Perhaps you too coped with the summer heatwave by going to the Rockaways, that skinny spit of land that juts out from Queens into the water down by JFK Airport. Most Rockaway beaches are informally numbered for the streets that crisscross the peninsula, which is only a few blocks wide. For example, I’m going through my notes while sitting on the sand at Beach 60th Street, looking west to Beach 61st Street, which runs in this way to Beach 149th Street. There, where the last city block lapses into nature reserves and semiprivate vacation zones, is Jacob Riis Park.
The one-mile plage at Jacob Riis Park is nicknamed “the People’s Beach.” Regulars love this part of the Rockaway coast because it barely feels like the city. It’s neither super accessible by subway nor affordable by taxi, so I’ve always hitched a ride in a friend’s car. It’s worth a little hassle: In my decade and a half of coming here, summer days have always ended in a sparklingly fun queer gathering pulsing with music and all different types of people dancing in a weed haze.
I’ve always thought, I said to her, that gay people came to Riis because of the veneer of disrepair and the privacy it made possible. Now you’ve done the repairs.
In August, the first phase of a new $88 million mixed-use facility opened at the Jacob Riis Bathhouse, under the name Rockaway Ocean Club. The bathhouse is that long brick building lying between the parking lot and the shore and studded with two octagonal towers. Aside from an inner court, until recently the only accessible part of the complex were the tiled public restrooms with mirrors made of unbreakable, polished metal. The bathhouse is just down the boardwalk from the site of another, larger brick sphinx with which it was sometimes confused. That building served as a tuberculosis hospital and then a nursing home before it was abandoned in the late 1990s and pulled down in 2023. It used to loom over the queer beach, its broken windows looking out over us with a maternal eye.
The main pavilion at the Jacob Riis Bathhouse is a charming composite. The detailing of those angular turrets, the kind you see a lot of in Brooklyn, with their colored brick and concrete trim, are what the books identify as Moorish. The span in between them is filled by a bulging arcade done in what you could call municipal moderne. Stepped piers balance the plumb lines of the towers, while the window-full story above the porch front contrasts the squares of deep shadow below. Both useful and elegant, tax-paid constructions like these elevate the life of the normal person.
“SHALL AN OCEAN-SIDE PARK BE acquired for its people?” That was the question the Parks and Playgrounds Association put to city administrators in a 1911 appeal for public recreation space. The group nominated two sites, one on Coney Island and the other in the Rockaways; the city went with the latter. Seaside Beach opened the following year and was soon renamed after the Parks and Playgrounds Association’s recently deceased honorary vice president, the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. The Parks Department sponsored a landscape competition that sought to create a city common on par with those in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In addition to proposing a second beach, on Jamaica Bay, the winning project imagined a vast pleasure garden replete with lagoons, playfields, esplanades, restaurants, and concessions. It was scrapped when the federal government seized the land and built a naval station to surveil German U-boats. New Yorkers protested the takeover of their People’s Beach. They lost but never stopped swimming.
Jacob Riis Bathhouse. Lauren Martin
The McKim, Mead & White–designed Neponsit Hospital, which had always been part of the reformers’ vision, opened in 1915. The navy pulled out sixteen years later. After recovering the parkland, Queens parks commissioner Albert C. Benninger hired Stoughton & Stoughton to build a changing room center. The bathhouse’s eclecticism vexed Robert Moses, who superseded Benninger in the mid-1930s and had it partly redone in a decoish style, gutting the beach-facing pavilion and remaking its façade in the streamlined image of an ocean liner. In a rare act of mercy, he spared the storybook towers—indeed, he raised them fifteen feet to bring them into proportion with the enlarged complex. The remodel, by architects Clinton Loyd and Aymar Embury II, was part of a whole new park concept funded with cash from the Works Progress Administration. Instead of lagoons and croquet yards, Moses delivered a promenade and lawned mall, trees, and a massive parking lot, whose area exceeds that of the beach itself.
The detailing of those angular turrets, the kind you see a lot of in Brooklyn, with their colored brick and concrete trim, are what the books identify as Moorish. The span in between them is filled by a bulging arcade done in what you could call municipal moderne.
