It takes about one hour to get to the Rockaway Peninsula from midtown Manhattan. There’s the A train to Far Rockaway, the A train to the Shuttle which will deposit you right on the beach, and there’s the Rockaway Rocket ferry. No matter how you choose to arrive, the 11-mile arm of low-lying land is knit together by miles of the city’s best beaches, surf shacks, and a scattering of housing projects.
While largely neglected in terms of resources and policy for decades, post-Sandy, architects and decision-makers alike have taken a renewed interest in the peninsula: A constellation of big-budget, yet largely uncoordinated design projects have popped up along the shore. Some target affordable housing, such as Marvel’s Rockaway Village. Others are community-oriented, including WXY’s reimagination of the Rockaway Boardwalks, commissioned by the city, or Snøhetta’s Far Rockaway Library, the rebuild of the original 1968 structure that offered disaster relief in the wake of the hurricane.
Though the peninsula’s infrastructure is unmistakably urban, the Rockaways are a community defined by water, and residents on the peninsula were some of the hardest-hit in the city. To the north, communities abut Jamaica Bay, and to the south, it’s all Atlantic Ocean. The western tip of the island is plausibly the realm of New York Harbor and the lower Bay. Breezy Point in particular saw chest-high flood waters during and after Sandy, and 250 homes destroyed, with hundreds more severely damaged.
According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, sea levels could rise as much as six feet by 2100, which would mean large portions of the Rockaways would be underwater. And though many of the Rockaways’ new developments are conscious of climate concerns, they do not directly address a glaring concern for the peninsula: resiliency. Nor do the projects feature the level of community leadership necessary to re-envision the neighborhoods in which people work and live.
A Community of Microgrids
Enter Bill Schacht, an ex-CUNY professor who specializes in resiliency design. He has spent years working to ideate and execute an energy-focused plan for the Rockaways. For Schacht, coordination is key, and the string of new architectural projects is missing out on the potential to work together to responsibly plan—and build—the neighborhood’s future. After attending an AIA convention hosted in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Schacht began working with a group of nonprofits involved in the peninsula to “very simply, do the right thing.”
Sandy might have felled homes and flooded streets, but the real vulnerability it exposed was infrastructural. Damages to the energy grid left residents without power for weeks.
In an effort to arm the Rockaways with stronger resiliency against future hurricanes, Schacht has worked for the past decade with a team at NYU’s Urban Infrastructure Institute to formulate a masterplan titled Resilient Rockaway United. The plan hinges largely on Schacht’s concept of “microgrids:” small-scale, localized grids that can operate independently will allow a neighborhood to maintain power in the case of outages. Suggested sites would be powered by low-carbon sources such as wind turbines and solar panels.
The northern end of 108th Street, where the ferry spits out passengers, will serve as a “a fulcrum for Peninsula-wide mixed-use neighborhood planning,” and is slated to become the first site for one of the five microgrid stations outlined in the plan, concluding on the eastern end at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital. Schacht envisions a “fully sustainable, mixed-use community,” including both affordable housing and commercial space, all powered by sustainable energy. Is this all too good to be true?
Because of the Rockaways’ uniquely narrow silhouette, the peninsula could be an ideal candidate for experiments in coordinated resiliency master planning. Schacht told AN, “[The peninsula] is underserved, it’s coastal, it’s urban… but I don’t think anyone’s really master planned the whole place. There have been a number of massive re-designs, but these were not coordinated: So you can figure 25 to 50 percent of the money was wasted.” Master plans like these beg the question: Can a more cohesive effort, rather than interstitial aesthetic upgrades, enact more tangible change for the peninsula’s residents in the face of rising sea levels?
There have been efforts on behalf of the city to ready the five boroughs for the changing climate. But most of them do not consider energy. In 2014, the Army Corps added a significant amount of sand to Rockaways beaches but most of it has already washed away. In Red Hook, Brooklyn, a $100 million coastal resiliency plan is underway, focused on implanting flood walls, sea gates, raising streets, and moveable barriers; and the controversial East Side Resiliency plan is rendering the Esplanade unrecognizable, molding bioswales and topography to staunch floodwaters into the 2050s. Yet this isn’t enough: Schacht and others believe these barrier-focused designs “cannot be looked at as a final solution to questions of resiliency.” And what about community efforts already underway?
A History of Developments in the Rockaways
It’s hard to approach any sort of master plan in the Rockaways without considering the history of top-down developments on the peninsula. Arverne, a neighborhood on the eastern end, has witnessed the full evolution of the Rockaways’s shifting landscape. In 1904, New York City lawyer Remington Vernam developed over 6,000 lots in Arverne, turning it into a summer resort town. By the mid-20th century, Robert Moses’s urban planning introduced large housing projects, including the Arverne Houses (1951), Hammels Houses (1955), and Edgemere Houses (1961).
