Far Rockaway
Based on Wikipedia: Far Rockaway
For thirty-one pounds sterling, you could once buy a beach.
That was the price in 1685 when Tackapoucha, a band chief of the Canarsie Indians—a group within the larger Mohegan tribe—signed over the Rockaway Peninsula to a Captain Palmer. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly five thousand dollars today. For a stretch of Atlantic coastline that would eventually become one of New York City's most storied neighborhoods, it remains one of history's more lopsided real estate deals.
From Homestead to Resort
Palmer's ownership didn't last long. A dispute with the Town of Hempstead over the property's rightful owner led him to sell just two years later to Richard Cornell, an iron master from Flushing. Cornell built a homestead near the ocean on what is now Central Avenue, and when he died, he was buried in a small family cemetery that still bears his name.
For nearly two centuries, the Rockaways remained quiet—a remote peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, accessible only by horse-drawn carriage or on horseback, or by a steam-powered ferry from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. Then, in the late nineteenth century, something shifted. The wealthy discovered the beach.
A group calling themselves the Rockaway Association, composed of affluent New Yorkers who already had homes in the area, bought most of Cornell's old homestead. On that site, they built the Marine Pavilion, a grand hotel that attracted guests whose names still echo through American history: the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the writer Washington Irving, and multiple generations of the Vanderbilt dynasty. The association also constructed the Rockaway Turnpike, because wealthy vacationers needed roads to get to their seaside retreats.
The Marine Hotel burned down in 1864, but its destruction only accelerated development. More hotels sprouted along the shore. Private residences followed. Far Rockaway was becoming something new—a destination.
The Railroad Changes Everything
The real transformation came in the 1880s when the Long Island Rail Road extended its Rockaway Beach Branch to serve Far Rockaway station. Benjamin Mott donated seven acres of land for a railroad depot, an act of civic generosity that would make him a local legend—and ensure his family name would be attached to the neighborhood's main avenue for generations.
The impact was immediate. Land values surged. Businesses proliferated. By 1888, Far Rockaway had grown from a scattered collection of seaside properties into a "relatively large village"—large enough, in fact, to formally incorporate on September 19th of that year. The steam trains connected this beach community to Long Island City and what was then called Flatbush Terminal, which we now know as Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn.
The village's independence was short-lived. A decade later, in 1898, Far Rockaway was absorbed into the newly consolidated City of Greater New York, becoming part of the borough of Queens. The former Village Hall found a second life as a police precinct and magistrate's court until 1931, when it was demolished to make room for a parking lot serving fire engine companies.
Not everyone was happy about joining Greater New York. The neighborhoods of Far Rockaway, Hammels, and Arverne tried to secede from the city multiple times. In 1915 and again in 1917, secession bills actually passed the state legislature—only to be vetoed by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel. Far Rockaway would remain part of New York City, for better or worse.
The Rise and Fall of the Bungalow Beach
What makes a neighborhood's character? For Far Rockaway, the answer was the bungalow.
These small, affordable cottages became the defining architecture of the area as it evolved into a summer resort community. Families from other boroughs would pack up for the season and migrate to these modest beach houses, trading cramped city apartments for the sound of waves and the smell of salt air. The bungalows gave Far Rockaway a distinct personality—casual, accessible, democratic. You didn't need to be a Vanderbilt to spend your summer at the beach.
The Far Rockaway Beach Bungalow Historic District now officially recognizes this architectural heritage, listing it alongside individual landmarks like the Russell Sage Memorial Church, Trinity Chapel, and the local United States Post Office on the National Register of Historic Places.
But the same forces that created Far Rockaway's resort identity eventually undermined it. In 1950, the Long Island Rail Road abandoned the Rockaway Beach Branch. The reason was simple: Americans had discovered the automobile. Why take a train to Far Rockaway when you could drive to Jones Beach, or fly to Florida?
The competition wasn't just local. Air travel opened up distant destinations—Miami, the Caribbean, California—that made a Queens beach seem quaint by comparison. Far Rockaway's tourism economy began a long, slow decline.
Public Housing and Urban Renewal
When a resort community loses its tourists, something has to fill the void.
For Far Rockaway, that something was public housing. After World War Two, the city built substantial numbers of housing developments in an attempt to replace what officials deemed substandard housing. The former bungalows—those charming symbols of democratic beach life—were converted to year-round residences for low-income families. Some were even incorporated directly into the public housing system.
The transformation was dramatic. A neighborhood that had attracted poets and industrialists in the nineteenth century, and middle-class families seeking affordable beach vacations in the early twentieth, became associated with poverty and urban decline by the 1960s. The construction of medical institutions alongside the housing projects didn't help the neighborhood's reputation.
Then came the 1970s fiscal crisis, when New York City nearly went bankrupt. Social services were slashed across the city, and neighborhoods like Far Rockaway—already struggling—were hit hardest. Unemployment rose. Drug use increased. The problems fed on each other.
In September 1984, a group of residents founded the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association, dedicated to "improving the quality of the Far Rockaway community through preservation, education, and cultural programs." It was an act of defiance against the narrative of decline—an insistence that Far Rockaway's history mattered, that its bungalows were worth preserving, that the neighborhood's identity as a beach community hadn't been entirely erased by housing projects and economic hardship.
The Jewish Far Rockaway
The story of Far Rockaway is also, in significant ways, a Jewish story.
During the early and mid-twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and their working-class descendants discovered the neighborhood—sometimes as summer visitors first, then as permanent residents. They established synagogues and private schools, including Orthodox institutions with separate boys' and girls' academies. Congregation Kneseth Israel, known locally as "The White Shul," was founded in 1922 and still serves the community today.
