Remembering Breezy Point

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)

Frances and Henry (my great grandparents)
42 West Market Street, Breezy Point NY, circa 1910

My mom, 1942, Breezy Point NY

Recent update on Breezy Point is available here: 'We're going to get through this': Breezy Point residents search for the past, look to the future