Rockaway, Queens
The Rockaway Peninsula, commonly referred to as The Rockaways or Rockaway, is a peninsula at the southern edge of the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, New York. Relatively isolated from Manhattan and other more urban parts of the city, Rockaway became a popular summer retreat in the 1830s. It has since become a mixture of lower, middle, and upper-class neighborhoods. In the 2010s, it became one of the city's most quickly gentrifying areas.
The peninsula is divided into nine neighborhoods or sections, with Riis Park in between two of such sections. From east to west, they are:
- Far Rockaway, from the Nassau County line to Beach 32nd Street;
- Bayswater, located to the northeast of Far Rockaway, along the southeastern shore of Jamaica Bay
- Edgemere, from Beach 32nd Street to Beach 56th Street;
- Arverne, from Beach 56th Street to Beach 77th Street;
- Rockaway Beach, from 77th Street to Beach 97th Street;
- Rockaway Park, from Beach 98th Street to Beach 126th Street;
- Belle Harbor, from Beach 126th Street to Beach 141st Street;
- Neponsit, Beach 141st Street to Beach 149th Street;
- Riis Park, Beach 149th Street to Beach 169th Street;
- Breezy Point, from Beach 169th to the western tip. This includes the smaller areas of Roxbury and Rockaway Point, as well as Fort Tilden
Etymology
The name "Rockaway" may have meant "place of sands" in the Munsee language of the Native American Lenape who occupied this area at the time of European contact in the early 17th century. Other spellings include Requarkie, Rechouwakie, Rechaweygh, Rechquaakie and Reckowacky, transliterated in Dutch and English by early colonists. The indigenous inhabitants of the Rockaways were the Canarsie Native Americans, a band of Lenape, whose name was associated with the geography. The name Reckowacky was used to distinguish the Rockaway village from other Mohegan villages; "Reckowacky" means "lonely place", or "place of waters bright". This area was mistakenly documented as occupied by a band of Mohawk people in a 1934 source; this Iroquoian-speaking tribe primarily occupied the Mohawk River valley in central New York, north and west of the Hudson River and Long Island.Other interpretations of the peninsula's indigenous name have also been proposed. One possible interpretation is "Reckonwacky", which translates to "the place of our own people", while another is "Reckanawahaha", which translates to "the place of laughing waters". Other phrases, such as "lekau" "lechauwaak", also referred to the area's geography.
History
Early history
In September 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew were the first Europeans recorded as seeing the area of the Rockaways and Jamaica Bay. Hudson was attempting to find the Northwest Passage. On September 11, Hudson sailed into the Upper New York Bay, and the following day began a journey up what is now called the Hudson River in his honor.By 1639, the Mohegan tribe sold most of the Rockaways to the Dutch West India Company. In 1664, the English defeated the Dutch colony and took over their lands in present-day New York. In 1685, the band chief, Tackapoucha, and the English governor of the province agreed to sell the Rockaways to a Captain Palmer for 31 pounds sterling. The Rockaway Peninsula was originally designated as part of the Town of Hempstead, then a part of Queens County. Palmer and the Town of Hempstead disputed over who owned Rockaway, so in 1687 he sold the land to Richard Cornell, an iron master from Flushing. Cornell and his family lived on a homestead on what is now Central Avenue, near the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. At his death, Cornell was buried in a small family cemetery, Cornell Cemetery.
19th century
The Cornell property was split into 46 lots in 1808 following a partition lawsuit. Several wealthy New Yorkers created the Rockaway Association, which brought many of the lots and started developing resorts in the area in 1833. Rockaway became a popular area for seaside hotels starting in the 1830s, with the first resort being founded at Far Rockaway in 1835.In the 19th century, people traveled to the Rockaways by horse-drawn carriages or on horseback. A ferry powered by steam sailed from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. The peninsula's popularity grew in the 1880s with the construction of the Long Island Rail Road's Rockaway Beach Branch to Long Island City and Flatbush Terminal, which facilitated population growth.
In 1878, the eastern community of Bayswater was laid out. One of Bayswater's early developers was William Trist Bailey, who had purchased the property. In 1893, much of Hog Island, a small sandbar island off the coast of Far Rockaway washed away in a hurricane. The remainder of the island eroded by 1902. Plates, along with older artifacts, still wash up along the shore of Rockaway Beach.
