by Max Meltzer
In October of 2012, as my hometown of Queens and the rest of New York City began gearing up for what would soon become one of the deadliest, costliest, and most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history, I was watching it all unfold 2900 miles away from my apartment in San Francisco. While part of me was thankful that I was a safe distance away, an even stronger part of me wished to be there.
I wanted to be there not simply to say that I survived the hurricane, but to be part of both the initial and long-term recovery efforts. I was born and raised in Queens, but I couldn’t do anything about the mass destruction there from San Francisco.
From that point forward I knew that my time in the Bay Area would be short, and I returned home to spend the following summer working for the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance (RWA), a small nonprofit organization on Beach 58th Street in Far Rockaway. The organization aims to inspire Rockaway residents to become active stewards of the waterfront, revitalize the health and well-being of the community, and take an active role in determining the future of their neighborhood. As a Community Outreach Coordinator and Planner for RWA, I worked on some great initiatives to help restore the Rockaway community and Peninsula as a whole. The experience also turned out to be a lesson in the challenges of community development and revitalization.
I worked on two major projects with RWA. First was a campaign called the Call-To-Action Plan, created as part of the RE: Rockaway Project to Revive, Rebuild and Renew the Rockaway Community. RE: Rockaway worked to realize long-term community planning efforts and find ways of supporting collaboration between people of all ages to support a safer and more environmentally resilient community. One part of the campaign was the First Wave Initiative, a collaborative project that engaged youth, senior citizens, and immigrants in developing innovative technological strategies to better prepare for times of need. The idea was to have high school students and other youth on the Rockaways serve as eyes and ears for vulnerable parts of the population, and to connect these students with local community and senior centers to make sure vulnerable groups had emergency preparedness plans in place. They would also check in with leaders of these centers to keep them up to date on potential storms or emergencies and protocols to follow. I focused on outreach to local agencies and community based organizations, building partnerships to make the campaign as large as it could be. We ended up registering over 500 people for Notify NYC emergency alert system through the campaign, which was a huge success. The other project involved reinventing the unused space underneath the elevated A train tracks in Far Rockaway as a bike and walking path to connect the east and west ends of the Rockaway Peninsula to each other and to the existing Jamaica Bay Greenway.
These projects gave me wonderful experience, albeit stemming from a very unfortunate situation, but also introduced me to the nuances and unexpected difficulties that planning and community development bring. For starters, I saw that the Rockaway Peninsula is divided on a number of issues, frequently along socioeconomic lines. If you enter the Rockaway Peninsula from Cross Bay Blvd and go west, you find the well-to-do neighborhoods of Rockaway Park, Rockaway Beach, Neponsit, Belle Harbor, and Breezy Point. Go east and you’ll find a much more ethnically, economically, and racially diverse community. This creates a divide amongst Rockaway residents on many issues, and in my outreach I found that many community organizations were reluctant to partake in our Call-to-Action plan. It seemed that many groups had a “no thank you, we can take care of ourselves” attitude. And while many parts of the western Rockaways were recovering at a quick pace, some of the community centers still did not have emergency preparedness plans in place, and had no interest in being part of the collaborative effort. I have often thought that with great tragedy and mass destruction comes the opportunity for mass collaboration and innovation. Yet, many communities in the West End did not seem to want to be part of that process.
A similar tale can be told about the bike path project. Most of the eastern end groups supported the path as a way to safely bike, walk, or run from one end of the peninsula to the other, and there had even been ideas for this path pre-Sandy. People on the western end though, were much less supportive. The western end of the Rockaway Peninsula is truly one of the last secluded neighborhoods in New York City. Many families have been there for generations, and the area is difficult to access by public transport. It is quite lovely, and residents proudly maintain their neighborhood. However, this also means that many residents do not want visitors in their backyard, utilizing their beautiful beaches, or biking and walking in their pristine green parks, even if it would bring economic activity. One of my favorite signs in Neponsit is a “No Parking” sign, which indicates it is illegal to park on the street Saturdays and Sundays all day, between May 15th and September 30th. To me, it reads as a clear sign that visitors are not welcome.
A further challenge to expanding bicycle infrastructure is that part of the existing Jamaica Bay Greenway is managed by the NYC Parks Department and the Federal National Parks Service. It can be difficult to implement large projects quickly given the bureaucratic nature of governments, and working with two levels of government simultaneously slowed down the process more. Many Rockaway residents were so fed up with the process that they had abandoned the bike lane fight long before Sandy.
My short experience in the Rockaways was both worthwhile and humbling, and I know that my story does not reflect every resident from the East End or West End. I met community members on the east end who oppose the bike path or other new projects because they fear that development will make the area too expensive and they will be displaced. I also spoke to people from the West End who love the idea of a bike path and the connectivity it would bring. However, my time in the Rockaways left me with more questions than answers. When people from the same community have such different ideas about recovery and community development, not to mention different visions for the future, how can anyone find an answer? Who gets to make the decisions or ask the questions in the first place? What is the planner’s role in trying to bridge community divides, if any? Clearly, there are few right answers, but many important questions.