The breeze at Rockaway Beach gets a little stiffer as the August warmth begins to yield to the autumnal cool. The waves get a little choppier, and the opportunistic seagulls get a little more desperate with slimmer pickings to scavenge from fewer humans.
Some Rockaway residents say they’ll miss the hustle and bustle of peak summer, when people from all corners of the city pour onto the peninsula seeking an escape. But for the most part, locals say September is when things actually get good.
“Let me tell you something,” said 69-year-old lifelong Rockaway native Debbie Valentino, “come May, and we start dealing with warmer weather, we say ‘Yes, we finally got through the winter.’ But then every single local will look at one another and say, ‘Now we can’t wait for September’ — and you will know a local by those words.”
Valentino, who was speed walking side-by-side with the beach’s ebbing tides Friday morning, is a Pisces (“I’m a fish, and I’m born on the beach”), learned to swim in the Atlantic Ocean (“They call us water rats”), and remembers the days when the sea was filled with rubbish and Hurricanes Sandy and Donna ravaged the area.
She’s been taking daily walks by the ocean since she was 20 years old, she said, and now does it once in the morning and a second time at sunset.
But that routine is less soothing in the popular summer months, she said, as the beach becomes “lawless,” dogs go off leash and DFDs (local slang for outsiders who are “Down For the Day”) leave behind trash that Valentino can’t help but pick up.
“This is our planet — ours. And I say, if you love the ocean — respect it.” Valentino added. “It’s a nightmare in the summer.”
Farther down the shore, another Rockaway local was attending to the beach as a lifeguard. He said it has been an especially busy summer for rescues, though things have started to slow down as the season nears an end, and he prepares to return to school as a special-ed teacher. (He declined to be named because of the politics of being a New York City lifeguard.)
“Oh I love September,” he said underneath a doodle-filled lifeguard umbrella while sipping coffee from a large thermos barefooted. “There’s no more humid air, there’s no Parks Department, and nobody’s here to tell you what not to do.” (A lifeguard is, in fact, a Parks Department employee, and the man said he loves the job and “will do it till I can’t pass the test anymore.”)
Near the fences that cordon off the beach, Jersey City resident Jame Novy was just preparing to head out for the day after a morning of surfing with friends visiting from Hawai’i, who said the urban waves were “nice” and “better than I expected.”
Novy said he surfs year-round at Rockaway and typically wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to get to the beach by 6:30. He is looking forward to the fall, he said, as fewer casual beachgoers interrupt the surfs and hurricane season brings dramatic swells.
“It can be good if you like size — I’ll usually wait until it gets a little bit smaller,” said the 50-year-old. “But what I love is that it’s just so close to the city, and there’s surf out in New Jersey, too, but it’s not as nice as coming out here.”
Boardwalk Life
Off the beach and onto the boardwalk, Parker Starr has been coaching young kids at Rockaway Beach Skate Park all season long. It was now the last day of the summer skate camp, and one girl decked out in hot pink said that after today, she and her father will decide if she is going to have a skateboard of her own.
Starr said he likes it when the beach is buzzing but was sure many of his neighbors won’t agree. The skate park gets a lot more quiet from here on out, he added, when school’s in and summer is out — though kids “all come running here” once they’re dismissed at 2 or 3 p.m.
The 23-year-old said he was once such a local kid and has been skating in the spot since the park was built with metal instead of concrete — and before it was razed flat by Hurricane Sandy and then reopened in 2020.
“It’s very humbling — seeing the park rebuilt, it really symbolizes our resilience as a community,” he said. “And teaching the kids is a very rewarding feeling, just to instill confidence in them and to not be afraid to try something.”
Nearby, Parks Department employee Keisha Whittingham shoveled off sand from concrete stairs. The 34-year-old said she was excited to finally work on the beach for the first time this year after 10 years with Parks — but she won’t miss cleaning up after the summer crowd.
“One time there was a pad on the ceiling, and I had to clean it up,” she said. “It’s hard to keep the bathroom really clean on the weekends.”
By Beach 86th Street, Hunter Ayala, one of two grillmasters at RIPPERS, can flip through as many as 1,200 burger patties at the boardwalk’s seasonal hamburger stand. But the 25-year-old Rockaway native said he is himself “pretty sick” of the juicy, cheesy delights.
Ayala started as a porter at the burger joint when he was 19, he said, and spent his time there washing dishes while listening to music on the night shift. He’s now the kitchen manager and will be teaching in a school in the fall after recently getting his master’s degree. But he’s not quite ready to abandon the beach.
“I used to feel like, ‘Wow, I gotta get out of here.’ But the older I’ve gotten, the more I appreciate it,” said Ayala, who plans to return to the kitchen next summer while on vacation from school. “It really is my peace away from the city, and when things get too much, I can just kind of come back.”
The 35-year-old general manager of RIPPERS, Jimmy Lee, has worked summers at the concession spot since he was 28. Lee helps organize local band performances there all summer long and speaks fondly of the local high schoolers and college students he works with.
The restaurant will be closing for the year on Sept. 21, Lee said, when it will host “St. Rippers Day” and friends and family are invited to come for one last hurrah. And when he rolls down the metal door to seal the store shut until next summer, he said, he’ll be both relieved and sad.
“There’s a relief of, like, ‘Oh, I can finally take some time off,’’ Lee said. “But then for a lot of us, it’s also like, ‘What am I going to do now?”
Further inland, 66-year-old Kenny Przyjemfki sat in his walker chair while listening to a local rock band on his headphones outside Surfside Manor, the assisted living facility where he’s lived for the last 19 years. On a usual summer day, he said, he’d be hanging out with his skin exposed to the sun so he can tan up. But it’s been colder this August than last year, he said, which means the hoodie must come on.
Przyjemfki has had three major surgeries since waking up one morning 20 years ago paralyzed from the waist down, he said, and loves summers in the Rockaways because he knows all the lifeguards — meaning he can be unafraid to take a dip in the ocean, which helps with his lower body mobility.
“And the water’s usually warmer this time of year than outside,” he said. But the lifeguards will be around only for another week, and won’t be returning until next year.
“It’s a shame, because it’s such a great place, especially in the summer,” added 50-year-old Kristian Piazza, the facility’s mission director, who moved to Rockaway after a divorce 22 years ago.
“I came over this bridge — and this has been a dream, because I always took my children here — and I actually moved across the street from where I always dreamed about.”
“But I’m not gonna lie,” she continued. “It’s nice when everyone is finally out of here and it’s just us.”
