Below Deck

Having rhapsodized and apostrophized and otherwise sung the praises of the Rockaway Ferry yesterday (see below), in my loyalty I rushed down to Wall Street in torrential rain to get on the 5:30 boat. It was the first time ever that I sat inside. I am exaggerating when I say there was “torrential rain,” but only because inside the boat there was a TV tuned to the news and they were giving the weather, which we could see perfectly well for ourselves out the ferry windows, and the weatherman was saying (according to the captions) that there was now or would be later “torrential rain” somewhere. The boat sped through the harbor, lurching over the waves, and water sloshed up against the windows and I felt ever so slightly as if I just might be seasick . . . I didn’t dare go up top for my customary beer, choosing instead to cling to my tabletop, turning my eyes occasionally onto the horizon (still visible) for stability.

Probably my choice of reading matter didn’t help any. I had forgotten my current book yesterday morning—I am on a Jonathan Ames kick, and he can be so perverted and scatological (yet hilarious) in his personal essays that they might have helped distract me—so on the way out of the office I grabbed a review copy of “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,” by Glenn Stout. The book begins, for reasons that will become clear, with a description of the Slocum disaster, the worst maritime disaster in New York history. On June 15, 1904, more than a thousand women and children drowned when the General Slocum, an excursion boat that was carrying a party of German Lutherans up the East River, caught fire. The captain and crew made all the wrong decisions, and none of the lifesaving equipment worked—it was ancient or inaccessible, and hadn’t been inspected in years. Women were not taught to swim in those days. Most of them drowned in shallow water off North Brother Island. Two chapters later, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Trudy Ederle (born October 23, 1905) learns to swim.

The ferry arrived safely and not a moment too soon at Riis Landing, and rain fell well into the night, though once we were on land it did not seem quite so torrential. I went to bed haunted by visions of maritime disaster. If it got really bad out there in the harbor, it would be so much worse to be on (or under) water than it would to be in a subway.

This morning, I reverted to the A train. Rather than continue with “Young Woman and the Sea,” I read this week's Wave. In a letter-to-the-editor, the paper’s historical columnist, Emil Lucev, wrote eloquently about, of all things, the Slocum disaster. The letter ends, “In nautical circles, the General Slocum is known as the ‘Poor Man’s Titanic’! The captain, William H. Van Schaick, was sent to prison at Sing Sing, New York … and was pardoned by President William Howard Taft in 1912. Shortly thereafter, the real Titanic went down with another great loss of life. The cause was ice, not fire, but the reasons were similar.”

Foretaste

I went out to Rockaway last weekend for the first time in months. The bungalow had not burned down, and in fact I had left it fairly neat. I said hello to the dog across the way, Sam, and to the cat down the walk, Buster, and visited with a few neighbors, and raked and bagged leaves. I got there just in time for the first forsythia blossom. The forsythia is going to be amazing this year.

I was also delighted to see that my favorite gossip columnist, Dorothy Dunne, is back in the Wave, and that she is in good form. On St. Patrick's Day, she went to see Cherish the Ladies, "an astonishing array of virtuosity, instrumental, vocals and stunning step dancing," she writes. "It was an interesting and enjoyable program, a little long."

I have been cleaning my links, and added a new one: Cook the Wolf, a food blog by the highly entertaining Emily Nunn, who lives and eats turnips in Chicago.

Yellow Curb Fever

The Wave this summer has been brimming with stories on the parking controversies of Rockaway. I missed the meeting last Sunday about raising the parking fee at Riis Park. It now costs five dollars a day to park there, and the proposal is to raise the fee to ten dollars, effective the summer of 2009. The Wave had an article on the proposed hike, complete with photos of parked cars, and of cars arriving in order to park, in this historic facility. (You will remember that the parking lot at Riis Park Beach was, when it was built, the largest parking lot in the world. Still, it is not very photogenic.) Many of the people who use the parking lot at Riis are families who make a day of it, setting up tents and hammocks and grills under the scrubby little pines, and fishing in the bay or swimming or picnicking. The only locals who park at Riis, as far as I can tell from the Letters to the Editor (of which there are plenty), are golfers.

The National Park Service wants to raise the parking fee to keep the cost of parking at Riis in line with parking fees at other lots in the Gateway system—in other words, because they can. Most of the revenue would go back into the park—paying parking attendants and making improvements—but some twenty per cent of it would go toward improvements at other parks. Besides the golfers, who demand a safer parking lot (cars get broken into), letter writers included a local politician and a civic-minded elder. Naturally, no one came out in support of the price hike. I suppose what will happen is that they’ll reduce the hike by approximately the amount they proposed to give away to other parks and raise the price to eight dollars.

