By Gabriel Rom
Ed Hynes sat with his back turned to the ocean on a blustery fall afternoon along the new Rockaway Boardwalk.
“The city never did nothing for this whole damn place until the storm. But now?” he said, surveying the sleek new one-mile stretch of continuous boardwalk. “This is unbelievable, it’s really just unbelievable.”
Sobrino, 82, from Breezy Point, has been coming to the Boardwalk since the 1950s, and he said that after decades of neglect, this is the best it’s ever looked.
Residents agree that whether for better or worse, the new boardwalk has little resemblance to its raggedy wooden predecessor. Designs call for sand berms to be piled between the 40-foot-wide boardwalk and the ocean. Additionally, the city Parks Department has agreed to install metal walls called baffles behind the boardwalk to prevent sand and water from drifting onto the street during major storms.
The historic boardwalk, and much of the surrounding community, were devastated when Sandy tore through the peninsula on Oct. 29, 2012. The Federal Emergency Management Agency designated $480 million for boardwalk reconstruction, nearly a million square feet of which had been destroyed by Sandy and tosses in chunks across the sand.
From the sleek low-seating benches, to the ambulance trailers that look like spaceships, the new boardwalk has a highly modern aesthetic.
“I think it has lost some of its character,” said Donald Sautner of Far Rockaway. “And to be honest, the construction took much too long.”
Parks has divided the project into five phases and intends to complete the entire project by Memorial Day 2017.
In July Rockaway received another stretch of boardwalk. The steel reinforced concrete deck spans Beach 97th Street to Beach 107th Street, joining up with the first stretch of opened boardwalk to give residents and visitors one continuous mile of newly constructed boardwalk.
“As a result of the de Blasio administration’s push, the Rockaway Boardwalk will be continuously complete by Memorial Day 2016, with intact sections of the old boardwalk and new sections linked together,” said Meghan Lalor, spokeswoman for New York City Parks. The boardwalk will be entirely completed as new construction by Memorial Day 2017, she added.
Officials said the structure would be more elevated and secure than its predecessor. “The new boardwalk, which started construction in April 2014, will set a global standard for resilient shoreline design, while providing the Rockaway community with a beautiful, functional beachfront,” said the Parks Department in a statement released this July. “The project is being integrated into a multi-layered system of coastal protection that will resist future weather events and account for the long-term effects of climate change,” it added.
“Before Sandy this place was falling down,” Hynes added. “Now it’s wider and cleaner. There’s just no comparison. It’s a home run. This here is built to stay.”
Lorena Jerez, who lost her home in the storm, now lives nearby with her daughter. She sat on a bench bundled up in her jacket staring out to sea.
“I guess I don’t know whether I like it more or less,” she said plaintively. “It just looks so different. This whole area does.”
Reach reporter Gabriel Rom by e-mail at grom@
