Those who spend their summer at Rockaway Beach know how awful this is. That beach — a beautiful expanse of white sand along the southern coastline of Queens — is one of the crown jewels of New York City, leaving anyone who visits marveling at the idea that such a thing could exist just 20 or so miles from Midtown Manhattan....It is also the people’s beach, a breezy bit of heaven for the thousands of New Yorkers who can’t book a getaway to the Hamptons but need an escape from the city’s sticky summers all the same and love the ocean just as much... NYTMay 26, 2018, 12PM
Yes. Except we are better than the Hamptons where they can't see the ocean in one direction and the Manhattan Skyline in the other. And take a subway. Or a ferry.
Today's NY Times devotes considerable space in the main section to the Rockaway Beach erosion and closing issue. A wonderful editorial --
Opinion - Save the People’s Beach at Rockaway
New York’s leaders should push harder to save the city’s vulnerable, beautiful coastline.
And a full page news article (below). If you read the local press like my own paper, The WAVE, this issue has been front and center for a year. We need groins/jettys. The Army Corps of Engineers jumped to out them in Long Beach after Sandy, but has delayed doing so in Rockaway. We have some groins and where they are located there is no erosion.
A Summer Bastion of Beach Culture Is Off Limits
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/...
/nyc-erosion-rockaways-beach-closed.html
- Senior officials in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration have known for at least a year that the sands of Rockaway Beach were swiftly washing away. They heard about it at a town-hall meeting and in City Council hearings. They conducted a $200,000 study.
“We
see the erosion, we’re not blind,” a top Parks Department official said
last June, as residents of the beach-centered community in southern
Queens were raising concern over their shoreline.
The
study results came back in November: Despite obvious erosion, the beach
— which had been replenished at the start of the mayor’s first term —
and its dunes were determined to be “wider than at almost any time in
the last 100 years.”
So the city did not act.
Now,
days before the start of beach season, city officials have dropped a
bombshell on beachgoers and business owners: A half-mile stretch of one
of New York’s most popular and transit-accessible stretches of shoreline
would not open for the season on Saturday. From Beach 91st Street to
Beach 102nd Street, the beach would be off limits, and would likely
remain so for years.
“There
just isn’t enough space to operate the beach,” Liam Kavanaugh, the
first deputy commissioner at the Parks Department, said in an interview
this week. He called the closed section an “erosional hot spot” and said
the city has battled it for years, before problems caused by Hurricane
Sandy in 2012.
How the Rockaways got
to this point is a story of inaction and finger-pointing between New
York City officials and the Army Corps of Engineers, whose mission
includes reducing risk in coastal areas, and which has played a large
role in restoring the region’s coastline after Hurricane Sandy.
Long
before Sandy hit, beach erosion in the Rockaways had been a continuing
concern; a federal study of additional storm protections for the area,
including the possibility of more stone groynes — jetty-like structures
that are perpendicular to shore and trap sand — was ordered in 2003, but
was delayed for years because of lack of funding.
After
the hurricane, federal funds freed up. In 2014, the Army Corps
deposited about 3.5 million cubic yards of sand along the beachfront;
two years later, it released a new draft report for the area.
Things
appeared to be on the upswing, as Mr. de Blasio demonstrated his
interest in bolstering the Rockaways in other ways. A new ferry line
brings towel-toting hordes from Manhattan and Brooklyn to the thin
peninsula’s beaches. The mayor has visited the Rockaways to tout its
revitalization in two of the last three years in advance of the start of
the summer season.
Image
But
many have noticed the retreating sands; some accuse the Army Corps of
dragging its feet in the Rockaways while helping wealthier beach
communities on Long Island and elsewhere.
At
a town-hall meeting in the Rockaways in December, Mr. de Blasio heard
from residents who were concerned about the beach erosion, and vowed to
follow up with the Army Corps of Engineers. The mayor did so in January,
urging the Army Corps’ commanding general to speed up the timeline for
building new stone groynes, strengthening the dunes and adding new sand
in the Rockaways, a project that is slated to begin after the 2019 beach
season.
