Rockaway In the Midst of Change
A slow renaissance both helps and hurts the poor.
On days when he doesn’t see a doctor for his chronically painful leg conditions, Clifford Sanders spends much of his time with old friends on street corners in the Edgemere section of the Rockaway peninsula. Some of the men lounge on folding chairs, but Sanders, 61, stands to keep his legs from stiffening.
“We just talk about the old times, how it used to be and all that,” Sanders said, shifting his weight awkwardly as he speaks. He has long sideburns and a goatee, both tipped with white hair. His eyes are dull and bloodshot. He wears a thin undershirt and a baseball hat with an uneven brim from the 1996 Super Bowl.
“It’s sure rougher than back the way it used to be,” Sanders said. “More guns. More drugs. Just a whole lot going on that sure wasn’t going on then.”
Sanders has spent most of his adult life in the eastern half of the Rockaways. When he arrived from South Carolina in 1972, the Rockaway’s old beach tourism industry—peaking in 1947 with over 225,000 mostly white working-class summer residents—was a fading memory. He watched as bungalows were razed and replaced by high-rise public housing units. Today, he’s witnessing a slow but certain renaissance with the development of middle- and high-income housing on five miles of oceanfront property. He believes these changes ultimately will make the Rockaways a better place to live, but worries what they’ll mean for him and other long-time, low-income residents.
Sanders rents a room in a men’s boarding house in Far Rockaway. Years ago he lived with his family in one of the peninsula’s many cold-water bungalows. Today only a smattering of the bungalows remain: most were condemned and razed in the 1960s and 70s as part of a federal urban renewal plan, including the 30 shacks that Groucho Marx once owned as a real estate investment in the 1920s.
“It was nice then. Didn’t see none of this,” Sanders said, pointing towards a 20-story public housing unit. The building was the site of a gang-related homicide in December 2006, according to police. “Can’t even go in there now. If I see [friends living in public housing], they gonna come out here. I ain’t going in there.”
The source of east Rockaways’ decline is much debated. Some attribute it to the rise of jet travel, which enabled New Yorkers to more easily vacation in far-off locales while also placing the Rockaway peninsula directly beneath the flight path of one of the world’s busiest airports. Once vacationers stopped coming, shops closed, year-round residents moved out and bungalows fell into disrepair.
The city built dozens of public housing units in the peninsula’s eastern neighborhoods of Arverne, Edgemere, and Far Rockaway to accommodate the post-World War II influx of domestic and foreign migrants. Local historians Lawrence and Carol P. Kaplan have estimated that although these neighborhoods housed only .05 percent of Queens’ population in the years after World War II, they contained over 50 percent of Queens’ public housing by the 1970s. In 2006, the Rockaways’ median household income was nearly $5,000 less than the city’s median income of $38,518, with an unemployment rate 30 percent higher, according to statistics from the Department of City Planning.
For his first 25 years as a New Yorker, Sanders worked as a mechanic operating the machines that produced disposable plastic grocery bags. The Far Rockaway plant closed in the mid-1980s. He no longer works because the surgeries to replace his right hip and remove blood clots from his left leg have made him considerably less mobile.
Sanders first remembers drugs and gangs appearing in the late 1970s. Around the same time, the beaches started closing and falling into disrepair. Today they are inaccessible and heavily littered—much of the litter from the same disposable plastic bags that Sanders used to manufacture. He says he hasn’t been to the beach in 15 years.
“Back then, you could even get your blanket and sleep on the beach on the nice nights,” he said. “No one would bother you. You hardly ever heard about a gun.”
Sanders said he is optimistic about the future of the Rockaways because of recent development of private condos up and down the peninsula. Construction has brought jobs for many of his friends. He expects that influxes of well-heeled neighbors will bring improved services and retail options for everyone. But he also believes the recent gentrification has resulted in increased tension between low-income residents and police. He and his friends believe officers have enforced restrictions against loitering and other small infractions more vigorously since more affluent neighbors have moved in. One of his friends, Edward Wilson, 47, showed a ticket he recently received for riding his bike on the sidewalk in a non-pedestrian area and suggested police never would have enforced such an infraction years ago.
The tension Sanders and his friends speak of recently came to a head in a September 15th rally in Far Rockaway organized by the local NAACP chapter. Protesters decried what they consider the 101st Precinct’s excessive use of force and arbitrary searches. Area residents filed 43 complaints against the police department through August 31, 12 more than the same time the year before, according to police.
“[The police] just mess with anyone who been living here,” said John Sanders, 51, a friend of Clifford’s who lives in Edgemere. “It’s like they trying to close down the neighborhood.”