Far Rock forecast: deadly
WHEN THE thermometer hit 80 degrees last week, I checked for a Far Rockaway summer forecast. No other city beach community is as dangerous in the summer as Far Rock, where the Queens district attorney has a special unit just to prosecute local shootings.
If you escape the crossfire between the Bloods and Crips in this forgotten netherworld with no local industry except the drug trade, a neighborhood that houses 20,000 families in projects next to the sea, you still might drown in the most treacherous waters in town. Come on down. Floyd Smith of Concerned Citizens of the Rockaways — a disabled Vietnam veteran who patrols this storied beachfront in his wheelchair — says it took him two years to get the Parks Department to put up signs saying the waters were unsafe.
“After three little girls drowned in 2001, I had to fight the Parks Department tooth and nail to get up those signs,” he says.
The warnings in English, Spanish and Russian read: THESE BEACHES ARE DANGEROUS. THERE HAVE BEEN DROWNINGS BECAUSE OF DROP ZONES AND RIP TIDES.
This year Smith says he’s trying to set up a meeting with Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe about how to make this a fair and safer summer for everyone in the Rockaways.
“I think they have to have as many lifeguards down this end as they have on the lily-white end of Rockaway at Belle Harbor,” he says. “They have maybe 2,000 families down there and 20,000 down this end. Yet almost every bay down that end was open last year with lifeguards, but last year we only had half the bays open at this end where the poor people live.”
The Parks Department defended its strategy.
“We have increased the number of lifeguards at Rockaway Beach over the past several years, and that translates to more sections of the beach open on a consistent basis over the summer,” said Zachary Feder, a Parks spokesman. “We position lifeguards along the length of the beach and only operate under the safest conditions — and sometimes that means closing underused or unsafe sections and sections not near residential buildings or mass transit.”
But Smith scoffs at that explanation. “Not all the closed bays down here are dangerous,” he counters. “But there’s a state law that requires a lifeguard every 50 yards on an open beach and so they arbitrarily close them on this end to save money.”
Smith says another major problem is that young people in Far Rock are harassed off the beaches by local cops and Parks enforcement officers.
“Where they hell do they think they will go if they aren’t on the beach?” Smith asks. “There’s nowhere else to go in Far Rock, except maybe to jail.”
Smith also objects to the NYPD observation tower at Beach 67th St. “It rises above the beach like something out of a Na- zi concentration camp,” he says. “Look, I’m all for stopping the drug trade, but who wants a day on the beach with Big Brother watching from a prison guard tower?”
Still, the lifeguard service can take a bow that it didn’t have a single drowning in Rockaway last summer — partly due to a new hip- ster invasion in the middle bays that seems to have changed the tide of the lifeguard shortage that I reported on several years ago.
“The arrival of hipsters from Brooklyn and Manhattan has definitely had an impact,” says one longtime lifeguard in the middle bays. “New hipster food places opened. They had a hipster parade. And suddenly we had more lifeguards. If that’s what it takes to get more lifeguards in Rockaway, I’m not complaining. But there’s no denying that the Parks Department has improved the lifeguard situation in all of Rockaway, including Far Rockaway.” Smith disagrees with that, too. “I’ve never seen any hipsters or new hippies, or whatever they call them in Far Rock,” says Floyd Smith. “All I ever see is more kids with nowhere to go and more closed beaches and fewer lifeguards than at the other end of Rockaway. That’s why I requested a meeting with the Parks Department.”
Liam Kavanagh, head of all Parks operations, says he’s scheduled to meet with Smith within the next couple of weeks.
Sounds fair enough.