Surviving Hurricane Sandy: A Report from Ground Zero: My New VDARE Column is Up!

 

 

A strip of businesses on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, between 113th and 115th Streets in Rockaway Park, that burned down on the night of October 29th, when Hurricane Sandy hit. Although the area is four miles and four communities away from Far Rockaway, in a huge spread, New York’s self-identified “hometown paper,” the Daily News, misidentified the strip as being in “Far Rockaway.” Although Sandy hit the white West End the worst, the media sought to depict black Far Rockaway’s East End and nearby black neighborhoods as having suffered the worst.

 

The looted Key Food supermarket, on Beach 87th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard in the Hammels area of Rockaway Beach, which the MSM also misidentified as “Far Rockaway.”
 

Stephen Essen, of NPR’s WNYC, who took the above shot of the Hammels Key Food, misidentified it "Far-Rockaway-after-Hurricane-Sandy" and as “Shops in Far Rockaway boarded up and closed after the hurricane,” even though the store, which was not just damaged by the hurricane but looted, is over three miles east of Far Rock, in Rockaway Beach. I immediately recognized the store from the photograph, but have since walked by there, as well. When I walked by two weeks ago, heading to the Stop ‘n Shop around Beach 70th and Rockaway Beach Blvd., the Key Food looked just as it does in the photograph. (The Stop ‘n Shop apparently suffered no damage, and was re-opened only days after Sandy.) Since then, I have seen workmen or contractors on its roof, but do not know its present condition.

I do know that on Wednesday, January 9, I saw 11 massive generators on flatbeds, each weighing at least two tons, one welded to its own trailer, two smaller, perhaps one-ton generators with trailer, a massive van, smaller van, and a couple of large “PODS” storage containers in the parking lot of the Key Food on Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Beach 105th Street. This got me all excited, and while just about everything is still there, save for one of the one smaller generators, I have never seen any workers and, as far as I can see, peering into the store, no rehab work has been done.
One day shy of three months after Hurricane Sandy hit, the West End still has no supermarkets.

The Stix family lives fifty yards from the Atlantic Ocean in the West End of Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula, which was more or less Ground Zero for Hurricane Sandy on October 29 2012. We stayed, and were cut off from the world for a month. Many thanks to the VDARE.com readers who expressed concern, and especially those who donated to VDARE.com’s tax-deductible Nicholas Stix Still Alive and Well, But Extremely Stubborn Project. What follows is a personal and political report of a society under traumatic stress.

Today!—the Rockaways. Tomorrow!—America…

The New York Review of Books has just published a Bizarro World essay on Hurricane Sandy’s impact on The Rockaways, by one Michael Greenberg, who says he grew up here. There was no crime, and the black cut-throats from the local city housing projects were merely the victims of (presumably racist) neglect by the city. [Occupy the Rockaways! January 10, 2013. The headline is a reference to Greenberg’s claim that some the relief worker volunteers “had been participants in last year’s Occupy Wall Street protest.”]…

[Read the whole thing here!]