[NYguy]

http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4322

Behind Closed Gates
Little-known gated communities in NYC draw controversy, lawsuits

3-10-2010


Sea Gate, one of the oldest private communities in the city, has been sequestered for more than a century.

Residents of Edgewater Park have described their southeastern Bronx community as timeless and unspoiled, a waterfront Shangri-La. Next door to them is Silver Beach Gardens, a “white-picket-fence fairytale,” as the Daily News declared last summer. But trouble struck these two communities last month when the Fair Housing Justice Center, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against both claiming racial discrimination.

Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens are private cooperatives, with closed-off streets and a single point of entry. They have security guards and signs that forbid loitering, trespassing or soliciting. They also, as the lawsuit points out, have very few black people living within their cloistered confines—less than 1 percent. The suit, filed February 4, has left these Bronx neighborhoods defending their insular, tight-knit ways. And it has left those outside their walls astonished that gated communities exist in New York City.

But they are here, and not just in the Bronx.

Slices of suburbia nestle along coveted waterfronts and isolated pockets of the outer boroughs, fenced off and often guarded from the rest of the city. Some have been around for more than a century. They began as mostly white, middle class enclaves. That is what they mostly remain to this day.

The communities of Breezy Point, on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula, are protected as much by their gates as by their isolation.


A fence erected in 1989 to keep Coney Island beach goers from venturing onto Sea Gate property.

Gates first went up around the western tip of Coney Island in 1898. To this day, the 830-home Sea Gate maintains its own streets and sewers and even has its own private police force, separate from the NYPD, stocked with guns and squad cars. In 1960, residents at the far end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens formed the Breezy Point Cooperative. Silver Beach Gardens finalized its own private co-op in 1973. Edgewater Park followed in 1988. These are the largest and most well known, but it is not uncommon for developers to put up fences around developments new and old, declaring them off-limits to outsiders.

With beaches and mazes of private streets lined with bungalows or detached one-and-two-family homes, these gated communities hardly resemble Manhattan’s premier co-ops like Sutton Place or 740 Park Avenue. Nor do the residents enjoy the haughty, decadent lifestyle on display in Coto de Caza, the gated community where The Real Housewives of Orange County live. And yet these private sanctuaries do exhibit a similar world view.

“Sea Gate is horizontal. Park Avenue is vertical,” said Tom Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. “Physically the communities are different. Socially, they’re the same. The essential aspect is exclusion.” Gates and private security, Angotti said, send a message to people on the outside of these communities that they are not welcome.

Not all gated communities are co-ops like Edgewater Park or Silver Beach Gardens, however. Nor are their practices seen as nefarious. “We’re a unique seaside community,” said Tami Smorto, manager for the Sea Gate Association. “Nobody knows about us. We’re so quiet about who we are. It’s like a little hidden gem.” She said Sea Gate’s somnolent streets, low crime rate, and relative obscurity attract people.