Broad Channel - Queens
Rum Row, The Raunt, and the Real McCoy
Last week I got an email from photographer Rowland Scherman with a suggestion. Rowland has worked for publications like Life, Look, and Time, documenting everything from the March on Washington to Woodstock. He has even won a Grammy for his photography, which is a little like winning an Oscar for painting. Needless to say, when someone like Rowland gives you advice, you take it. His email simply read:
It’s got to be Broad Channel. Does anyone even know about it? And when yer there, look up a guy named Randall.
Though the prospect of wandering around a neighborhood asking complete strangers if they knew someone named Randall held a certain masochistic appeal, I decided to instead focus on the first part of his email and revisit what has to be one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city.
The 18,000 acres of Jamaica Bay are the largest open space in the city and the only national park in the United States you can reach by subway. Every year, a birder’s bucket list of more than 325 species, nearly a quarter of North America’s migrating birds, passes through the estuary’s tidal creeks and salt marshes. Congregations of Snowy Egrets, Great Blue Herons, and Glossy Ibises stalk the mudflats for fiddler crabs and crayfish, while seabirds like ospreys and terns dive-bomb the bay’s shallow waters, gorging themselves on a steady diet of peanut bunker and silverside minnows. In the distance, the spires and supertalls of the city are just visible through the haze.
In the middle of all this sits the small community of Broad Channel on the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, the last of the informal settlements that arose alongside the train tracks that first connected mainland Queens to the Rockaways. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge occupies the northern portion of the island, which is actually a conglomeration of what were once several smaller hassocks, salt marshes, and sandbars with evocative names like Goose Pond, Big Egg Marsh, and Rulers Bar Hassock.
Broad Channel’s main residential streets are laid out like the tines of a comb: eight parallel dead-end streets separated by channels of water along which locals store their boats, kayaks, and paddle boards.
It’s sometimes easy to forget New York is a seaport, but not here, where the air smells like wet cordgrass, mud, and the sea. Boats outnumber cars, flags are mandatory, and lighthouse mailboxes abound, making the whole island feel more like Cape Cod than Queens.
This proximity to the water also makes it one of New York City’s most flood-prone neighborhoods. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated the community, submerging nearly the entirety of the island under six feet of water. Power and other utilities were out for more than a month. Recently, the city completed a $97 million project that raised streets by three feet, installed new storm sewers, reconstructed bulkheads, and upgraded water mains. According to a recent study, the neighborhood has the highest resident-retention rate of any neighborhood in the city.
THE NEW UTOPIA
In 1880, the New York, Woodhaven, and Rockaway Railroad built a five-mile-long wooden trestle across Jamaica Bay, connecting the Rockaways to the mainland and giving rise to a constellation of small trestle settlements along the sides of the tracks.
Once solely the province of oystermen, clam diggers, and bait fishermen, these informal settlements soon began to attract tourists, and hotels and boathouses sprang up alongside the fishing shacks that lined the tracks. Besides Broad Channel, the other settlements, each of which had its own train stop, were Goose Creek, Beach Channel, and the Raunt.
At the turn of the 20th century, shortly before Queens became part of New York City, Frederick Dunton, a member of the Jamaica Board of Supervisors, placed a discreet announcement advertising the upcoming auction for leases on land surrounding the bay in a local newspaper. Of the exceedingly small number of people who actually saw the announcement, one was (big surprise) a Dunton associate who happened to win the lease. Soon after, Dunton began selling shares in a venture he called the Industrial Federation of America, promising to transform Jamaica Bay’s “ill-smelling mud flats” into a place where “myriad slim white minarets and chimney pipes rise in majesty above forty thousand new city lots.” This new utopian city, it was promised, would be home to 200,000 of “the city’s downtrodden proletariat.”
When the Long Island Rail Road, which owned the land on either side of its tracks, learned of the scheme (which included a trolley line across Jamaica Bay that would compete with the railroad) it took Dunton to court, where the leases were invalidated.
The city then took over, grandfathering in the fishing shacks and other existing structures while offering leases to interested parties. In 1915, the city leased the entirety of Big Egg Marsh to a developer named Pierre Noel on the condition that the land be improved. Noel formed the Broad Channel Corporation, which began filling marshland, laying out a formal street grid, and dividing the 150 acres into buildable lots. The company also dug a well and built a small power plant.
Realtor Marcel Peysson built dozens of bungalows that could be rented for $50 a year or purchased outright for $375 offering “all the fun and healthful outdoor life that the blue bloods spend thousands to enjoy.” These photos were used to draw people to the new community.
