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| My grandparents (Albert and Edna Diem) at 42 West Market Street, Breezy Point NY circa 1920 |
As a child in the 1960s, I occasionally visited my Uncle
Henry (technically my “grand uncle,” as he was my grandmother’s brother) at his
bungalow at Breezy Point, the section of Queens devastated by fire early
yesterday morning in the wake of Sandy. In my mind, the bungalow exists in a
kind of perpetual summer, where I always walked barefoot, if only to avoid kicking
sand into my shoes, and the windows were always open, sheer curtains blowing in
the breeze. My mother, who now lives in California, wrote yesterday to share her
memories of Breezy Point, a place where she spent many a day as a girl growing
up in the 1940s. To people watching the news reports who don’t know anything
about this community, the scenes are a charred reminder of Sandy’s force. For
my mother (and maybe now for anyone reading this as well), Breezy Point will always
be so much more. Here’s what my mother wrote:
I'm
sure you remember Uncle Henry who lived at Breezy Point, at the very
westernmost tip of the Rockaways. My grandparents (Henry and Frances) [see picture below] built a
"bungalow" there circa 1910-15 or so – I would guess, based on the
photos I have of it. Uncle Henry upgraded and insulated it for year-round
living and lived there almost all his life. My grandfather was giant-tall and
the sand dunes loomed like mountains when we went for walks, but hey, he died
when I was three, so I must have been very small. We used to spend summers
there when I was little, during WW II times - I remember teenagers
jitterbugging to records on one of the piers on the bayside, with me and my munchkin
friends watching, and envying them, from under the tables. I also remember an
artillery battery firing into the ocean during blackouts during the war, and my
friends, under my direction, digging an air raid shelter in the sand and
covering it with a blanket for a roof even though I somehow knew it would not
help in case of an attack. We stocked our shelter with purloined canned goods
and had lots of adventures and fun, believe it or not. A wonderful place for a
preteen - well yes, a sort of segregated, gated community for relatively poor
folk, but that was another time - where I could wander all day long charting
adventures among the sand dunes, with the ocean to the south, with Uncle Henry
teaching me to bodysurf, and Jamaica Bay to the north, where I would go
crabbing with my father, and digging for clams, and great family gatherings in
the summer with platters of corn drenched in butter - and, of course, we were
harvesting the clams and the crabs at a time before pollution got too bad. I
mention all this because last night Breezy Point caught fire and 80 of those
little cottages, apparently all of them, burned to the ground. A terribly
sad consequence of the storm. In the old days it was only a subway ride to
Sheepshead Bay, and then (in the '40s) a ferry boat ride away from Wall Street. Close,
but inconvenient enough to make it a rural oasis in the city. Of course, all those sand dunes were long ago filled in by houses, and the "bungalows" much enlarged - the story of all seaside communities, I'm afraid.
Let’s hope the
storm blows out to sea and that the fishermen are in port.
- Email from Mom, 10/30/12 (who also happens to be Frances Vardamis,
author of the Yannis
Lavonis Mysteries and many other works)
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| Frances and Henry (my great grandparents) 42 West Market Street, Breezy Point NY, circa 1910 |
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| My mom, 1942, Breezy Point NY |
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