On Growing Up
in the
Whitest Part of
New York City
by Edwin Johnston
March 16, 2001
Exclusive to BBBR
See related photo
of my family (I'm in the middle)
in
Rockaway Point, summer of '64
There's a census map of page A18
of the March 16, 2001 issue of the New York Times that breaks down the
populations of all the New York City boroughs by race. Surprisingly, I found on
that map that Breezy Point has the largest percentage of whites (98%) of the
entire city. This also happens to be a place where I grew up.
Breezy Point is a tiny
little community (1990 Census pop.
3,700, compared to the total city population of 8 million) at the westernmost
tip of a very slim peninsula that extends out into the Atlantic Ocean from
Queens, just south of Brooklyn and Coney Island. In fact, it's more of a large
sandbar than anything else. Its official designation is termed a private cooperative.
There's only one road through the place and the police force is a private
auxiliary, not city cops. The community is basically composed of houses, with a
few shops, restaurants, bars and a church. The houses are located on
"walks", not streets, which are their official mailing address designations;
little paths of concrete that connect one house to another. Residents' trash is
left on the back sides of their houses in sand alley ways, to be removed by
teams on dump trucks with sand bearing tires. On the south side of the
peninsula is the Atlantic Ocean. It's just a relatively short walk to the bay
on the north side. A small dock juts out on the bay side where people often
fish from. A ferryboat used to pick up passengers there several times a day to
take people over to Brooklyn.
The original essence of Breezy
Point was conceived as a summer haven for a segment of the Brooklyn working
class. The people who set up bungalows there were almost exclusively members of
New York City's police and fire departments. The ethnic makeup of this group
was overwhelmingly Irish. This may account for Breezy Point's other superlative
designation, as the place with the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser
beer. Now, my family is not specifically Irish, but many of them were (and
continue to be) New York City cops and firemen. My mother's father was
ethnically German and a New York City cop. His granddad probably settled in the
German immigrant area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My mother once told me the
story of how her father had their Breezy Point bungalow floated on a barge
across Jamaica Bay from Canarsie. This they then maintained as a summer
residence while they kept a year round brownstone in the Flatbush area of
Brooklyn.
My own parents met each other
when they were teenagers at Riis Park, which is a few miles east of Breezy
Point, near the Marine Parkway Bridge that connects Brooklyn to the peninsula.
Once they were married and began raising a family, they too had a summer
bungalow in Rockaway Point, another cooperative right next to Breezy Point.
(Not to be confused with Far Rockaway and Rockaway Beach, which is much farther
east on the peninsula with a far different history and ethnic make-up.) Our
bungalow was a duplex, with my father's parents and his youngest sister living
next door. My mother's brother and his growing family had a place nearby. Each
of them also had residences in the Flatbush and East Flatbush sections of
Brooklyn. Both of my younger brothers were baptized at St. Thomas More church
in Rockaway Point. Many years later my maternal grandmother's funeral service was
held there.
I have nothing but fond memories
of the summers I spent in Rockaway and Breezy Points. It offered everything a
kid could want. I learned to swim in the bay at a very young age, taught by a
lifeguard. A neighbor's dad taught me how to dive off the wooden jetties. On
the ocean side, I picked up body surfing. I had my own fishing rod and we often
ate flounder caught off the Rockaway Point dock. At the little retail complex
there was a shop called Kotter's, which featured glass covered cases full of
penny candy, which they'd put in a little brown paper bag for the kids to take
home. On the ocean side was the Sugar Bowl, where you could buy swirly soft ice
cream cones and hot dogs. It was a child's paradise. For summertime birthday parties
the rest of the extended family would come out and we'd hold great all-day and
all-night bashes; beaching during the day and setting up strings of Chinese
lanterns for enjoying the cool outdoor weather in the evening. On the Fourth of
July we'd all assemble on the bay side and watch the fireworks displays across
the bay in New York City. From that vantage point, you could see both the
Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty. At the end of each summer, there
would be a grand parade of all the residents, called Mardi Gras, with specific
families and groups outfitted in costumes and displays following some kooky
theme.
My own family gave up our
bungalow as the 1960's came to a close. "White flight" was occurring
in our area of Brooklyn and we would soon move to the suburbs of Long Island.
My mother's father had died and her brother helped to winterize and expand the
Breezy Point bungalow for year round living. The suburbs on the south shore of
Long island had much to offer young people. It was only a short train ride or
hitch-hike to Long Beach or the family would pack a picnic basket for a trip to
Jones Beach or Point Lookout further out on the Island. We still often visited
my mother's mother in Breezy Point. My two younger brothers would each spend
two weeks separately there every summer, staying with my grandmother and their
cousins who lived upstairs. This was a tradition that began while my
grandfather was still alive. As I got older and into my teens, I would make my
own trips to Breezy Point; first on 15 mile bike rides with my Long Island
friends and years later using my dad's car, where I'd take my pals out for a
day and night full of drinking and carousing at the beach.
I never knew Breezy Point to be
a particularly racist place, although I recall a comment once from a family
member that went something like this: "You don't often see a black person
riding through Breezy Point, but if you do, they're riding by very fast!"
My early years in Brooklyn were similar. I attended Catholic grammar school,
where from the first through eighth grades there was only one African-American
enrolled. The same pattern was duplicated when we moved to Long Island. There
was only one African-American family enrolled in our combination junior/senior
high school of over 1,500 students. It's difficult to recognize what racism
entails when all those around you are the same types. What really shook up
Breezy Point was not racism, per se, but ethnic difference. Beginning in the
late 1970's and accelerating during the 1980's and 1990's, was an influx of
ethnic Italians. These Italians also had lots of money and built much larger
homes than the longtime residents could afford. So these days there is a
conflict between the "native" inhabitants, the more working
class-based, overwhelmingly Irish residents and the middle class Italians who
are becoming a dominant force there. It's a bitter struggle that I really don't
know enough about to comment on, mostly because I have spent the past two
decades living 1,500 miles away from the area.
