A secret military installation hidden in the scraggly woods beyond the western end of the main Rockaway street grid
These are prop cars for MTV's One Bad Choice, "a new series that explores the consequences of young people who made a single, terrible decision that irrevocably changed their lives forever."
This property has undergone a serious post-Sandy redesign. Compare its appearance today with how it looked in 2012.
That's the Marine Parkway Bridge spanning Rockaway Inlet in the distance.
Part of the ongoing post-Sandy Rockaway Beach restoration effort
Built in 1912, this old mansion became the Hotel Del Mar in 1930. It most recently served as the Chai Home for Adults, but has remained vacant since its residents were evacuated after Hurricane Sandy. Its current dilapidated state isn't just the result of the storm, though; it was looking pretty shabby even before Sandy hit.
(In front of the building, you can see the concrete supports that held up the Rockaway Boardwalk before Sandy washed it away.)
This is one of several large apartment buildings in the area that once opened onto the boardwalk, before the boardwalk got swept away by Hurricane Sandy.
Standing about a block away, I'm facing back toward where I was when I took this photo.
One of a few found along Shore Front Parkway
This Mobi-Mat (or reasonable facsimile thereof) is one of many that have been installed in the Rockaways to make it easier for beachgoers — especially the elderly and disabled — to climb over the new, post-Sandy dunes and get to the ocean.
The first wall of a narrative triad by Alice Pasquini spread out across the metropolitan area
Old Glory looks a lot sharper than she did a year and a half ago. (Was this hydrant an original '76er?)
100 feet or so beyond these chain links, where the boardwalk used to stand before Hurricane Sandy washed it away, is where this picture was taken.
The plaque mounted on this World Trade Center remnant reads:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR BROTHER KNIGHTS
WALTER G. HYNES AND FRANKLYN J. MONAHAN
AND ALL VICTIMS OF THE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 TERRORISM
KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS
ROCKAWAY COUNCIL #2672
DEDICATED
SEPTEMBER 19, 2004
The long-abandoned Rockaway Courthouse. The most recent plans for this structure call for it to be turned into a medical center.
This building, the former Temple of Israel, was erected in the early 1920s after a fire destroyed the congregation's previous home — "the first permanent house of worship for the large Jewish population in the Rockaways" — which had been constructed on this site around 1900.
(There's a marina next door.)
After taking this photo, I continued to the end of Beach 84th Street, which terminates at what appeared to me to be a house standing beside Jamaica Bay. It wasn't until later, when I was looking at a bird's-eye view of the area, that I realized that what I had seen was not a single house by the bay, but rather the end of a row of about 16 bungalows built on a pier that runs out into the water. These unusual houses, apparently more than a century old, were in the news back in 2008 when the state passed a law allowing the city to sell the pier to the homeowners who lived atop it. A few years later, the artist Duke Riley featured the bungalows in one of the stained-glass pieces he designed for the nearby Beach 98th Street subway station.
This tribute to Billie Holiday was the first of the post-Sandy Beautify Earth murals painted in the Rockaways. You can see others here.
This 1989 statue was the city's first monument to honor the women who've served in the US military during wartime. It was commissioned by a local American Legion post, which planned to install it in Rockaway's Veterans Memorial Plaza, next to the World War I doughboy memorial (cast in 1927; reportedly the peninsula's oldest sculpture).
However, the city's Art Commission (now called the Design Commission) rejected the statue as ''not strong enough artistically", preventing it from being permanently placed on city property. So the Legionnaires made a stopgap arrangement with the Parks Department to temporarily install the monument across the street from the doughboy (placements of a year or less were not subject to Art Commission approval) while they searched for a permanent location.
But the statue, now known to some as "the doughgirl", still stands across from the doughboy today. It seems that its popularity with the community has led the city to overlook the fact that it's not really supposed to be here — at least that was the case as of 2003. (This brings to mind the story of the Fred Lebow statue in Central Park, which is briefly relocated each year to maintain its status as technically temporary.)
