The quaint town of Belle Harbor is a drop of suburban heaven in the New York City borough of Queens. The town is a nest of its own kind on the Rockaway Peninsula; it conjures images from the 1998 film “Pleasantville,” as the neighborhood of everyone knowing each other.
Two-story houses with manicured lawns and patio decks line up between Beach 126th and Beach 142nd Streets. These homes are filled with families, whom are mostly Irish Catholic and upper-middle class.
Belle Harbor is less than a five-minute walk from the beach and an hour’s drive away from Manhattan. It’s a 45-minute bus ride (Q35) to Brooklyn College. It’s considered part of Queens County, but over the Marine Parkway Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge the pavement becomes part of Brooklyn.
However, the pristine shrubbery that once decorated the facades of these dreamy, urban castles has been swept away. Most residences are now empty and silent. All sentimental items and furniture kept hidden inside these dwellings have been swallowed by Hurricane Sandy and spit out as piles of rubble that litter the sidewalks and streets.
Residents with vacant, dry eyes walk around inside the FEMA tent, waiting for their turn to submit an application.
Sandy hit New York City on October 29th and slowly filled the streets with salt water. Cars floated down the block. Basements filled with fish. The power blew out.
“During the day we didn’t think it was going to be that bad because we are used to having storms here and people just migrate to the beach and everybody was walking around because they love it – it’s a beach community,” said Felicia Brunetti, a resident on 129th Street.
By 2:00 PM Brunetti was on the beach and “knew we were in trouble” with the waves growing more massive and the surge already reaching land. About an hour later the bridge closed so anyone left on the peninsula could not evacuate. By 4:00 PM “the water starting taking over the blocks”
“We were stuck here,” said Brunetti.
Rockaway resident Barry Cotter told a story about a 50 year-old woman going down to her basement during the storm to turn off the gas. A mirror fell on her arm and she bled to her death on 124th Street.
“All of us stayed behind almost because nobody thought the magnitude of it and that’s what happens. We think okay, its over exaggerated and nobody wanted to leave their home in case of looting,” said a retired NYC firefighter in a baseball cap, who went by Frank.
He had fish swimming through his apartment. He joked that if he stayed at his house he would “be sleeping with the fish as they say in the mafia — in other words, I’d be dead!”
Since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Belle Harbor has not been the same. Sorrow flushed through the roads since it experienced a heavy loss of inhabitants employed by the New York Police Department and the New York City Fire Department.
Over 2,700 New Yorkers lost their lives that day and for Belle Harbor, it was not quite the closing of a chapter for aerial crashes. In November of 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 took off from JFK Airport, soaring through the sky to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.
“There was a lot of community people killed at the World Trade Center and then a month later this plane crashes right here in this same community,” said Kenneth Monahan, a local and retired New York City Police Department, Detective of the 67th precinct in Brooklyn.
George Miller — a resident of Belle Harbor at the time — was at work and received an email from his mother telling him a plane crashed. He made the last train allowed back into the Rockaway and went to his parents’ on the 10th floor of the building.
“You could still see these plumes of black smoke and everything from it perished,” said Miller.
The plane hit land in the morning, while some people were still at mass at St Francis de Sales Church a few blocks away. Next to the church is a Catholic grade school. All of the householders that were directly affected by the crash were members of this church.
“How it didn’t kill hundreds of children is still beyond me,” said Miller.
All 260 passengers on the plane died immediately. Five Belle Harbor residents on the ground died: the Lawlers, a mother and her son at No. 262; the Concannons, a retired husband and wife at No. 266; Franco Pomponio, a father and husband at No. 258.
“It wasn’t just living so close to them as they were very well known and very well loved – they were very involved with the community and you’d see them in the church, in the neighborhood,” said Mary Alison Cuneen, a Belle Harbor resident on 123rd Street remembering her neighbors who died.
Then Hurricane Irene hit in the Summer of 2011 and it didn’t do much to New York besides encourage residents to “ride out” Hurricane Sandy when the superstorm approached over a year later.
And then as if the devil lit a match, a fire started in Belle Harbor during Sandy. The flames lit up the neighborhood and became the town’s main source of light and horror.
According to Brunetti, this was around 6:00 PM.
On 129th Street, the back of Rockaway Seafood caught on fire.
The famous 32-year-old restaurant, Harbor Light Pub, only has the entrance left of it. On Newport Ave between 129 and 130 Streets, neighbors decorated the only part of it still standing with a Christmas wreath and two photos — on the left, a young man holding a full mug of beer and on the right, the same man but aged and in uniform. The photographs are of the owner’s son, who died at the World Trade Center. All the photographic memories that decorated in the interior the pub: gone.
“It has brought us together in many ways because we are all in the same boat where when everyone needs and wants the same things you can relate to one another. We all lost things near-and-dear and just the basics to get along everyday and so you want to help each other,” said Cunneen.
Cunneen told the story of a widow named Elcy Naas on 117th Street, whose basement was flooded “to the point she said it looked like a great, big indoor pool.” None of her neighbors could spare a water pump or generator and at her wits end, Naas sat on the top of her stoop, crying with her head in hands. A young man walked by named Billy Taylor asked her if he could help. He left and returned with all the equipment she needed. He spent hours emptying the flood from her basement. Naas asked how she could repay Taylor and he responded with “you don’t have to repay me – what I’m doing — this if for you.” Cunneen ended the story with tears in her eyes.
“We are fighters here in the neighborhood; we all stick together, but it really shook up the whole neighborhood,” said Brunetti.
Belle Harbor is a town that looks like a hot pink sign hanging in from of Danielle’s Rockaway Florist at No. 436. Handwritten in marker, it reads: “We have all suffered a great loss but will rebuild better and stronger. It was my honor to serve you and I look forward to seeing my friends and neighbors at our grand opening. We are working hard at restoring our business and community and will be back soon.” It is signed by Danielle.
Belle Harbor is a town that looks like a constant stream of people entering and leaving Beach Bagel, a shop on 129th Street that was closed for a month. The patrons talk to each other in line and then refer to the manager behind the counter — the same counter that a month before was only a few inches away from being submerged underwater — by his first name, Mohamed. The children collect at a table in the corner and discuss missing their classmates who relocated and giggle at the idea that those students will be Photoshopped into their yearbook.
Belle Harbor is a town that has a count of over 16 American flags on one block. Some flap from the porches of houses or tall steel poles. On the stretch, over five massive piles of torn wood sit in front of houses. They look like splinters in the heart of 126th Street between Newport and Cronston Avenues.
“I’ve heard a few people that say ‘aw, that’s it, I can’t do this’, from whom are mostly elderly, but for 99.9% of the people, they’ll rebuild, I’ll think,” said Steve Stathis, president of Graybeards, a local nonprofit dedicated to helping the community.
Body Dialect 