The other big flap in the parking arena began in a Letter to the Editor. A man who lives on Beach 118th Street had recently learned that a friend received a ticket for parking in front of the house of neighbors who had painted their curb yellow. It’s true: anyone can paint his curb yellow. Because of the severe restrictions on parking in the West End (where, incidentally, it is clear that the editor of the Wave lives and parks), homeowners have all kinds of strategies to save the spaces in front of their houses for themselves and their guests. They put up bogus signs (“No Parking, 24 Hour Drive,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” “Parking for Irish Only”) or set out orange traffic cones that they picked up somewhere. The letter, published on July 27th, included the address of the house of the yellow curb and stated that there is no driveway or garage at that house, and that, furthermore, the people next door had also painted their curb yellow and erected one of those portable basketball hoops to keep people from parking there.

The next week, the man with the yellow curb wrote a letter in his own defense: wounded by the Wave’s publication of the first letter, which made his home and family the subject of scandal, he enclosed proof that his curb cut is legal and demanded an apology. The Wave responded with a separate article on the controversy: the letter they printed had ignited a feud on 118th Street. Mostly the article quoted the letter, but it also pointed out that it is illegal to paint your curb yellow. The family in question did not know this. Also, the family acknowledged that their curb cut is not as high as the standard curb cut, but explain that there is a valve poking up in middle (possibly a cap for the water main). The article was accompanied by a photograph of the yellow curb, in black-and-white.

The house next door to the house with the substandard yellow-painted curb cut—the one with the basketball hoop—also occasioned a letter to the editor, this one from an extremely jaded resident. “How long have you been living on this block?” she asks. “You said you called the police and 311 and no change? Hello, obviously these people know someone!”

This week (August 17th) the Wave reported that a resident got a ticket for parking in her own driveway. It’s really more of a photo essay, with a shot of the car, overhanging the sidewalk a bit, and the Traffic Enforcement Police vehicle in the background (and an “Open House” sign with balloons, which kind of confuses the issue), and a long caption: “It is illegal to park on the beach blocks west of Beach 126 Street at any time and it is illegal to park on most west end streets during summer weekends. So where do people park? In their driveway (if they have one), of course. Because of the restrictive parking regulations, there has always been an understanding that overstuffed driveways were all right on summer weekends. A car parked up the curb cut, even blocking the sidewalk a bit, was usually ignored by local police. Last Sunday, however, a local parked in her own driveway was ticketed by a traffic enforcement agent for just that.”

Tucked away in a section called Beachcomber (one of my favorite sections) is a tiny item stating that you if you park at Fort Tilden, at the western end of (and very convenient to) Riis Park, you will get a ticket from the National Parks Service (but payable to the city) unless you have a sticker. To get a sticker, you have to show car registration and driver’s license, but the sticker itself is free. I’m not sure this isn’t misinformation, but if it’s true, it’s awfully good news. Shouldn’t it be on page one?

T.G.I.F.

“How was the waugh-da?” the girl at the deli asked, from behind the salad counter. I stopped this morning on my way home from the beach to see if the Wave had come in.
“It was great,” I said.
“What the hell?” said the cashier, registering my wet hair and towel. I think this is the girl I once lost patience with. I told her to concentrate on what she was doing.
“She goes there every day,” the first girl said.
“Not every day,” I said.
“Almost.”

She’s seen me twice now this week. As long as I'm staying in Rockaway, I try to go for a dip before work at least three out of five mornings a week. Otherwise, what am I out there for? This morning it was overcast, and I might have used that as an excuse not to go in the water, but I knew I would regret it, so I went. Clean, not too cold, with good, regular, long-breaking waves, maybe a suggestion of a rip tide.

After my swim, sitting on a towel with a cup of coffee, I noticed down the beach lots of surfers hanging on the water in their black wetsuits. They don’t mind if it’s overcast. Gulls were dropping clams from on high to break them open. I had piping plovers in stereo: cheep-cheep cheep-cheep cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep. I wonder if they have only one pitch, and if I will ever be organized enough to take a pitch pipe with me to the beach to find out.

And the Wave had come in—the local paper, that is. I'm saving it till I get home tonight and can read about the latest parking controversy.

