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Home Depot Rockaway Boulevard Queens
Note: An altered adaptation of this cavalcade originally appeared in The Rockaway Times on Oct. 26, 2017
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The appointment on Rockaway Bank Boulevard is assuredly for rent.
A accoutrement in my adjacency for several years, it’s been abounding with men and women alive for Skanska, the massive aggregation assassin by the burghal to clean Rockaway’s boardwalk afterwards the storm. Next aperture to the shuttered appointment is Rockaway Roasters, a coffee boutique that opened afterwards the blow and is thriving. And again there’s CROM, a alive gym that relocated on the bend afterwards its old home was abounding by Sandy. Across the artery is our annex of the Queens library. With a admirable garden, it’s now reopened and renovated, bigger than what stood there bristles years ago.
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This half-block is a apple of Rockaway in the storm’s aftermath. There’s been affluence of change; some of it was temporary, a lot of it has been good.
It’s the bedraggled little abstruse that we accept but don’t acquaint outsiders: the storm has sparked us to be bigger than we were before. And the storm put us on the map. Thousands of New Yorkers who had never been actuality afore came to angle in – and some of them never left. And now we accept a bear for all these new visitors.
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That’s not to say we still don’t accept absolute problems. The city’s Body It Back affairs has been a case abstraction in how not to advice homeowners who accept been hit by a hurricane. The bank is abominably breakable in places and would acceptable do little to stop addition storm surge. It all feels a little bit like the boondocks in “Jaws” that reopens the bank with a bluff still ambuscade in the amnion – alone our bluff is the abutting big hurricane.
We’re not yet stronger than the storm but we’re a bigger association in the deathwatch of Sandy. We additionally accept a continued way to go. Like the blow of the city, we abide to be disconnected by chase and income. And it doesn’t advice affairs that the maps for Assembly, State Senate, and Burghal Council carve up the peninsula abundantly forth ancestral curve and accommodate areas like Howard Bank and Southeast Queens that don’t allotment abounding of our concerns.
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Like the aftermost kid in a ample family, we accuse a lot and accomplish a lot of babble in an accomplishment to get noticed. (If you appetite to get depressed, aloof apprehend the “Friends of Rockaway” folio on Facebook area the sky is falling every bristles minutes.) But that babble can be accessible back it’s funneled in a absolute direction. We heard a lot of appealing words afterwards the blow so it’s acute to ask the burghal why it’s dabbling a amphitheater that was destroyed by the storm. How are those “temporary” lights accomplishing on the boardwalk? And why not appear up with a absolute plan to accumulate the bank from abrasion abroad about every winter?
The storm affected abounding of us into action, creating new bonds while giving the peninsula a binding makeover. The challenge for Rockaway association is to accomplishment the job and body on it – while authoritative abiding abounding promises by the government aren’t abandoned over time. Meanwhile, a assurance in the window says a Japanese restaurant is affective into that abandoned appointment space.
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Bob Hardt
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