RUM ROW
When Cross Bay Boulevard was completed in 1923, Broad Channel was finally reachable by car. The community, far enough removed to avoid much scrutiny from the police but now accessible by automobile, quickly became a favorite destination for those city residents who were not particularly devoted to the tenets of the Volstead Act. Rum flowed freely at local speakeasies, yacht clubs, and places like the Enterprise Hotel, giving rise to Broad Channel’s nickname, “Little Cuba.”
That same combination of accessibility and isolation made it not only an ideal spot to consume alcohol, but also the perfect place to import it. During Prohibition, massive flotillas of ships anchored in international waters just beyond U.S. maritime limits became known as Rum Row. Stretching from Nantucket to Long Island Sound, the line of ships served as a floating marketplace where local suppliers could comparison shop. Operating small boats sometimes outfitted with surplus aircraft engines to outrun the underpowered Coast Guard vessels, the rum runners would make their purchases and then, under cover of darkness, speed their illicit cargo back to shore. The liquor was then loaded into cars and trucks with false bottoms and driven into the heart of the thirsty city.
Captain William “Bill” McCoy is often credited with coming up with the Rum Row idea and prided himself on his high-quality liquor, which was marketed as the “real McCoy.” One of McCoy’s suppliers was a woman named Gertrude Lythgoe, aka “The Bahama Queen.”
When Prohibition was declared, she convinced the British shipping firm she worked for, which handled timber exports, to get into alcohol. Setting up at the Lucerne Hotel in Nassau, she became the only woman in the Bahamas to hold a wholesale liquor license. When her male competitors conspired to ice her out of the trade, she loaded 5,000 cases of whiskey aboard one of McCoy’s ships and accompanied him to Rum Row, staying aboard for several weeks until all the whiskey was sold. Lythgoe retired in 1925 and moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she started her own rent-a-car business.
Despite Prohibition’s unintended boost to the local economy, Broad Channel wasn’t immune to the effects of the Depression. The Health Department had shut down the city’s oyster and clamming industry after hundreds of cases of gastroenteritis and typhoid fever were traced back to Jamaica Bay, putting a serious damper on the local economy.
By 1939, the Broad Channel Corporation had gone bankrupt and the city took over its leases. The neighborhood had seen an influx of permanent residents during the Depression, many of them former summer visitors who had winterized their bungalows for year-round occupation. Now those new residents faced the prospect of losing the land beneath their homes. For more than forty years, the citizens of Broad Channel engaged in a series of legal battles with the city until, in 1982, Mayor Ed Koch concluded negotiations that finally allowed residents of the island community to own their land.
THE RAUNT
The Raunt, now submerged beneath East Pond in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, was the second-largest settlement along the train tracks. In 1897, there were only six structures at the Raunt. By 1913, there were over 100. Hotels like Sehey’s East Side and O’Sullivan’s offered bay dinners and accommodations for recreational anglers who, for 50 cents a day, could rent a rowboat and head out to the calm waters of the bay teeming with seemingly endless numbers of flounder, fluke, porgies, skates, eels, and bluefish. At the Raunt’s third hotel, Paschke’s, it wasn’t just the fish that were blue.
The structures of the Raunt were all built on pilings and connected to each other by a crooked and elevated boardwalk. The community was described as a retreat for men who wished to be forgotten while remaining within sight of the familiar New York skyline. Those who really wanted to be forgotten could pull in the planks connecting their house to the boardwalk, the ultimate introvert’s drawbridge.
In the 1940s, The New Yorker sent out one of their reporters (Our Man Stanley aka Philip Hamburger) to check out The Raunt and he returned, “smelling slightly of fish and kelp.” Though most of the buildings in the settlement had burned in a 1931 fire, he still found some locals to interview including a “plump old man” named Eddie Bozett, and Martin Pfannkuchen, who everyone called Pancake and was, at the time, the island’s oldest living inhabitant. The main topic of conversation was the Watt family who had built the first house on The Raunt. According to Stanley, “Old Mrs. Watts (said to have met with a fatal accident on the mainland) was a great one for shooting sea gulls and making a medicinal juice out of them. When her husband unaccountably fell sick once, she killed and eviscerated seven cats, wrapped the cats’ contents in cheesecloth, and applied them to Mr. Watts’ bared stomach. He was up and about again in an hour or two.”
Seagull juice and cat poultice could not, however, stave off the Power Broker, Robert Moses. In the 1950s, the last of the Raunt's residents were evicted by Moses who, years earlier, had blocked a proposed large industrial port by placing Jamaica Bay under Parks jurisdiction. When the city wanted to replace the wooden train trestle across Jamaica Bay for use by the subway system, Moses, who as Parks Commissioner had jurisdiction over any construction in the bay, stipulated that they would have to build two freshwater ponds, effectively submerging the Raunt. These two ponds, the 117-acre East Pond and 45-acre West Pond, are at the heart of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. At low tide, the last vestiges of the Raunt, the mossy, shipworm-eaten pilings that once held up its ramshackle buildings, still emerge from the mud.
