Rockaway, Queens: Dealing with hard times
Dionne, E. J. Jr.
E.J. DIONNE Jr. ROCKAWAY, QWEENS A neighborhood I know well Our family has a love affair with a star-crossed little neighborhood at the edge of New York City. In our house, "Rockaway" is a...
...he's Brian's cousin...
...Maybe it goes through hard times because it is so naturally gifted at dealing with them...
...It isn't...
...Babysitters suddenly materialize...
...2001, Washington Post Writers Group 7...
...The flames were ripping through houses and buildings two doors down from my brother-in-law's home...
...It's work that's often passed down from father to son...
...Many people who don't know the place think this is an attitude foreign to New York City...
...The guns were put there to fight Nazis who many feared would come across the sea during World War II...
...Grandma finally got through to us...
...Fortunately, the Nazis never came...
...All I know is that it's a place that knows how to pull together and get dinner to the household down the street where no one is home to cook...
...A few weeks back, I was talking with Monsignor Martin Geraghty, the pastor of Saint Francis de Sales, about his neighborhood's troubles...
...The invitation for a drink at the Harbor Light, a friendly establishment smack in the path of November 12's devastation, comes right on time...
...ROCKAWAY, QWEENS A neighborhood I know well Our family has a love affair with a star-crossed little neighborhood at the edge of New York City...
...You see, Rockaway, and in particular the Belle Harbor section that was struck on November 12, had already suffered mightily in the World Trade Center disaster...
...Why so much trouble has come so fast to one small place I cannot explain...
...Their attitude fits too—tough on the outside, romantic on the inside...
...Misleading because everyone is acutely aware that it takes hard work and careful adjustment to keep old values alive in the year 2001...
...A passel of kids of varying ages, the cousins love playing baseball in the front yard, romping on the beach just two blocks away, or exploring what's left of the Fort Tilden gun emplacements that overlook the Atlantic Ocean...
...Going to Rockaway means seeing grandma and aunts and uncles and "the cousins...
...To call this neighborhood old-fashioned is both true and misleading...
...We knew my mother-in-law was in church at the time of the crash—she goes to the 9 a.m...
...He's a deeply thoughtful man, a neighborhood intel6 lectual who never flaunts how smart he is...
...That's just what these people are...
...Firefighters are as thick on the ground as steelworkers once were in Pittsburgh or stockbrokers still are in Brooklyn Heights...
...She and the rest of the family were OK, too...
...He's not an outsider...
...We learned courtesy of a live interview with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani that the church was OK...
...It's a neighborhood full of firefighters and upwardly mobile, middle-class people, many of whom had moved across the Gil Hodges Bridge from working-class sections of Brooklyn...
...The word gets out fast...
...They don't have to...
...The television screen on the morning of November 12 cut suddenly to a city block we know and cherish...
...He's a kid...
...My son loves the neighborhood because he can hit the streets and within five minutes be brought into a game of basketball or beach baseball or whatever else is going on...
...he's an honorary neighbor...
...In our house, "Rockaway" is a magic word...
...Nobody ever asks questions...
...He spoke of the academic trend to deconstruct, and thus explain awy, anything...
...You can deconstruct everything," he said, "except suffering...
...Everybody knows the same comfort will be available for them when they need it...
...Food just shows up...
...Mayor Giuliani said he remembered the church because of the many funerals and memorial services he had attended there since September 11...
...I don't envy Monsignor Geraghty's task of explaining to the good people of this exceptional neighborhood why the inexplicable keeps happening to them...
...Mass every day at Saint Francis de Sales, about a block from where some of the plane fragments hit...
...True because the prevailing values really are old-fashioned...
...Many of them found good jobs in the financial boom of the 1990s and worked in the Trade Center...
...Nobody thinks about being paid back...
...Now, the neighborhood faces troubles no one ever imagined...
...People in Belle Harbor don't much debate a word like "communitarian...
...Few professions fit the neighborhood better: a marriage of family values with public service...
...The funny thing about this neighborhood is that for all the ties of clan and ethnicity and faith—most of the neighbors we know are Irish, with a sprinkling of Italians, and Catholic— there is a kind of open welcome you don't run into everywhere...
...I know from family experience that when a neighbor gets sick, whole blocks mobilize instantly...
...That's why it was so painful to watch this neighborhood in flames...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 20
