OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
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Filmmakers have Rockaway snaps, would welcome more

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“The Bungalows of Rockaway” is at the rough-cut stage but it’s not too late to insert an image of people in such moments. The possibility that someone still has a photo taken long ago at exactly noon or 6 p.m. may seem remote, but Logan Harris and Callaghan believe that are certainly plenty of interesting images out there that portray Irish-American life before, during and after World War II in the famous Queens resort.
“We would be very responsible with photographs, scanning and returning them promptly,” Logan Harris said. “All donors would be listed in the film’s credits.”
Four years ago, the pair reached out to the community through, for example, newspapers like the Irish Echo and the Jewish Forward, looking for people who spent the vacations on Rockaway. Since then, they’ve conducted more than 60 hours of interviews and gathered a considerable amount of archival material. Among those on tape are Prof. Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and her father Lawrence, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, and Maxine Marx, the only child of movie star Chico Marx.
Many other subjects are rather less well known, like Bob Connelly, a retired NYPD detective who began going to Rockaway as a 9-year-old in 1952. He told the Echo that being interviewed wasn’t a problem as he’d a lot of experience being questioned on the stand by defense attorneys and prosecutors. “It’s hard to shut me up sometimes,” he said. “I definitely enjoyed it.”
Logan Harris described Connelly as a “fabulous storyteller.”
The Connellys, who lived the rest of the year in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, rented a bungalow in Lynch’s Court at Beach 107th Street and St. Mark’s.
Many Irish-Americans today live year-round in Belle Harbor and Breezy Point further along the peninsula, but as 20th century vacationers they congregated in the sections known as Seaside, which is Beach 101st Street through 116th Street, and Rockaway Beach, the community next to it.
Many Irish bungalows were arranged in two rows of five facing into a courtyard. They were generally less than 600 square feet.
The filmmakers would like photos or moving footage of court parties in the 1930s, ’40 and ’50s. They’d also like images of the people enjoying themselves in and outside the restaurants and saloons in the commercial strip of Seaside known as Irishtown. Also on their wish list is material relating to Playland at any period
Using city records, the filmmakers, with the help of Caroline Pasion, who is writing her architectural thesis on the subject, determined that there were 7,300 bungalows in 1933. Most were rented by working-class and lower middle-class Irish and Jewish families. (There was also a long-standing African-American community there that didn’t live in bungalows.)
Today, there are less than 500 bungalows, with only about 60 or 70 of them surviving in the formerly heavily Irish sections, mainly on 108th and 109th Streets. Logan Harris and Callahan, however, talked to families like the O’Hanlons and the Kellys, who’ve been there for generations.
These families started out as renters but bought them from the big landlords. Some from humble backgrounds had the means to buy in the 1920s. Groucho Marx bought a few bungalows as an investment after he and his brothers made it big on Broadway, but apparently sold them when he moved to Hollywood. One legacy of that short-term ownership is home-movie footage of his family and brother Chico’s vacationing together.
The idea of Rockaway as a retreat took off before the Civil War. Newport-scale homes were built alongside dance halls and casinos. It became popular destination for working-class families from the last years of the 19th century. They could never afford to stay in a hotel, but they could rent tents.
In 1905, a developer named John J. Egan came up with the idea of prefabricated dwellings.
“Little by little the bungalows took over,” Logan Harris said.
It remained a thriving getaway into the post-war era affordable to working people, like Connelly’s first-generation Irish-American parents. His father was a truck driver in the Garment District and his mother worked in a school lunchroom. The family stopped renting in 1961 because of the worsening crime situation in Hell’s Kitchen. They felt they couldn’t leave their ground-floor apartment for a whole summer, but continued to go on day trips to the peninsula.
Things were to go downhill for Rockaway, too. The city used it as a dumping ground for those displaced by urban renewal in Manhattan. The big landlords exploited the situation to the fullest.
Connelly, as it happened, landed back in Rockaway in 1981. His new job as a desk sergeant was meant to be punishment. Some higher-up wanted him out of Manhattan, but another senior officer was looking out for him and had him placed in the neighborhood he knew well from childhood. It turned out to be the most enjoyable year of his 26-year police career.
“It was like ‘Barney Miller.’ It was just hysterical,” Connelly recalled. “There was still enough of the old Rockaway.”

To contact Elizabeth Logan Harris and Jennifer Callahan email: bungalowdoc@yahoo.com.

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