Since the beaches of Rockaway Beach are constantly drifting away, requiring fresh sands to take their place, it makes sense that new life-forms find their way there, including pleasant British tourists — softish shoulders, neatish beard — steered by their friends’ mums. Human crop rotation, maybe.
This one did not know how much toil and federal and city loot went into the sand under his feet.
You see all these pipes and heavy machinery here?
Just weeks ago they were working 24/7 to rebuild this stretch of Rockaway Beach between Beach 92nd Street and Beach 105th Street, which last year had become so narrow that New York City suddenly closed most of it for the season just days before Memorial Day, a move that made beachside business owners feel insufficiently blessed.
That was last year.
Tides roll in, tides roll out, and what do you know, this year $13.4 million washed up on the shore, in the currency of sand — 348,000 cubic yards of it, pumped onto the beach from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging mission in East Rockaway Inlet.
The strip of beach reopened for swimming this weekend.
“We’re beyond stoked,” said Michael Perzy Powers, co-owner of the Low Tide Bar and High 97 concessions at Beach 97th Street, eyeing a genial midafternoon crowd. Summer frenzy had not yet arrived. But at least this year, Powers felt confident that it will.
“Last year was a struggle,” he said.
A commander from the Corps of Engineers said that if you piled that much sand onto a football field the heap would be 20 stories high. That’s in addition to nearly 3 million cubic yards of sand that was already added to a 2-mile stretch of the beach in 2014, a project that cost $28 million in federal emergency relief funds available after Hurricane Sandy.
Ever since Rockaway Taco opened nearby in 2007, drawing other foodie-friendly vendors to the area, this stretch of the barrier island has been a magnet for off-islanders, including busloads from the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn and the lower east side of Manhattan. (The taco shack closed in 2015, replaced by Tacoway Beach.)
Powers had a thought about that. In the past, he said, the beach stayed open with even more erosion than last year. But that was before the fashionable crowds came. “Now it gets more attention,” he said, and left it at that. No point in spoiling a beautiful day.
But in fact, Rockaway Beach has always gotten a lot of attention — almost $270 million in restoration efforts since 1930 (in today’s dollars), as of the latest tabulation by the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. That’s more than any other beach in the country. The federal government has replenished the sand at least 37 times.
Andy Coburn, associate director of the program, said that what we call beach erosion might more accurately be called shoreline migration, the island’s natural response to changing currents and “human interactions.” The Rockaways want to move westward, but we won’t let them. Thus the unceasing need for more sand.
As a character says in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard,” “For everything to stay the same, everything must change.”
Or, as Hector Mosley, a spokesman for the Corps, put it: “In the past, Rockaway was a much shorter place.”
He called the island “a sacrificial barrier to large storm waves.” With tacos and a decent surf scene.
Valerie Costa, who was relaxing on the boardwalk with her boyfriend and his young daughter, called the new sand a “Band-Aid on a broken leg,” but she said she was glad to see the beach open, however long this fix lasts. A lifelong Rockaway Beach resident, she was still smarting from a 2010 New York Times article about Rockaway Beach that called her father “amusing, almost.”
Tides roll in. Condescension now tends to target the outsiders rather than the natives. The arc of the moral universe bends slowly, etc.
But no matter. When the beach was closed in 2018, Costa said, these same outsiders wandered confused into her neighborhood farther west, around Beach 107th Street. “We felt the ripple effect from everyone coming up,” she said. “If putting in sand opens the beaches and restores balance, I’m happy with that.”
The Corps’ next plan, starting in 2020, is to build jetties and groins to slow the erosion.
On a sand bank below the boardwalk, Wanda Osorio pulled a towel over herself to protect her from the cool wind. She has lived in the Rockaways for 47 of her 65 years — maybe enough, she said. But where would she find a beach like this?
Still, rising sea levels might take some of the fun out of life on a sacrificial barrier, she said.
“That’s predicted,” she said. “The water’s gonna take over New York. I think that’s the last days.”
Perhaps. In the meantime, surf’s up!
But step lively, friends. Hurricane season begins June 1.