“I said we need to come to a
vision together,” Mr. de Blasio said on Wednesday at an unrelated news
conference. “We are absolutely convinced that there’s nothing we can do
on our own that will have a lasting impact.”
A
spokesman for the Army Corps, Michael Embrich, said in a statement that
the beaches were designed “for flood-risk reduction to provide
protection for the communities,” adding that they “performed well during
the last storm season in the face of four nor’easters.”
Recreational use, Mr. Embrich said, is the jurisdiction of the city.
The
subject came up again at a City Council hearing last month concerning
the Park Department’s budget. “I need sand in Rockaway,” Councilman Eric
Ulrich, a Republican, said then.
“We
agree that there is sand needed at specific parts of the beach in
Rockaway,” Mr. Kavanaugh replied, but he said it would not be prudent
for the city to spend its own money to dump sand into the ocean.
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City
officials say the severe series of winter storms that buffeted the
coastline this year are the reason the beaches experienced
worse-than-expected erosion after their study had found a robust
beachfront.
All the while, residents of the Rockaways watched as the sands eroded in plain view of one of the busiest sections of the beach.
In
the interview, Mr. Kavanaugh estimated that about 250,000 cubic yards
of sand might be necessary to replenish the problematic section, at a
possible cost of $10 million, but he cautioned that the city had not
done a formal estimate of how much it would cost.
Temporary
fencing, erected this spring, now blocks off entrances to the beach —
though in many sections it has been cut, rolled up or pushed to the
side. Sunbathers abound, squeezed up near the dunes during high tide on
Wednesday afternoon.
Image
In the areas where groynes are present, there has been less erosion. But in the section without them, the sands washed away.
“Trains
stop here; the buses — this is considered the middle of the beach,”
said Fred Catapano, 74, who lounged in a blue beach chair in the
Wednesday sun on a closed section of beach. “They’re trying to take my
favorite spot away from us.”
His
79-year-old brother, Joe, sat nodding next to him; for 40 years they
have been coming from nearby Howard Beach to sunbathe. On Saturday,
Parks Department officers will be directed to keep them, and others, off
the sand.
Closing the beach was a
decision made for safety reasons, Mr. de Blasio said at the news
conference, adding that it had come so late because “we were hoping
against hope we could find another outcome.”
Representative
Gregory W. Meeks, a Democrat who represents the area, faulted the city
for poor communication that he said had prevented local and federal
officials from working together to find a way to open the entire beach.
“We could have been talking about it,” he said, and possibly “found some
money.”
The local economy in Rockaway
Beach is seasonal, a three-month bastion of beach culture a train ride
from Times Square. At the pastel-painted concessions at Beach 97th
Street, Jordan Wolff, 29, said she decided to open a “surf and turf
shack” this year, her first foray into business ownership. She had no
warning from the city, to whom her rent ultimately goes.
“I
would have taken that into account,” said Ms. Wolff, who like the
others who rent beachfront concessions from the city were told about the
beach changes on Monday, just before it was announced publicly. “It’s
not a good year to open a business.”
Along
the boardwalk on Wednesday, a new wooden fence marked “temporarily
closed” blocked an otherwise unobstructed view of the water from the
picnic tables outside the Low Tide Bar.
Its
owner, Michael Powers, 38, talked of business considerations — “our
entertainment is booked already” — and waxed philosophical about the
notion of owning a stretch of beach or barring city residents from the
waters. “It belongs to the people,” he said.
One
possible solution that he shared with the Parks Department earlier in
the day: Allow surfers like himself to extend their narrow space into
the closed section — since lifeguards do not watch the surfers anyway —
and create a large surfing beach that would be a draw even if the beach
is going to be closed to swimmers for years. (Surfing is already
permitted from Beach 87th to Beach 92nd Streets, just east of the closed
area.) A Parks official said the idea was being considered.
In the meantime, Mr. Powers said, “we’re going business as usual.”
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