By 1965, the Arverne project was razed in an attempt at “urban renewal,” leaving 100 acres of oceanside property entirely empty. In 2001, The Architectural League and the Housing Preservation & Development department (HPD) selected four universities to examine how to best introduce market rate housing into the uniquely challenged site, surrounded by high-rise housing projects and threatened by rising sea levels.
That’s where Michael Bell, a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, became involved with Arverne. His proposal “Stateless Housing,” refers to how the state has literally “withdrawn” its promises for subsidized housing in this area.
Bell’s vision for Stateless Housing had a few central tenets: to not “reveal or sustain its subsidies,” but rather fold government funding into the “general guise of market rate housing;” implement a mixed-use, multi model development (including both triplex and duplex); and to consider the site’s context and foster a connection with the surrounding landscape (including housing projects). However, his proposal remains a work of paper architecture: The site was eventually developed by The Beechwood Organization and the Benjamin Companies into Arverne by the Sea, a master planned community filled with beachy shingles and manicured lawns. Though the community certainly dons a homogeneous feel, it marks a sharp departure from the previous housing projects built in the 1950s and 60s. And, importantly, the developers considered resiliency—they raised the road beds and implemented protective dunes and subsurface drainage. These measures were effective: The community experienced minimal damage from Sandy.
Though the need for resiliency has become even more urgent, Bell’s original Arverne proposal was an inquiry into several of the peninsula’s most pressing questions. How do you develop within a “fragmented” urban fabric? Can projects utilize state funding without it defining the development? Through Stateless Housing, Bell merged the public and the private, encouraging collaboration between the state, developers, and universities. Now that public-private partnerships are the status quo, we know there’s a glaring omission to address: community engagement.
Integrating urban theory into real developments was an important step back then. Today, though, major developments often overlook community concerns, which while acknowledged are rarely elevated to become key drivers in the projects.
More Than a Survey
Jeanne Dupont is the leader and founder of the Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity (RISE). Dupont arrived in the Rockaways in 2003, moving to Beach 25th Street in Far Rockaway and feeling a “huge sense of hopelessness.” Residents of the Rockaways, Dupont told AN, were all too familiar with short-lived proposals of developments that would supposedly bring change: “People would just put a proposal out there, see if it stuck, and then move on.”
Many of the developments that came to the Rockaways lacked community engagement. Dupont’s entry into community activism was driven by a simple reminder to officials: These projects affect people. As a protest against plans to raze many of the area’s vernacular beach bungalows to build large apartment complexes, she captured “porch portraits” of her neighbors and brought them to city planning.
“And I told them, these are the neighbors. These are my neighbors and the people who are going to be kicked out by monstrosities like this,” Dupont said.
Dupont eventually succeeded in protecting the beach bungalows within a historic district, and successfully lobbying against demolition. After a battle with developers and city agencies, Dupont then secured 32 acres of land and a $40 million investment from Bloomberg for a public park adjacent to Arverne East. The park was developed with nature-based solutions, including sand dunes, which provided a barrier against Sandy’s battering waves; Dupont’s neighborhood was spared the brunt of Hurricane Sandy’s damage.
These initiatives demonstrate an obvious, unfortunately neglected lesson—developments tend to succeed, even in unexpected ways, when guided by the needs of the community. “The best way to approach [developments in the Rockaways] is to find a way of talking to people and figuring out what their experience is, day to day, and how we can improve on that experience,” Dupont said.
Developers are still not listening to Rockaway residents, and failing to recognize that inadequate infrastructure is rendering the areas where they are building tens of thousands of new housing units, as Dupont noted, “unlivable.” In Far Rockaway, Dupont said, “there’s no place for parking. There’s no place to get groceries.” While an attractive community library or well-designed housing development certainly adds value, these developments ultimately fall short without adequate infrastructure. Though Sandy was more than ten years ago, the road beds still have not been consistently raised—necessary, in Dupont’s opinion, to the survival of the Rockaways.
“When Storm Sandy hit, I thought that was a pivotal moment where the City of New York either had to decide to walk away, and just make the peninsula nothing but a giant park, or to really invest in the infrastructure,” Dupont said to AN. “And they haven’t done either.”
An anxiety underpins any conversation about development in the Rockaways. Even with favorable projections of sea level rise, the peninsula will continue to suffer from chronic flooding and uneasily anticipate the next hurricane, and less optimistic predictions show the peninsula all but underwater. As Dupont asked, “is this really a good idea to be building housing in the lowest lying floodplain in New York City? No, it’s not. And will these developments help the people who live there through bringing more programs, or bringing better transportation? Not really.”
There’s a complex overlay of problems spanning climate, poverty, and resources, so accordingly there should be varied approaches to development in this unique neighborhood. The peninsula needs raised roads, sand barriers, a microgrid system, and housing better attuned to its surroundings. But the mission should revolve around supported community involvement to implement something at these scales.
