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There's a sizable prescence of secular and Orthodox Jews in Bayswater and a community of non-Hassidic very Orthodox Jews in an area that became known as West Lawrence (but really Far Rockaway) during the 80s.
SeventhFloor, I didn't know you were in Nordeck. I used to have friends there before they left to get married. Nice apartments. I do remember when Ocean Village was built it was supposed to operate like a Mitchell Lama, but don't know anything about a fire. I'll ask some ex-Far Rock friends who are now spread throughout the US and my older brother, who remembers more about the area than me, about this topic.
Just to update Coney, through some research I discovered that the 1st people that lived in Ocean Village came from a slum clearance project in Bed-Stuy....so not a fire as I originally perceived.
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"The man who sleeps on the floor, can never fall out of bed." -Martin Lawrence
I did a search for "Ocean City" on Google books and this one talks about that area a bit. Might have some other useful info for those interested in Rockaway history
This is specifically for Seventh Floor, I've been wondering how Far Rock was able to have a black majority pop or what made black people move there in the first place cause it's not like Harlem or Bed Stuy, which have been a long standing black communities, nor is like many various neighborhoods in BK or BX that went through white flight. From what I understand, Far Rock was largely underdeveloped so was it the PJs alone that made it a black majority?
Here is a new article covering some of this -- from today's Ny Times
In retrospect, after the storm, it looked like a perverse stroke of urban planning. Many of New York City’s most vulnerable people had been housed in its most vulnerable places: public housing projects along the water, in areas like the Rockaways, Coney Island, Red Hook and Alphabet City.
How is it possible that the same winding, 538-mile coastline that has recently been colonized by condominium developers chasing wealthy New Yorkers, themselves chasing waterfront views, had been, for decades, a catch basin for many of the city’s poorest residents? The answer is a combination of accident, grand vision and political expedience.
New York started building housing projects on the waterfront because that’s where its poorest citizens happened to live. It continued because that’s where space was most readily available. Finally, it built them there because that’s where its projects already were.
Consider the Rockaways, the narrow spit of land in southern Queens that was so emblematic of Hurricane Sandy’s undemocratic wrath, and whose long row of oceanside towers (the Arverne, Hammel, Redfern and Edgemere developments) stand as a kind of dubious monument to a bygone era of New York City housing policy.
Projects first started to rise in the Rockaways in 1950. At the time, there was an unprecedented demand for housing, from returning veterans and blacks migrating from the South, as well as plenty of federal financing as a result of the Housing Act of 1949.
Above all, there was Robert Moses.
“Why did the Rockaways end up with so much government-financed housing? Largely because Robert Moses wanted it there,”says Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.”
It’s impossible to talk about the landscape of modern New York without talking about Moses, who leveraged his position as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance to mass-produce thousands of units of high-rise public housing, often near the shoreline. His shadow looms over much of the havoc wreaked by the storm.
The Rockaways were irresistible to Moses. Once a popular summer resort for middle-class New Yorkers, who filled its seaside bungalows and crowded into its amusement parks, the area had fallen on hard times when cars, new roads and improved train service made the beaches of Long Island more accessible.
In retrospect, after the storm, it looked like a perverse stroke of urban planning. Many of New York City’s most vulnerable people had been housed in its most vulnerable places: public housing projects along the water, in areas like the Rockaways, Coney Island, Red Hook and Alphabet City.
How is it possible that the same winding, 538-mile coastline that has recently been colonized by condominium developers chasing wealthy New Yorkers, themselves chasing waterfront views, had been, for decades, a catch basin for many of the city’s poorest residents? The answer is a combination of accident, grand vision and political expedience.
New York started building housing projects on the waterfront because that’s where its poorest citizens happened to live. It continued because that’s where space was most readily available. Finally, it built them there because that’s where its projects already were.
Consider the Rockaways, the narrow spit of land in southern Queens that was so emblematic of Hurricane Sandy’s undemocratic wrath, and whose long row of oceanside towers (the Arverne, Hammel, Redfern and Edgemere developments) stand as a kind of dubious monument to a bygone era of New York City housing policy.
Projects first started to rise in the Rockaways in 1950. At the time, there was an unprecedented demand for housing, from returning veterans and blacks migrating from the South, as well as plenty of federal financing as a result of the Housing Act of 1949.
Above all, there was Robert Moses.
“Why did the Rockaways end up with so much government-financed housing? Largely because Robert Moses wanted it there,”says Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.”
It’s impossible to talk about the landscape of modern New York without talking about Moses, who leveraged his position as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance to mass-produce thousands of units of high-rise public housing, often near the shoreline. His shadow looms over much of the havoc wreaked by the storm.
The Rockaways were irresistible to Moses. Once a popular summer resort for middle-class New Yorkers, who filled its seaside bungalows and crowded into its amusement parks, the area had fallen on hard times when cars, new roads and improved train service made the beaches of Long Island more accessible.
Click to see more
Pretty much.
__________________
"The man who sleeps on the floor, can never fall out of bed." -Martin Lawrence
That's a good article and this part is very poignant:
Initially, there was a strict screening process to get into the Rockaways’ new projects. Over time, though, those with steady incomes were encouraged to leave, to make room for people on public assistance.
The article also mentions how Rockaway became a dumping ground for the mentally ill and sick seniors in nursing homes. There was this "orphanage" or institutionalized foster home for boys, St. John's (not the hospital) that had some really tough dudes.
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