in Rockaway beach is a perfectly nice place for a day trip, so not sure why people on the UWS can’t go for there as you alude to, maybe sans weekend house. People shouldn’t get the impression that the whole peninsula is a mess like those pictures above..
There used to be huge multistory cedar shake houses in Far Rockaway, but they’re long gone. Those were the houses that were built for the “elite”, if you want to use that term. The thing is, I know of some that were knocked down as the area declined, but nothing was built to replace them…
What a shame. What happened in East Rockaway is a prime example of misplaced priorities and poor judgement calls among an urban planning elite with limited forsite. Of course, good old Robert Moses played a role in the demise of the bungalows, too. The decision to put in large scale, high rise housing in East Rockaway ultimately killed the community. There are locations sprinkled around the city where bungalows still exist and have not fallen into neglect like this. But the Rockaways probably had the largest concentration of them. It’s unfortunate. Someone with the right skill and promotion skills could have possibly seen the charm in these bungalows decades ago, renovated them and marketed them as an alternative for city residents to expensive summer weekend places in the Hamptons and the Jersey shore. Just try to imagine upper West Siders getting on the A train on summer weekends to head to their rentals at the shore. Hey, one can dream. Go ahead and laugh. No one ever imagined the High Line would one day be a beautiful park.