For the Birds

Of all the complaints you hear in Rockaway in the summer—not enough lifeguards (so that beaches are closed); not enough parking spots (because of nonresidents parking on the street); cops giving people tickets for drinking beer on the beach or for swimming after hours or for surfing at a nonsurfing beach or for not surfing at the surfing beach; that Coney Island gets all the attention while Rockaway gets the drug-crazed and the mentally ill; that there isn’t a movie theatre or a mall or a swimming pool or a ferry or (my personal pet peeve) an Internet café—from one quarter there has been silence: no complaints about piping plovers.

My friend G., having invited herself to the beach, noticed it first. “Where are those little birds that run back and forth?” she asked. It’s true that there weren’t any on the beach that afternoon, but I figured it was just because the beach was crowded and the tide was in and the birds were elsewhere, in Arverne or at Breezy Point. Then there was an article in the Wave about the perennial battle between the piping plovers and the volleyball players (“On the Peninsula It’s a Battle for the Beaches,” by Michelle Romano). The Rockaway Beach Volleyball League, whose members play at Riis Park, have in the past had to move their nets every week to accommodate the piping plovers (rhymes with lovers), which are listed as a “threatened” species; by law, the places where the birds nest and raise their chicks have to be protected. This year, it seemed as if the volleyball players had triumphed: the birds had (in the irresistible idiom) “flown the coop.”

In Rockaway, people take it very personally when a section—their section—of the beach is closed, for whatever reason, but when the reason is those little birds that run back and forth, the most enlightened Rockawayites get all bent out of shape. There are people who hate dunes, in the belief that dunes attract plovers. There is even a bumper sticker: “Piping Plover—Tastes Like Chicken.” The New York Post ran a piece last month about a fragrance launch in Amagansett which featured Land Rovers on the beach and ended with accusations against fashion editors for upsetting the plovers; the article also reported that in East Hampton, for the second year in a row, the Fourth of July fireworks display was cancelled on account of the birds, pitting patriotism against plovers.

The Wave article was admirably balanced and well written, giving lots of space to a cute ranger at Gateway National Park named Dave Taft (I once went on a walking tour led by him). “Not everyone gets to see a piping plover,” he said, in their defense. But it got me worried. I started missing the birds whenever I went to the beach. In the same week’s Wave, I noticed an announcement for Piping Plover Day, sponsored by the Parks Department, at Beach 59th Street, so I rode my bike down there one morning. You hear them before you see them, piping away. I locked up my bike on the boardwalk and was relieved to see a handful of plovers racing along the beach with a pair of skimmers—wonderful black birds with long pointy orange beaks and yellow legs, who whistle at each other out over the water.

A few days later, at sunset, low tide, I went to Fort Tilden to look for plovers. This time, I was overjoyed to have a little flock fly over me while I was in the water. Then last Saturday I went down to my neighborhood beach to take a dip and watch the sunset. Beachgoers and surf were lit up golden; the ocean was full of seaweed, and the waves sloshed in, as green as spinach. And then, there they came: piping plovers on my beach—yes! Their underbellies lit up white as they flew toward the sun, and when they banked and doubled back they disappeared.

Maybe you have to be a native of Rockaway to resent the piping plovers. (There is no danger of my driving an ATV or playing volleyball.) I’ve asked myself how I’d feel if my beach was closed on account of the birds: I came five hundred miles to be by the ocean—I’m not going to mind a couple of extra blocks. When I thought there were no plovers in Rockaway, I felt deprived, as if the summer were ruined—the beach just isn’t the same without them. They are like tiny slapstick comedians, zipping back and forth on their rapid little legs, chasing the waves out, rushing back in, lifting off all at once, at some mysterious signal, and circling out over the water to fly back up the beach and begin again, their flight smooth yet unpredictable, like a ride at Coney Island that makes you slightly dizzy.

When I got home, a neighbor stopped me to say, “Hey, that chick got arrested—you know, the crack whore? The police handcuffed her and took her away.” All day, our local crack whore had sat outside her bungalow with her mother, presiding over a somewhat pathetic yard sale. And now she was in jail, or at least in night court, and her mother would have to bail her out. I was kind of sorry. But I was glad I'd seen the plovers.

