Far Rockaway Bungalows

Introduction by Richard George, President, Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association (BBPA)

The applicant to Place Matters was the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association (BBPA), which was established in September 1984 and became a non-profit in December 1988. The BBPA is dedicated to the preservation of one of the last remaining bungalow colonies on the Rockaway Penninsula, built in the Rockaway heydays of the 1920s.

The bungalows are nestled along the blocks of Beach 24th Street through Beach 26th Street in Far Rockaway, Queens, between Seagirt Avenue and the boardwalk. Approximately one hundred summer bungalows remain. They were originally constructed around 1920 as an affordable getaway for Jewish immigrants residing in New York City. The bungalows consisted of three bedrooms, a small kitchen, living room (which at the time was the dining room), and a bathroom. Porches were clad in stucco or wood shingles, on twenty by forty foot lots sold to individual families. Just steps away from their homes lay the boardwalk and beach, where residents could swim in the ocean waves.

The property of the bungalow development was originally the Dickerson Estates, owned in the 1860s by John Joseph Mott and his family. A map of the Dickerson Estates shows that it was part of Far Rockaway Inlet or Bay, which is public trust lands artificially infilled to build the bungalow development. The Dickerson Estates was subdivided into smaller lots, approximately twenty by forty feet. Other lots on the west side of Beach 25th Street and the east side of Beach 26th Street were approximately twenty feet by ninety-six feet deep to accomodate two bungalows, front and back.
By Jennifer Callahan
The bungalows of Rockaway are a living reminder of the early decades of the 20th century, when many affordable seaside resorts first lined the country’s coasts. New York City had several summer bungalow colonies: Orchard Beach, Staten Island, Coney Island, and Rockaway, with Rockaway being the city’s largest, attracting for over many decades numerous immigrant and first-generation immigrant families. By 1933, over 7000 bungalows stood on Rockaway, an 11-mile barrier island at the citys southeastern edge with a generous boardwalk stretching across it. Today, about 400 bungalows remain. In Far Rockaway, three intact blocks of bungalows, now on the National Register of Historic Places, stand.

Do you want to know what a feeling of place is like? Please then get yourself to the southeastern edge of New York City, to the blocks of Beach 24th, 25th, and 26th Streets, and, at the corner of one of, say Beach 24th and Seagirt Boulevard, face south, towards a block of bungalows, and walk ahead to the beach. You will actually end up walking in the middle of the street, because it’s easier. Numerous cars, sitting like couch potatoes, press against a curb. Sidewalks are quite narrow, so narrow that the sidewalks not blocked by cars seem like extensions of the bungalows themselves, like feet, and the absence of driveways means that cars have nowhere to go but the street. You’re in Rockaway.

You will proceed down the block and behold bungalow after bungalow – one symmetrically placed pitched roof after another, one inviting porch after another. Like an allée of trees on a French country road, the one-story bungalows line the block, providing you with an almost theatrical sense of sweetness – of charming little houses, like from a fairy tale, waiting for you, ushering you towards the beach, inviting you to forget your worries. The bungalows, though, are also in a veritable design competition with the surrounding post-World War Two towers, which resemble templates for a prison. If their shadows were not so invidious you would almost feel sorry for the ugly tall structures, monuments to a stern fantasy, it seems, so inattentive to the surrounding environment, to being perched on a barrier island. Thanks to a 2008 re-zoning, no new buildings reaching those heights will appear again on/near these bungalow blocks but, still, plenty do exist, and their presence expresses with great clarity exactly how for so many years city leaders viewed this barrier island and its residents.

As you encounter each bungalow in Far Rockaway, as you try aesthetically to digest as well the visual incongruity, of the bungalows and their backdrop of prison-like towers, with the bungalows’ charisma almost a polite rebuke to the grim towers, you may well experience the complicated sensory fusion that is Rockaway’s specialty. But with the delicious salt air wafting by, the roar of jets flying to and fro JFK airport, the long caws of seagulls, the sounds of salsa playing from one bungalow, the laughs and ball bounces of some kids playing basketball, the sight of some pretty impatiens fluttering on a ledge and some bungalow residents having a glass of wine on a porch, the sanding of a surfboard at another, as you spy paths that separate the bungalows, and imagine where they may take you, you might well let yourself fall into the rhythms of this world, the contemporary magic of this particular multi-ethnic, multi-racial bungalow colony, before you get to the beach and encounter that Atlantic.

In the early 1920s, when the first bungalows here went up, the area attracted Jewish immigrant and first-generation families, who continued to summer here in large numbers through to the late 1950s. Summer residents included Holocaust survivors. Architect Henry Hohauser, who went on to design many of the art deco hotels in Miamis South Beach district, designed many Far Rockaway bungalows. Hohauser marked his work with a signature detail – the inset diamond-shaped terra cotta tiles, still visible on some extant bungalows. In terms of the entire barrier island, the first bungalows appeared in 1905, in the area called Seaside, around Beach 108th Street, made of wood, and were not as large as the 600 square-foot bungalows in Far Rockaway.

It’s no wonder that, when the Far Rockaway bungalow area was in semi-ruins, the survivors of disasters and upheavals created by urban renewal plans, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the area was considered dangerous by many, with reports of gunshots and gang warfare taking place on the street, that the semi-dilapidated bungalows inevitably attracted artists, who could see the good bones in each bungalow and who also appreciated the prices. In the 1980s, a group of bungalow-owners and renters formed the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association, and have ever since here, in the Far Rockaway area of Queens, been leading the effort to preserve the bungalow blocks in Far Rockaway. In the late 1980s and throughout the 90s and early 00s, a small diverse group of people, undeterred by the demolition of a high number of bungalows, started moving into them. The New York Foundation supported the preservation work of the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association and I know that when, in 2003, with foundation executive staff I met Richard George, the executive director, and encountered these bungalows, I found the bungalows enchanting. I thought they and their past would be an excellent subject for a documentary. The bungalows’ survival is yielding many returns – not just as abodes for current and new residents, flocking to the arts, food, surfing, and sustainably-minded local non-profits flourishing in Rockaway, especially after 2012, when Superstorm Sandy hit so hard, but as locations for films, such as Boardwalk Empire, executive produced by Martin Scorsese.

Soon the bungalows in Far Rockaway will be 100 years old. Will they be landmarked, be awarded complete protection?

Jennifer Callahan directed and, with Elizabeth Logan Harris, co-produced the independent feature documentary, The Bungalows of Rockaway. It was first broadcast in New York City in 2010, later screened in Antwerp and Rotterdam, among other cities, and is now distributed by Kino Lorber.

[This piece posted July 2017; previous piece, co-written by Jennifer Callahan and Elizabeth Logan Harris, posted June 2008, and updated June 2011]