This stretch of leisure space has an old, populist spirit. At Riis (today’s everyday sobriquet), ten thousand lockers, divided according to gender, once lined the courtyard. In Gay New York (1994), George Chauncey argues that at public parks and beaches, queer New Yorkers cultivated a kind of privacy derived from numbers. He recounts a 1929 anecdote about a female Variety reporter who had agreed to judge a Coney Island beauty contest, only to find that the contestants were mostly men, some wearing makeup and women’s clothes. In another Coney scene, from the 1940s, male sunbathers turned “their towels into dresses and fancy hats, swishing down the beach, kicking up their heels.” Chauncey notes a Riis lesbian section was established near the Neponsit Hospital in the 1950s.
By the following decade, Riis was home to a queer scene centered around Bays One and Two, nicknamed “Screech Beach” for its embrace of raucous, clothing-optional subversion. Police harassment picked up in these years, with Black and Latino patrons made to endure the worst of it. Cops issued tickets over the size of swimsuits and arrested others who protested. In 1971, not long after Stonewall, the Gay Activists Alliance held voter registration drives at Riis.
It was a good place to find potential activists, the sand packed with people taking liberties forbidden in other parts of the city. A Howard Johnson franchise operated out of the hall that projected over the arcade. There was a rooftop solarium, and of course all those lockers. But with a budgetary shortfall looming in the early 1970s, the city closed the complex. Riis passed into the hands of the National Park Service (NPS), joining the Gateway National Recreation Area. The US Parks Police took over patrolling Jacob Riis Park from the NYPD, but until the 1980s they lacked proper jurisdiction to effectively prohibit nudity. As the park fell into a sort of regulatory gap, patrons gathered, not minding the general air of dilapidation. The bathhouse lived a twilight existence—its changing rooms remained open, but the restaurant and concession stands had gone; paint was peeling everywhere—until inspectors found asbestos and shuttered it completely.
“Worth the risk!” To receive issues by post:
NPS undertook a restoration project in the greasy-palmed early 1990s. Although they made improvements to the landscaping and promenade, salty sea air had compromised too much of the bathhouse. They shored up the unstable parts and stripped the asbestos but restricted access to the building to park rangers, first aid stationers, and lifeguards. For many years, a dusty and armless lifesaving dummy glared out at swimmers through a second-floor window. The bathhouse’s broad face continued to take lateral blows from the open ocean. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy further damaged parts of the structure, and yet it endured.
A DECADE AGO, NPS PUT OUT A CALL for proposals to rehab the grounds. It awarded the bid to Brooklyn Bazaar, the operator of many of the concession stands on the boardwalk. Owners Belvy Klein and Aaron Broudo incorporated the project as Bathhouse Lodge LLC and secured funding from controversial developer Jonah Bamberger’s Aulder Capital. They also retained as restoration architects Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, the adaptive reuse specialists behind the conscious rejigging of Grand Central Terminal, among other local landmark spaces. After clearing a gymnastic process of historical and environmental reviews, Bathhouse Lodge LLC signed a sixty-year lease from NPS in October 2022—an ill-advised move, according to some. At a 2021 public hearing, a frustrated attendee argued that Brooklyn Bazaar’s history of short leases (two and a half years at 29 Norman Avenue; three years at the Polonaise Terrace in Greenpoint) made them a bad bet.
New Yorkers protested the takeover of their People’s Beach. They lost but never stopped swimming.
I joined a press tour of the site on a very hot morning in late June. Entering from the parking lot, you pass under archways supported by cast-stone Corinthian columns. (Because the complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, antiquated features like the row of ticket booths had to stay. Tubular metal chairs and tables—the kind specialist buyers have to travel around Europe to find—were temporarily stored among them.) A courtyard separates the low-lying entry pavilion from the larger building with the turrets, which won’t open until next year. On one side of the courtyard is a veranda and on the other is a U-shaped pool—both new additions, Ursula Damani, founding partner of Rockaway Ocean Club, explained. She was friendly and seemed genuinely excited to show journalists around. She was also at pains to emphasize continuity: The original complex opened when it was only 60 percent finished, and so would this one.
Up on the second floor of the seaside pavilion, an architect from Beyer Blinder Belle talked about the craftsmanship of the existing seafoam green tile. Running along the top are wave motifs scraped through the glaze by hand, revealing a twist of raw ceramic, he said. Because of conservation rules, the developers couldn’t reproduce the detail—tricking the visitor isn’t allowed—but couldn’t fight it, either. Complementary aquamarine porcelain tiles line the vestibule of a new ADA-compliant elevator that leads back down to the pool.
