Rockaway Beach: Warm/Cold
The last day of summer, and a middle of fall squall:
Two looks at NYC's most ubiquitous beach, Rockaway.
Photos and words by Jesse Huffman
It's the end of a season— families, friends, children, adults, surfers and swimmers are soaking up the last warm day, before fall begins. Each summer millions will visit New York City's beaches, thin interfaces between the urban and the oceanic, where apartment dwellers can slip off their stresses, take a dip, or simply lay out to get a serious sun burn. Backed by rows of housing projects, and under an hour via train from central Brooklyn, Rockaway is in many ways the most direct beach escape, and one of the unique natural resources that make New York City more than a simple metropolis.
Three months later, the scene at Rockaway has shifted. The beach goers have packed it up for the season, the kids are back in classes, and the weather has turned from balmy and sun-soaked to a rainy, cold mess. With the late-summer and fall storms comes ocean swell, building across the Atlantic and sending pulses of waves eastward, where they bump up on coastal sandbars. Surfers wake before dawn, rush out to the water, don rubber and paddle out to ply the waves. Getting their turns in, then tossing gear in bags and heading back into the city for the days work, these dawn patrollers return to the jungle tired but contented, viewing "life as usual" through a brine-tinted perspective. Fishermen slip on rock-grabbing shoe spikes and heavy rubber pants and coats, trawling the water at the end of the jetty for a first catch of the season.
One place, two perspectives; as the cycle of seasons goes by unnoticed by concrete sidewalks and paved streets just miles inland, Rockaway revels in being the last ribbon of change before New York City's fortress of immutability.
