Long Beach, I sometimes tell people, is my sort-of hometown. I say "sort of" because I've never actually lived there, but it's about as much of a hometown as a place you've never lived can be. I've been coming to Long Beach as long as I can remember; it was my family's go-to beach destination, and one of my earliest memories is bobbing in the waves, eating pretzel rods with a grandfather who died when I was 4.
My parents tried to get closer not long afterward. In 1986 I accompanied my mom to a trailer in neighboring Atlantic Beach, where we listened to a presentation on a new beachfront housing development. There were lavish houses and more-modest houses, the developer said. "We can't afford any of those," my mom told me on the way out. But five years later, when I was 13, my parents got wind that someone had bought one of the last vacant lots, then backed out midway through construction, leaving the developer desperate to unload it. We were in.
My parents continued to live just a few blocks from the Long Beach border until a couple of years ago, when they decided to live out their twilight years on one level. They sold the Atlantic Beach place and bought an oceanfront condo three miles down the road at the other end of Long Beach. The first time I drove down from Rhode Island to visit was the first time I had ever slept in the city that I'd been claiming for years as my hometown. (Atlantic Beach, with its population of under 2,000, is the kind of place that people who live 10 miles away have never even heard of.)
Long Beach, New York, population 33,275, is one of only two incorporated cities in Nassau County. (The other is Glen Cove.) It's located off the South Shore of Long Island, on what's officially called Long Beach Barrier Island -- but don't ask locals about that, because that name is never spoken and many residents don't even know it. Access to the barrier island is via three bridges, including two drawbridges, one of which is a toll bridge. It's bordered to the west by the aforementioned Atlantic Beach, where the island nearly touches Queens' Rockaway Peninsula, and to the east are Lido Beach and Point Lookout.
In my opinion Long Island has some of the Northeast's best beaches, but Nassau County, which has a population greater than 10 U.S. states, mostly lacks beach towns. Nassau's beaches are on Long Beach Barrier Island and adjacent Jones Beach Island (there are also beaches on the North Shore, but South Shore residents don't consider them real beaches -- they tend to be small and rocky.) Long Beach Barrier Island's other towns are almost entirely residential, and Jones Beach Island is taken up by state parkland. That leaves Long Beach as the only place with a real beach scene.
I visited Long Beach on the weekend of April 23-24 and decided to indulge my new hobby of taking photos with my terrible smartphone camera. (I hesitate to post those photos here considering the presence of some truly excellent photographers, but hey, you don't have to look.) Nearly all my time was spent on the boardwalk, a two-mile waterfront promenade that's one of the major reasons I love Long Beach. You'll hear more about it later, but note how active and vibrant it is with Memorial Day and the official start of the summer season still more than a month away. Long Beach now has a couple of hotels and the summer brings day trippers from around Long Island and New York City, but you can be confident that the people you see in these photos are almost all locals, out to enjoy a beautiful day as Long Beach residents love to do.
Yeah, this song's about the wrong beach, but it's not far away and this is by far the definitive (only?) New York beach song:
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Long Beach's Long Island Rail Road station. Uniquely for Long Island, a lot of architecture in town is Spanish style. When you disembark here, you're only a few blocks from the beach, making Long Beach popular with carless city dwellers.
Long Beach is the end of the line. From here, it's around 50 minutes into Manhattan.
Park Avenue in central Long Beach is a largely walkable strip that's active year 'round but particularly comes alive during the summer.
On to the boardwalk. A Long Beach landmark for more than 100 years, what you're looking at is actually brand new. It was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and rebuilt. The new boardwalk opened only about a year after the storm. I'm amazed by how quickly Long Beach has recovered from Sandy, but there's still some progress to be made, as we'll see later.
Beach volleyball is more or less Long Beach's official sport (though hockey is a close second; the city used to be the official training center for the New York Rangers). I've seen televised tournaments taking place on the beach, but I don't think these guys would qualify.
A testament to Long Beach's connection to the sea: Just because you're wearing long sleeves and even jackets, doesn't mean you can't spend some time lying on the beach.
Every block has a ramp up to the boardwalk.
Cycling is serious business in Long Beach, and it's still my favorite place to ride a bike. A couple of years before Sandy, the city started a bikeshare program. The storm ended that, but now it's back. No bikes available now, but the sign promises they'll return soon.