In his park building efforts, Moses had also tried to evict Broad Channel’s residents, but the community was too well established and organized to let that happen. While the Raunt slipped beneath the waters of the refuge without a fight, Broad Channel survived and developed an identity all its own.
STARS AND STRIPES
Broad Channel has to be the most patriotic neighborhood in the city, with more bunting per capita than even the deepest Staten Island neighborhood. The Fourth of July isn't for another month yet, but on a recent visit, I found the neighborhood festooned with enough Stars and Stripes to make Betsy Ross blush.
I considered that all the patriotic flair could be in anticipation of this weekend's UFC cage fight set to take place on the White House lawn as part of the country's 250th anniversary, but later, when flipping through the pages of the book put out by the Broad Channel Historical Society, I realized that this overt patriotism can be traced back to the community’s founding.
In 1908, Broad Channel held its first annual Mardi Gras celebration which, counterintuitively, has nothing to do with marking the beginning of Lent, but instead is a celebration of the end of summer. The tradition was started by the Volunteer Fire Association, who used the event to raise money to build their first firehouse. It was a multi-day affair that included a boat parade, a land parade, a king and queen, and so much bunting. The elaborate floats, which in more recent years have been built on flatbeds and boat trailers, are awarded prizes in a variety of categories.
On Labor Day, September 7, 1998, the parade made national news after a group of men in blackface rode a float titled “Black to the Future: Broad Channel 2098” and threw watermelon and fried chicken, while one man dragged himself behind the truck in a parody of the June 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Footage of the float prompted then Mayor Rudy Giuliani to declare it a “disgusting display of racism." When Giuliani is calling you out…
Police Officer Joseph Locurto and firefighters Jonathan Walters and Robert Steiner were fired in October 1998. They sued, arguing their off-duty speech was protected by the First Amendment. During the trial, lawyers for the city cited the trio's participation in previous floats like "Hasidic Park" and "The Gooks of Hazard" (which won the Funniest Float prize in 1996) as evidence of a pattern of behavior.
Among those who testified on their behalf was Al Sharpton, who had led a protest march through Broad Channel just days after the incident. Sharpton argued that it was hypocritical for the city to punish three rank-and-file employees for a racist float while ignoring broader racism within the NYPD and FDNY. A federal judge initially ruled in the men’s favor, but the decision was later overturned on appeal.
Floats in the most recent parade were thankfully controversy-free and included “Crazy ‘A’ Train,” “CHANNEL RAT-tatouille,” and a Jaws-themed float called “This Is The Bigger Boat.”
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
It was windy both times I visited Broad Channel this week. The audio I did manage to capture features the sound of waves hitting the bulkhead at one of the neighborhood’s many dead-end streets, along with the rumble of a distant A train, the hum of planes departing JFK, and the persistent song of a Northern Mockingbird.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
Maureen Drennan first noticed Broad Channel on her way to photograph the Rockaways, where she had been shooting pictures of surfers. In 2012, just a few months before Hurricane Sandy, she embarked on a four-year project documenting the lives of the neighborhood’s residents.
From a 2017 interview:
Through my photographs, I seek out the vulnerability and fantasy of living in a small island community seen through the eyes of the young women and girls who reside there. The community is Broad Channel, Queens and it’s a lifestyle conditioned by water, vulnerable to storms, tides, changing weather, and yet, in close proximity to one of the largest urban centers, New York City. Broad Channel is a multi-generational, mostly blue-collar neighborhood with a rich history of being resistant to change. There is this enduring fantasy of living near the water that is in direct opposition to the reality. The residents love living by the water, but there exists a delicate balance between the community and the natural environment. As the effects of climate change shake this balance, the community has been confronted with the harsh reality that their home and community may not be as secure and idealistic as they think it to be.
Drennan, who teaches at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, has published two books, Meet Me in the Green Glen and the sea that surrounds us. Both are available on her website.
Here is an interview with the Camera Club of New York.
ODDS AND ENDS
Daniel Lombroso’s 2022 documentary “Greywater,” looks at the poaching that takes place in the waters just off Broad Channel. Earlier this week I saw tubs full of crabs freshly pulled from the muddy bottom of the bay.
When the proprietor of Broad Channel’s Enterprise Hotel died in 1931, he left his daughter $5 to buy a book on Filial Etiquette, because “she has been wholly negligent In her duty as daughter for many years.”
Anne will find Randall for us.
A classic episode of The Neighborhoods with all my favourite features - shoreline with a distant peek of the Manhattan skyline against a pale blue sky, idiosyncratic architecture, wooden trestles/boardwalk, the ephemera of life - a deflated Liberty, a guest appearance by Robert Moses. Wonderful images as usual Rob. Thank you.