Laron Rhodie walked onto the beach at Beach 17th Street on Tuesday wearing an orange swim cap and a sleeveless wetsuit. He greeted the lifeguards who asked if he was going out for a swim. The water temperature was 56.3 degrees. He smiled and motioned to his suit and...
Walter Arcario was born and raised in Rockaway, “The whole thing,” he says. “I just had one brother, but the family—I don’t know, there must have been like twenty cousins—we all started here
“I’m from Mexico City. I’ve lived here for maybe twenty-something years—I don’t remember exactly.”
“I grew up in a small town in Minnesota on a farm.”
I met Nicole Switzer in her office on Beach 116th. She is the kind of person who really makes you feel seen and heard—valued when you talk to her.
“My mom was in the military. When…
“I’d come out here for the beach. We’d take the Green Line bus from high school to come to Rockaway.” Shane grew up in Canarsie. She moved to Rockaway about ten years ago. “I wanted to live by the ocean. I wanted sunlight. I was looking on…
“I was born in the Bronx, but we moved out here and stayed in the bungalows on 105th Street from day one. We’ve been living down here since then. We lived on 130th for a while, but have been in this house for, I don’t know, 50 years.”…
All roads lead to Rockaway. When my mom told me and my siblings that growing up, we would shrug it off. “No one knows what Rockaway is,” we would tell her.
In 2021, I started college at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. At this…