Unlike some other beach towns, Long Beach has no retail on the boardwalk itself (though it has in the past and will again soon). Instead, the boardwalk is lined with apartment buildings, ranging from modest to luxurious. The newer they are, the more upscale they are.
After the boardwalk was rebuilt, Long Beach started putting up these "comfort stations" every few blocks. They offer bathrooms and showers, and soon they'll include retail outlets as well. The city is soliciting suggestions from the public on what they'd like to see.
These directories are new as well. We've already seen "downtown" Long Beach (though I've never heard anyone call it that). I promise before we're done, you'll see a little of the West End and East End, too.
Access to the beach. Anyone can go down now, but it'll cost you $12 or an annual pass after Memorial Day.
If you hang out on the boardwalk long enough, eventually you
will see something like this. Behind these guys is Long Beach's "superblock," a huge vacant lot planned for mixed use but stuck in development hell since long before Sandy.
An art installation on vacant land beyond the boardwalk.
I probably could have done a better job of capturing the fact that there are seagulls
everywhere.
I always thought of the boardwalk as a kind of pedestrian-and-cyclist highway, with a series of exits to local roads. The exits have always been marked, but now the signs are prettier.
Another exit sign, this one to Long Beach Boulevard, the city's major north-south corridor. Keep going and it'll take you over the Long Beach Bridge to Long Island proper.
A while back someone used data from social media to show that there isn't a single ZIP code in America where the Mets are more popular than the Yankees -- even the Mets' home ZIP code in Flushing! Needless to say, as a Mets fan, this didn't sit well with me, and frankly, I don't think I buy it. Long Beach is totally Mets country. On my walk I saw easily a dozen people or more wearing Mets garb with nary a Yankees hat to be found.
Selling ice cream and drinks on the beach is something of a rite of passage for local teenagers. I never did it, but my brother did. With summer rapidly approaching, this is a job fair for teens who want to make a buck by hauling a cart across the sand. The cart you see on the right, though, is the type that will remain stationary on the boardwalk, staffed by girls -- they're always girls, and the kids on the beach are always boys.
This is new: a permanent art installation made from pieces of the destroyed boardwalk.
One of the older buildings on the boardwalk, a reminder that this area used to be affordable. I thought the Puerto Rican flag was interesting -- it's not the type of display of ethnic pride you usually see in this area.
And a reminder that there's still a degree of blight around here, even as luxury apartments sell for well over $1 million. When my parents saw their new building for the first time, they loved the building itself, they loved the beach and the boardwalk, but they were concerned that this side of town was too grungy. This is what they meant.
The left and right sides of the boardwalk are for pedestrians; the center strip is for cyclists. Signs are posted to spell this out, but the old boardwalk also had clear markings painted on the wood. The new boardwalk makes do by laying the wood in a different direction, but I don't think that's obvious enough.
From my parents' balcony. That's one of the comfort stations below; the building's residents fought against its construction, worried that it would block their views and attract vagrants, but lost.
Another one from the balcony. One thing you won't find in Long Beach is a parking lot. Instead, visitors have to circle looking for street parking -- potentially a very tall order even at this time of year, so imagine it in mid-July. Fortunately, the city provides a
lot of creatively laid out street parking, but I'm still glad my parents' building has a garage.
Can you see that? Right at the left of the middle third of the photo, peeking up from the horizon? No? Well, look harder -- that's the Manhattan skyline, just barely visible from here on clear days.
And now a few from a previous visit in February, when I got some different angles. Yes, I said February. Look at how packed the boardwalk still is.
On the beach.
I promised I'd take you to the West and East Ends, right? Well, I didn't visit the West End on my latest trip, but I did in February. It's the younger, funkier side of town, and I love it a lot (and not just because it was an easy walk from our old house). This is where the island is a measly three blocks wide. Houses here are smaller, on extremely narrow lots, and they're popular summer rentals for college kids. But I stay mostly to the bar- and restaurant-laden retail strip, Beech Street:
And now about three miles crosstown to the East End, specifically the neighborhood known as the Canals.
My wife thought this house was hideous, but I dunno, I kind of like it. She said it looked like a sand castle. Is that bad?
And finally, the new reality of construction in Long Beach: Houses are now required to be built elevated in order to combat flooding. Sandy didn't just destroy the boardwalk; it destroyed many houses, most of which are now being replaced by homes that look a lot like this.
I'm back in Long Beach a lot and will try to update over the summer.
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