Paved Paradise

The first place I ever rented in Rockaway was a converted garage on Rockaway Beach Boulevard between 123rd and 124th Streets. It was on a beach block, meaning I didn’t have to cross any streets to get to the ocean. And it was right on the fault between alternate-side parking, to the east—No Parking Fridays, 8:30 to 10 A.M. (although the other side of the street was No Parking Anytime, so I guess technically it wasn’t alternate-side)—and, to the west, seasonal parking for a beach community: No Parking Saturday, Sunday, & Holidays, May 15-September 30. Many policemen and firemen live in Rockaway—and a mayor, Abraham Beame, had a summer home here—and I suspect they swung some sort of deal with City Hall to get these regulations, which insure that the neighborhood isn’t besieged by a bunch of DFDs, dragging their coolers down the road in the middle of the night and slamming their car doors, leaking oil, littering, changing babies’ diapers, and partying until the wee hours. The non-residents are supposed to put their cars in the lot at Riis Park, which, when it was built, was the biggest parking lot in the world. (These days, it is rarely full.) Residents had better have a garage or a driveway or driveway privileges, or they are screwed, at least in summer.

My bungalow was a detached single-car garage with a pointy roof at the end of a narrow driveway. It was behind a three-story house full of tenants, all with cars. The driveway was augmented by a parking pad out front. I never fully understood where in the drive I was supposed to park, but I did give the first-floor tenant, a family man, a set of car keys, so that he could get out if I blocked him in. (He did not give me a set of keys for his minivan. He had a nice blond wife, two demonic children, and two vicious Pomeranians.) Once I was woken by a pounding on the bungalow door at two in the morning: a tenant in the big house couldn’t find a spot on the street and was entitled to park in the driveway—it was a Saturday night, and he said he’d been driving around for hours. The family man had moved my car and left it in the other tenant’s spot.

I soon learned that if there was a spot available on the street in front of the house I should grab it to save space in the driveway. There were both a fire hydrant and a bus stop in front of the house, but the sign for the bus stop was missing, so people parked there anyway. Once, a woman who was waiting for the bus told me, “This is a bus stop.” I said, “But there’s no sign,” and proceeded to lock my car and leave the scene. “I’ll have to walk out in the middle of the street to get the bus,” she said, getting angry, and then she started screaming at me: “You don’t care, do you, bitch!” That shook me up (Welcome to Rockaway!), but it was true: I didn’t care, as long as I didn’t get a ticket.

I rented the beach garage for two summers, until my landlords sold the property. They had rented the place to me cheap the second summer, while the big house was on the market, because they hoped prospective buyers would see that the garage was habitable, and therefore a source of rental income. In the end, though, before the inspectors came, the landlords arranged enormous boxes cagily over the toilet and the sink, to make the place look as if it were used only for storage. The next summer, the new owners put up a tall fence around the property, redid the deck, fortified both the house and the bungalow with brick facing, and did in fact use the bungalow for storage. I moved on.

What a shock this year to see that the grandly renovated house had been demolished. I’ve seen plenty of ramshackle bungalows go under the bulldozer to make way for condos, but a perfectly good three-family house with a deck and a yard on a beach block? It was between a small suburban-looking apartment building of recent vintage and a bigger, older, shabbier apartment building. What were they going to put in there? A sliver high-rise?

When I drove by with some friends last weekend, to point out the spot, I was in for yet another shock: the property had been graded and paved and fenced in. It was a parking lot!

People are always raving in the Wave about the difficulty of finding parking in the West End, meaning those neighborhoods on and west of the parking fault: Neponsit, Belle Harbor, and Rockaway Park (sometimes identified, for real-estate purposes, as Lower Belle Harbor). They argue that Rockaway residents should be issued stickers distinguishing their cars from those of the DFDs and permitting them to park on the street on weekends. But this parking lot is not for them. I took a closer look at it when I walked past there yesterday, on a foggy morning, on my way to pick up my car from the mechanic's, where I had taken it for its annual emissions inspection (it passed) and its first ever tuneup under my ownership (it cost a small fortune). (I even remembered to ask the mechanic to look at the space over the accelerator, where a spritz of liquid has been unpredictably wetting my right foot.) The property has apparently been annexed by the shabby apartment building to its west, which has been renovated and given balconies and a new blue awning and a new name: The Ocean Villa. The pay phone out in front of it, which I had thought of as my office, is gone, and there is a new sign at the bus stop. The new parking lot has green plastic vegetation woven into a chain-link fence around it and a sliding steel gate that locks. Clearly the developer saw that no one was going to buy a condo here on the Rockaway Fault unless he put in a parking lot.

The parking lot made me nostalgic for my beach garage, where I let my cats out on leashes (they got chased by the Pomeranians) and grilled porgies on a miniature Hibachi and heard the low-flying planes on foggy days and watched a single apple ripen on a tree outside my door, and where I never came home to bad news (largely because there was no phone).