The last time I visited Breezy
Point was in late 1996. I probably hadn't been there for a decade or more. My
brother and I drove in to visit my uncle, now the sole resident of my
grandparents' home. He wasn't at home, but we looked in through the glass door
to see the recent improvements he had made. The place is a virtual palace
compared to the original one story bungalow from the earlier part of the
century that it used to be. We walked across the road to Kennedy's bar and
grille, where we were sure that we would find him. There he was, at the back
end of the bar, facing the bay. He was happy to see me. We both told each other
how good each of us looked. My uncle pointed to the barges out on the bay that
were adding sand in an attempt to stem the rapid beach erosion that has been
going on. He told me that he had sold his nice boat because it was too
expensive to maintain, yet he kept his small sailboat that he had named after
his oldest daughter. After a while, we left our uncle and his fellow retired
cops to their midday beers at Kennedy's. We crossed back over the road to visit
the daughter of one of my mother's cousins, a girl I grew up with and who had
lived next door to my mother's grandfather in Breezy Point. She now lives year
round in a little one story bungalow just down the walk from my uncle's place. She
was recently divorced with a couple of young children whom I played with while
we chatted. Due to her circumstances she had fallen on some hard times. Her
ex-husband and his father lived a few houses down and fought with her a lot.
After I left there I decided to stop at the ATM at the little retail complex in
Rockaway Point and then made my way back to her house offering her a little
gift of some cash to purchase some new toys for the kids on my behalf.
Racism was never a problem in my
family. In the 1970's my father and some of his co-workers bought the business
he had worked at for years as a union typesetter in Manhattan. His three
partners represented the diversity in New York City at the time; Sam was
Jewish, Joe was African-American and Manny was Puerto Rican. Living in
ethnically segregated areas does not imply racism, merely insularity. Perhaps
the people who summered in Breezy point wanted to have a safe insular place for
their children to play during the summer compared to the lack of resources and
facilities for Brooklyn kids at the time. Perhaps my own father sought a place
to escape to in the suburbs for himself and his family in contrast to the
gritty reality he witnessed in the city every day. But each of these places,
Breezy, Rockaway and the Long Island suburbs had something to offer children in
their development that those with enough money could purchase. In my mind it
was less an escape and more of an investment in the children's future. Is it
better to learn from the school of hard knocks on the city streets, or from a
natural environment of exploration and exercise? Do you get a better education
in an ethnically diverse environment of crumbling schools and infrastructure,
or from a narrower, class-based and higher tax-supported system? I'm quite sure
that my parents were preparing me for the real world. In college I eventually entered
a program with a world studies core curriculum. These days in my activist life,
I pride myself in being able to work closely with both African-American and
Latino civil rights leaders, Arabs and Jews, Asians and others of all political
stripes, ages and economic levels. Had I been brought up differently, coming
into conflict with other ethnic groups as a younger person, no doubt I would
have developed prejudices against them, which would have been very difficult to
remove as I got older. I also recognize the societal privileges that have been
bestowed on my for what they are, and feel a strong sense of personal
responsibility to use what I have been given for everyone's benefit.
So, the New York Times, naming
Breezy Point as the whitest place in New York City may be misleading to many
people. It doesn't necessarily classify it as a place of racial hatred. The
biggest hotspots of racial discord are those segregated areas of New York City
that border on other ethnically and racially segregated areas like Crowne
Heights and Bensonhurst. Breezy Point's nearest neighbors of a different race
are a good ten miles away. On that New York Times map, and in nearly every
other large American city, all neighborhoods are essentially segregated by
race, ethnicity, class and other distinctions, differing mostly by degree and
not scale. This is the larger problem, not the fact that some people of mostly
Irish ancestry still have a near exclusive hold (which is tenuous at this
point, at best) over a tiny slice of property that very few have ever heard of.
I don't mean for this little essay to seem like an apology for racial
segregation, which it isn't. I'm simply reminiscing about a place that many
members of my family have called home for a long time and just happens to be in
the news at this time. It is my hope that you will walk away from this essay
with a different attitude from what you may get from the news, from the
perspective of someone who actually lived there.
As a funny and ironic final
note, let me end with this: Some years
ago an ocean freighter full of illegal Chinese immigrants ran aground on the
ocean side of the peninsula near Riis Park beach. Someone on the Larry King
Show the following night was speculating that it may have been an intentional
beaching to avoid the harbor authorities. I called in to the show to claim that
was a preposterous proposal, saying that any non-whites in that area would
stick out like a sore thumb immediately. I was hung up on by the show.
Links:
A Short History of Breezy Point
http://gopher.house.gov/weiner/neighborhoods/hoods_breezypoint.htm
A Photo of a Typical Breezy
Point Walk
http://www.queenschamber.org/Queens/breezypoint.html
Map of Breezy Point/Rockaway
Point Area, Featuring Kennedy's Landmark
http://www.newsday.com/special/rockaway/rockmap.gif
[DIVA NOTE: Having never lived in a segregated community
as a child, and never as an adult until moving to Orange County, California
four years ago, I cannot really argue the relative merits of differing
childhood experiences. However, I would
suggest that an interesting, highly recommended, and very different perspective
on this issue can be found at:
SCHOOL SHOOTINGS AND
WHITE DENIAL]
