“My name is Nick. My last name is Cregor. I was– I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Nice place to grow up.” I met with Nick at Washed Up on Beach 97th one morning.
“I went to NYU. I was 18 or so; I was like enamored with New York. Was more interested in just living in New York than I was to go to college, but it worked out well that way, and uh I moved here, and I’ve stayed ever since. I’m 43 now. I’ve bounced all around, you know…After I graduated, I just stayed and was, yeah, very happy to be here. Just totally in love with the city …I’ve lived in so many different neighborhoods, and always kind of felt like I was having to leave or get priced out of somewhere or whatever I was like ‘All right, that’s it, like I’m either gonna end up somewhere where I’m spending too much money or I’m not comfortable or too far from where I have to work or whatever. And then, um, New York just kept kinda like renewing itself over and over again, and I found like another amazing neighborhood that was affordable with so much new stuff to offer,” Cregor shared. After hopping throughout the city, Nick finally ended up in Rockaway.
“Before I was here, I was in Woodside, Queens, like the border of Jackson Heights, for about seven years, and I just adored it there; it felt like living in six different countries at the same time, uh, so that was great. And I, when I was there, I started coming to the beach more regularly, just taking the Q53 like you know, to the end of the line…Yeah, I was really enjoying the beach and liking the vibe here more and more. I started surfing just on like a whim. Had a friend who had been surfing most of his life, and he was like ‘I’ll teach you.’ I was like, ‘Okay sure,’ and then, yeah, I was like– it must have been my mid to late 30s at the time. I was pretty enamored with it pretty quickly. I was like–that was like–that might–I lost track of timing a little bit, but it was like roughly that summer–that could have been 2019. And then 2020 was pandemic, and I, like, in the winter of that year before things had really gotten wacky, we [Cregor and his roommates] were told we had to leave our Woodside apartment–on good terms–I was like, ‘Oh okay, can’t stay there anymore.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, that’s cool. I’m gonna travel. Like, this is a good time to just sort of mix things up. Um, I was gonna take some time to leave New York and just be in other places, um, and then the pandemic came…I was like, ‘Well I gotta move somewhere, but I can’t find like another two bedroom share in Brooklyn. Like I need something novel; I was about to go to South America!… Then so yeah, on just a whim I was like Craigslist-ing. I was like ‘Oh Rockaway, I’m kind of into it right now.’ Found a place on Craigslist. I moved here.”
In Rockaway, Cregor has found a real sense of community. “I moved here and happened to meet a bunch of other, you know, ‘expats,’ so to speak, who had also recently landed here. I started volunteering at Edgemere Farms and met all these new people. It was weird during the pandemic. It was like, you know, when the world was closing down, my world opened up in all these amazing ways. New friendships, new community, new beautiful neighborhood, like surfing every, you know, day.”
Today, Cregor is the man behind Rockaway Bread, a now fairly widespread weekly project, but baking began as “just a hobby interest.”
“My [new] roommate was like, ‘Oh, what do you–you know, what do you do?’ I was like, “Oh I’m a baker; I just left a baking job in Brooklyn.’ and she was like, ‘Oh, you know our landlord has like a baking studio in the basement of his house. I was like, ‘I did not know that.’… and so immediately then I went to reach out to them, and there was another guy making some bread there at the time, and he wanted to kind of collaborate, and so I plunked down, and then I had myself a little baking job,” Cregor said. “I mean things came together for me here very quickly in a super delightful way.”
After about two years of baking with this partner, “things shifted gears a little bit…I started working for Sean Aiken, baking here on the boardwalk, making pizza, which was an amazing lateral shift. I always think of pizza as basically bread with things on top…it was super great; it was a wonderful learning environment.” He stopped working at Seany Pizza a few years ago after moving his mother from Wisconsin to Rockaway to live with him, but the switch allowed for the revival of Rockaway Bread. “And then I was like, ‘You know what, maybe I’ll start up the bread thing again in like a slightly different iteration, keep it as small as possible but like in a way that’s sustainable.’ And I did that now, like, a year and a half plus ago, and it’s been really nice.”
Baking requires time, care, patience. “It’s like two 12-hour days plus just the time during the week of sorting all that out, but it’s really gratifying. It’s super dynamic and challenging. I feel like I’m such an amateur honestly, even though I’ve been doing it so long. It’s all sourdough, which makes it a really wild and unpredictable thing. So really learning the nuances of that as the temperature changes constantly out there.”
If this bake-talk is starting to sound a bit like a metaphor, it’s no coincidence. “You know, I spend roughly 20 hours every week in that space by myself with bins of dough and floured water fermenting left and right. It’s enough to drive you crazy. And really, like the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know…bread: it’s lovely, metaphorically and analogously too, once you sort of think like ‘Oh, this is how it works; this is a shaping style that works really well for this loaf.’ It’s only a shaping style that worked well for that loaf, for that day, with that dough, and those circumstances. Yes, there’s some truth maybe to the discovery you made, but ultimately–in the same way, I feel like in life–I go through my life constantly being like, ‘Okay, this is the situation that works,’…and it’s only like in that moment–and what I find more is that I work towards just trying to listen. That ultimately, what it is, is actually just listening to the dough, listening to my body, listening to my experience, and then responding sort of organically to it with as much attention and focus as I can without bringing in preconceived notions of, ‘Oh, it has to be this way.’ And the bread is no exception to that. Like, and it teaches me over and over again…And so you get these, you know, constant uh, nuances of trial and error and learning from that as you go. It’s a wild ride, but it’s really cool. I do feel grateful that, like, again, the whole package just does kind of fit in a way.”