The east-west wings that branch off the main block are being converted into small hotel rooms with views of the New York skyline or the sea. From the roof terrace, where an unsympathetic metal canopy has been added, the view to Sandy Hook is especially clear. I pointed out the queer beach to Damani, and an empty spot where an open-air art gallery—pictures and weavings affixed to a longstanding chain-link fence—once stood. I’ve always thought, I said to her, that gay people came to Riis because of the veneer of disrepair and the privacy it made possible. Now you’ve done the repairs.
In my decade and a half of coming here, summer days have always ended in a sparklingly fun queer gathering pulsing with music and all different types of people dancing in a weed haze.
Investment in the Rockaways has been profoundly uneven. Aspirational holiday homes are set adrift in food deserts. In this sense, the Rockaway Ocean Club perhaps represents another point of continuity. According to the club’s website, more than half of the restored complex will be open to the public. Access to the pool, lounge chairs, and other amenities will be limited to members, with annual fees ranging from $1,000 to $3,500 (for a family). Damani, who cited the development’s expense in connection with the rates, seemed earnest about keeping the bathhouse true to its roots. “People like to put things in boxes,” she said. “Why can’t we have a kids’ summer camp in the morning, and a queer dance party in the evening?”
AFTER MY VISIT, I CALLED Ceyenne Doroshow, founder of Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS) and longtime community steward at Riis, to ask what the beach had meant to her as a younger person, before she grew into a doyenne of glamour and activism. “That was my home for many years,” she said. “Every summer, when I had no place to go, those people took care of me.” (I also put Damani’s question to her. She replied, “Whose kids?”)
Park police tamped down on toplessness and cooperated with ICE to set up a checkpoint in Moses’s ungodly parking lot.
Doroshow is campaigning to have Bays 1 and 2 at Jacob Riis Beach landmarked. It’s the latest in a long effort to protect Riis—she calls it the “queer Boca Raton”—and its significantly Black and Latinx public from the threat of comprehensive redevelopment. Doroshow’s associates in the People’s Riisearch Group believe that Rockaway Ocean Club has conspicuously kept their distance. According to jah Elyse Sayers, a researcher who helps run the Riis Beach Bloc Association (RBBA), a Riisearch subgroup that circulates anti-privatization resources on social media, no one from the club has reached out. “There has been no community engagement process,” Sayers says, “no gesture toward community benefits other than a place to spend money.”
The Riis community carries on with its traditions. Journalist J. Wortham, whose documentary short The People’s Beach will premiere in October, tells me about a jaunt to Riis in the early morning on a post-Pride Sunday—an appointed hour “when all the queers and trans folks drag themselves from the club to the water to recoup at the beach in as little clothing as possible.” They’d been doing this for years: Friends who are now parents attend with babies in tow, “Mayor of Riis Beach” Ralph Hopkins is a ubiquitous presence, and timelines of lovers converge on the sand. “This is part of what it means to live outside the confines of straight time and the straight world,” Wortham says.
Still, the outer world intrudes. This summer, Truthout reported that policing was heavier at Riis than in recent years. Park police tamped down on toplessness and cooperated with ICE to set up a checkpoint in Moses’s ungodly parking lot. RBBA organized a boycott, calling on beachgoers—who show no sign of abandoning the queer beach—to withhold their money and participation from the bathhouse’s private club, pool, hotel, eateries, bars, and events. Inspired by the success of FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment) to conserve the West Side Piers, the group hopes to couple maintenance with bottom-up planning. That will take time, a luxury Riis may not possess. The Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement, a $1 billion fracked gas pipeline project to augment an existing pipeline under Riis, could leach toxins into the seabed. Erosion is also a major issue, and there is no indication that NPS is committed to finding a solution, aside from closing off sections of the shoreline, incrementally dispossessing the people of a beach they have called their own for a hundred years.
The water has been so nice lately in the Rockaways that the whales and dolphins and seals are coming by more. The creatures are beautiful. The tiles on the wall at the renovated Jacob Riis Bathhouse are beautiful, too. It didn’t make sense to ask Ceyenne Doroshow what she thought of them, because she’s never been inside.