File:Rockaway - 'You're one of them air bunco men, b' jing'.jpg|thumb|1899 cartoon by Jimmy Swinnerton shows Father Knickerbocker pulling Rockaway into New York City
The Rockaway Peninsula was originally part of the Town of Hempstead, then a part of Queens County. In 1897, the central peninsular towns of Hammels and Hollands merged, and were incorporated as the Village of Rockaway Beach. Rockaway split from the Town of Hempstead and along with the three western Queens townships of Jamaica, Flushing and Newtown plus Long Island City, formed the new borough of Queens, which was consolidated into Greater New York City in 1898 . The village of Rockaway Park became incorporated into the City of Greater New York on January 1, 1898.
Early 20th century
In the early 1900s, a new railroad station opened up the community and the rest of the peninsula to a broad range of the population. The wealthy no longer had a monopoly on the peninsula, and various amusement parks, stores, and resort hotels attracted people from all over the city to spend a day or a whole summer there. Much of the area was developed by James S. Remsen and William Wainwright. In this era, it became known as "New York's Playground". Around this time, Breezy Point in the Rockaways began as a neighborhood of summer beach bungalows; this kind of house became the most popular type of housing during the summer months. Even today, some of these remain, converted to provide modern amenities, although the vast majority were razed in urban renewal during the 1960s.In 1900, a New York State judge ordered that the land west of Rockaway Park be put up for auction. Belle Harbor and adjacent Neponsit were bought by Edward P. Hatch, who sold it to the West Rockaway Land Company in 1907. Residential lots in Belle Harbor were auctioned off in 1915. Belle Harbor was named by the president of the West Rockaway Land Company, Frederick J. Lancaster, who had earlier developed the Rockaway neighborhood of Edgemere. In 1905, before Lancaster acquired the land, a group of men wishing to form a yacht club entered into a grant agreement with the West Rockaway Land Company. The group, which had named itself the Belle Harbor Yacht Club, bought property from the company for $4,000. The agreement included 200 square feet of land and thirty plots of upland. That same year, the group received corporation status from the State of New York and by 1908 began participating in its first interclub ocean races with some of the city's other yacht clubs. A new street system, based on numbered streets with the prefix "Beach", was laid out for the Rockaways in 1912 to help development.
The central-peninsula neighborhood of Hammels, along with the eastern communities of Arverne and Far Rockaway, tried to secede from the city several times, complaining that consolidation had brought high taxes and poor services. In 1915 and 1917, a bill approving the secession passed in the legislature but was vetoed by then-Mayor John Purroy Mitchel.
Rockaway's famous amusement park, Rockaways' Playland, was built in 1901 and quickly became a major attraction for people around the region. With its growing popularity, concern over swimming etiquette became a problem and early in 1904, the Captain of the NYPD, Louis Kreuscher, issued rules for those using the beach, censoring the bathing suits to be worn, where photographs could be taken, and specifying that women in bathing suits were not allowed to leave the beachfront. The park was grand for its time. One of its most popular attractions, the Atom Smasher roller coaster, would be featured at the beginning of This is Cinerama, a pre-IMAX type movie, in 1952. An Olympic-size swimming pool and a million-dollar midway also were built within the amusement park; they would serve the community for more than 80 years. It was a popular place for New York families until 1985, when insurance costs and competition from major regional parks made it impossible to continue operations.
Arverne became well known as a beachfront community with inexpensive summer bungalows, and hotels of varying levels of expense and luxury as well as amusements and boardwalk concessions, and it also attracted a year-round residential community. One grandiose plan for the community included a canal running through the neighborhood, reminiscent of the Amstel canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The canal was never built; its right-of-way became Amstel Boulevard, which, except for a stub west of Beach 71st Street, was later incorporated into Beach Channel Drive.
The first transatlantic flight departed from Neponsit on the Rockaway Peninsula. On May 8, 1919, four United States Navy Curtis-model seaplanes took off from what is now Beach Channel Drive to Newfoundland, Canada, the Azores Islands, and Lisbon, Portugal. Finally, on May 31, 1919, one of the planes, piloted by Lt. Commander Albert C. Read, arrived in Plymouth, England.