The Edgemere Community Civic Association (ECCA) gathered with elected officials on the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk at Beach 38th Street on July 6 to voice their frustrations over the neighborhood’s lack of beach access for the last 26 years.
Photo by John Schilling
The Edgemere Community Civic Association (ECCA) gathered with elected officials on the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk at Beach 38th Street on July 6 to voice their frustrations over the neighborhood’s lack of beach access for the last 26 years.
Since 1996, the one-mile stretch of beach between Beach 38th and 59th Street has been a designated nesting area for endangered shorebirds, including piping plovers, terns and oystercatchers. Because of the nesting area, which is designated and managed by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation under guidelines from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Edgemere residents are unable to access the beach and have to head west of the peninsula in order to do so.
“This is a harsh and cruel injustice to those who live and work in this community,” said ECCA President Sonia Moise, who has lived in the Rockaways for 45 years. “It has been too many years that we have been the forgotten community. Edgemere always gets dumped on. No one thinks about the Edgemere community and what our needs are.”
Edgemere, which exists from Beach 32nd to Beach 59th Street, is home to 19,000 residents, 56% of whom identify as Black and 32% of whom identify as Hispanic, according to 2019 city data. Rockaway resident John Cori says the lack of beach access goes beyond inconvenience and is an issue of inequity.
“There’s a very big racial disparity,” Cori said. “The injustice that goes on in this peninsula is very profound, and they have taken away this bit of land away from the people of Edgemere without any community input, and that is a big travesty of justice.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams echoed this sentiment, referring to Edgemere’s lack of…
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