“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…