The New York Times later described the arc of this community: Far Rockaway had "flourished in the 1940s but withered" by the 1960s as residential development in Nassau and Suffolk counties drew Jewish families to newer housing farther east on Long Island. But the community didn't disappear entirely. According to the Times, "a few Jewish families started the Hebrew Free Loan Society for new home buyers," helping to sustain an Orthodox presence that continues to this day.
Schools like Sh'or Yoshuv Institute of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva Darchei Torah, and the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway remain active institutions, giving the neighborhood a distinctive religious character that sets it apart from other beach communities.
A Neighborhood of Immigrants
Today's Far Rockaway is one of New York's most diverse neighborhoods.
According to the 2010 census, the population of just over fifty thousand breaks down in ways that would surprise anyone who last visited decades ago. African Americans make up the largest group at nearly forty-five percent, followed by whites at about twenty-six percent and Hispanics or Latinos at nearly twenty-five percent. But these census categories don't capture the full picture.
Far Rockaway has become a gateway for immigrants from across the globe. Jamaicans, Guyanese, and Guatemalans have established communities alongside arrivals from Russia and Ukraine. The Orthodox Jewish population remains significant. These groups don't merely coexist—they've layered their cultures onto a neighborhood that has been reinventing itself for centuries.
The population density tells its own story: forty inhabitants per acre, which translates to about twenty-six thousand people per square mile. For context, that's denser than San Francisco and approaching the concentration of some Manhattan neighborhoods. All of this packed onto a narrow peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean.
Rezoning and Reinvention
In September 2017, the New York City Council voted to rezone twenty-three blocks in central Far Rockaway. The plan would allow as many as 3,100 new residences, along with community spaces and retail development. The following year, city officials approved 670 affordable apartments within the rezoned area.
This is the latest chapter in a neighborhood that has transformed itself repeatedly: from indigenous territory to colonial farmland, from farmland to Victorian resort, from resort to public housing enclave, and now—perhaps—into something new again.
The physical infrastructure supports this continuing evolution. The New York City Subway's A train terminates at Mott Avenue, connecting Far Rockaway to Manhattan's West Side and beyond. The Long Island Rail Road's Far Rockaway Branch still operates, though the old loop through the peninsula was abandoned decades ago due to fires and maintenance problems. The city eventually acquired that abandoned right-of-way to develop the IND Rockaway Line—the subway service that now defines the neighborhood's connection to the rest of New York.
A Library for the Future
Perhaps the clearest symbol of Far Rockaway's ongoing reinvention opened in July 2024: a new Queens Public Library branch designed by Snøhetta, the internationally renowned architectural firm behind Oslo's Opera House and the expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The building cost thirty-nine million dollars—a striking investment in a neighborhood often associated with disinvestment. It spans eighteen thousand square feet across two stories, with a glass facade and a blue roof designed to collect rainwater. The color scheme deliberately evokes the ocean visible from the neighborhood's southern edge. Inside, the second floor features an artwork called "Feynman Code" by Pablo Helguera, while the facade incorporates "Style Writing" by José Parlá.
It's a building that makes a statement: Far Rockaway matters. Its residents deserve world-class architecture. The beach community that once attracted Longfellow and the Vanderbilts is still worth investing in.
The 101st Precinct
No honest portrait of Far Rockaway can ignore its challenges. The neighborhood is patrolled by the New York City Police Department's 101st Precinct, and while the precinct and its neighbor—the 100th Precinct, which covers the rest of the Rockaways—together ranked as the tenth safest patrol area in the city for per-capita crime in 2010, the numbers hide a significant disparity.
The 100th Precinct is high-income and relatively insular. The 101st Precinct is low-income and densely populated. The crime rates reflect this divide.
Still, the trajectory is positive. Between 1990 and 2018, crime in the 101st Precinct dropped by nearly seventy-five percent across all categories. In 2018, the precinct reported six murders, twenty-six rapes, 151 robberies, and 301 felony assaults—numbers that would have seemed impossibly low to anyone living through the neighborhood's worst years in the 1970s and 1980s.
What Thirty-One Pounds Bought
Stand at the edge of Far Rockaway today, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rockaway Peninsula, and you're standing on contested ground. The Canarsie Indians lived here first. Then came the Dutch West India Company in 1639, followed by the English in 1664. Captain Palmer paid his thirty-one pounds. Richard Cornell built his homestead. The Rockaway Association constructed their grand hotel. The railroad arrived. The village incorporated. The city absorbed it. The tourists came and went. The bungalows rose and fell. The housing projects went up. The immigrants arrived from Jamaica and Guatemala, from Russia and Ukraine. The Orthodox Jews stayed. The library opened.
Every layer remains somehow present, like geological strata visible in a cliff face. The Cornell Cemetery still exists. So does the White Shul, founded in 1922. So do the bungalows protected by the historic district designation. So does the A train, carrying commuters to jobs in Manhattan.
Far Rockaway has been a resort and a slum, a destination and a dead end, a symbol of urban decline and a site of urban renewal. What it has never been, across more than three centuries of recorded history, is static. The neighborhood keeps changing because that's what neighborhoods do—especially neighborhoods built on contested ground at the edge of an ocean, where the boundaries between land and water, city and beach, past and future, remain perpetually in flux.
For thirty-one pounds, you could once buy a beach. What you couldn't buy was certainty about what that beach would become.