For a few summers (the exact number is not remembered but it was at least 2-3) we enjoyed spending a few days at a friend’s family cottage at Breezy Point. From Wiki: “Breezy Point is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, located on the western end of the Rockaway peninsula, between Rockaway Inlet and Jamaica Bay on the landward side, and the Atlantic Ocean. Breezy Point Tip, to the west of the community, is part of Gateway National Recreation Area, which is run by the National Park Service. This isolated, 200-acre area includes an ocean-facing beach, a shoreline on Jamaica Bay, sand dunes, and marshland. It is a breeding spot for the piping plover, least tern, black skimmer, American oystercatcher and common tern. According to the United States Census Bureau, the community's ZIP code (11697) has the nation's highest concentration of Irish-Americans, at 60.3% as of the United States Census, 2000. It functions mainly as a summer get-away for many residents of New York. Estimates put summer residency at 12,000, while year-round residency was 4337 in the most recent Census. Notable residents included Frank McCourt, author; Angela's Ashes, who mentioned in his memoir Tis, that his mother Angela McCourt spent time with him at a house in Breezy Point. Due to its large concentration of Irish-Americans, Breezy Point has been called the "Irish Riviera."”
Our friends were the Kammeran’s, a nice Irish Catholic family in our neighborhood. My mother was friends with their mother through the school and I was in grammar school with one of their sons and my brother Mike was in class with one of their daughters. There were other little Kammerans, but I do not remember an exact number, just that there was a lot. As I said, they were a good Irish catholic family.
They owned a cottage on the beach at Breezy Point. There were rows of them from the beach back and theirs was one that was right on the waters edge. To get to it you had to pass at least 3 or 4 rows of cottages. They all looked about the same, painted in a white clapboard, green trim kind of way. It had a small porch on the back that segued into a kitchen/dining room area, past a bathroom/laundry room combo, past 4 bedrooms and then onto a front porch that overlooked the beach. The house was raised about 12 feet in the air, the better to avoid flooding during hurricanes and had a flight of steps in front, back and an outside shower without cover for rinsing off sand.
There was plenty to do for the kids. We swam all day, went fishing and boating in a 12 foot rowboat with a small motor attached. There was a tiny boardwalk about 300 yards down the beach with a few rides and a couple of restaurants for hot dogs and clams and ice cream. At night we were all “smooshed” together in a couple of bed rooms, sleeping on beds and couches and floors but there was never much sleeping as we fooled around late into the night and were up early for swimming and fishing.
One of the best features of Breezy Point was being able to see the Marine Parkway Bridge, later renamed the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. It was a draw bridge with the center span totally lifting up to allows ships to pass through. It was noisy and we were close to it, so the sound of it raising always drew a crowd on the beach top see what huge ship was coming through. I also can remember one summer it had been painted a different shade of green and looked so different. But the sounds were the same and that helped it remain familiar.
We would go for a few days, eat grilled burgers and hot dogs and just enjoyed being kids at the beach.
(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)
1 comment:
What a marvelous childhood memory!
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