A wide ocean beach with a concrete boardwalk, and the subway a few blocks from the sand.
What Rockaway Beach looks like
The beach runs the whole south side of the neighborhood, a concrete boardwalk behind the sand. Hurricane Sandy destroyed most of the wooden boardwalk in 2012, and its concrete replacement was finished in 2017. The city's only real surf is here. One of the two legal surf zones is between Beach 87th and Beach 92nd Streets.
It grew up as a resort. The hamlets of Holland and Hammels merged as the Village of Rockaway Beach in 1897. ran between Beach 97th and Beach 98th Streets from 1902 to 1987. Housing stands on that block. The station sign at Beach 98th Street still said Playland in 2003.
The resort trade faded after the Second World War. People call it the Irish Riviera. A quarter of residents claimed Irish ancestry in the 2000 census, the second highest share in the country after Boston's South Shore.
Two resort era buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. The synagogue on Beach 84th Street, from the early 1920s, now houses a church. The , from 1931, has been out of civic use since 1962.
Thirteen story apartment slabs from the late 1960s stand between and and still dominate the skyline.
The A and the Rockaway Park shuttle stop on elevated platforms at and Beach 98th Street. The sign at still says Holland. The lands in the middle of the neighborhood. It was the first direct road to the rest of Queens.
Films shot in Rockaway Beach
put the neighborhood on screen while the park stood. The Atom Smasher roller coaster appears in the 1952 film This Is Cinerama. The park itself turns up in Sophie's Choice, from 1982. It closed in 1987 and housing stands on its block now.
Freeheld, 2015
Freeheld shot around Beach 102nd Street, and Beach Channel Drive in October 2014. The feature film has Julianne Moore as the New Jersey detective Laurel Hester. The crew turned an auto garage into a set with lights out of a dozen trucks and kept going after dark in the rain. They also filmed the front of a house on Beach 102nd Street, down the drive between it and the neighbor's. The film is set in Ocean County, New Jersey. The location scout told the homeowner they had picked Rockaway because of Sandy and wanted to bring work to the neighborhood.
What Rockaway Beach can double for
Rockaway Beach can stand in for Ocean County, New Jersey in Freeheld, a beach town at the edge of a big city and an East Coast surf town.
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