Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

12 A Beach Bungalow with a Magnetic Pull: SUSAN ANDERSON IN FAR ROCKAWAY, QUEENS (October 24, 2010)

7 2 12 A Beach Bungalow with a Magnetic Pull Susan Anderson in Far Rockaway, Queens OCTOBER 24, 2010 Susan Anderson, an artist, in her restored bungalow in Far Rockaway, Queens. (Christian Hansen for The New York Times) 7 3 If ever an image captured the rhythms of summer for generations of working-class New Yorkers, it was the humble Rockaway bungalow. By the early ’30s, more than 7,000 of these Hansel-and-Gretel-like cottages lined the 11-mile-long Queens peninsula, their very silhouettes evoking nostalgia-soaked memories. In these little houses with their peaked roofs and diminutive proportions, generations of New Yorkers, many from immigrant backgrounds, celebrated the season. The buildings themselves functioned almost as madeleines, evoking memories of whiteuniformed ice cream salesmen trolling the sands, sweaty encounters under the boardwalk, and the jangly sounds of honky-tonk amusements. Even allowing for the softening glaze of memory, these summers were often idyllic interludes in intensely urban lives, a too-brief respite from stuffy apartments on treeless streets. Like so many remnants of an earlier New York, the bungalows of the Rockaways are vanishing. The postwar era brought high-rises and an influx of poor and minority residents to the peninsula. Today, perhaps fewer than 400 bungalows remain, the rest lost to development or neglect . But if a single survivor embodies the spirit of its predecessors, it’s the bungalow at the foot of Beach 26th Street in Far Rockaway, home for the past three years to an artist and woman of all trades named Susan Anderson. Exquisitely restored, studded with unusual found objects and glowing with an unearthly light, this house seems a throwback to an era disappearing in the rearview mirror. Ms. Anderson grew up in Arizona and came to New York as a college student in the early 1980s aboard the Green Tortoise, a vehicle that featured beds but no seats. Once arrived, she bounced from one odd job to another, the oddest being her stint as O. J. Sue, for which she sold freshly squeezed orange juice on Wall Street from a retrofitted wheelchair turned food truck. She also bounced from apartment to apartment. Yet wherever she lived, the bungalows of the Rockaways exerted a mystical pull. Accompanied by a group of friends, Ms. Anderson made her first visit to the Rockaways in 1984, when she was living in a loft in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and found herself entranced by a cluster of white stucco bungalows, each being advertised for $30,000. As she and her friends wandered onto their porches, she was reminded of ancient villages she had seen on her travels. “They looked like a stage set,” she says, “or a A B E A C H B U N g A L O w w I T H A M A g N E T I C p U L L 7 4 lost world waiting to be repopulated.” Had she ventured deeper into the neighborhood, however, she would have seen streets pockmarked with burned-out buildings and a community, devastated by AIDS and wracked by crime, drugs, and wrenching poverty, that felt deeply forbidding. In 1999, ensconced in another Park Slope loft, Ms. Anderson made a return visit, traveling out on her bike to see what had become of the area that had intrigued her 15 years earlier.“And in a weird way,” she says,“it was as if the world had stood still. The water was pristine. Even though it was summer, there was nobody on the beach.”A boarded-up bungalow being offered at the bargain-basement price of $15,000 looked tempting, despite the absence of part of the roof and the façade. By the time she got around to making an offer, however, she was moments too late. The bungalow had just been sold. Her third visit, again on her bike, occurred in the summer of 2002, but an effort to buy a bungalow advertised for $20,000 fell through because of missed communications with the real estate agent handling the sale. Nor was the neighborhood much improved; this might have been the visit during which a cop cautioned ominously, “Honey, you don’t want to live here.” On a summer day in 2003, by then living in the East Village, Ms. Anderson returned a fourth time. A homeless man who lived in a van on a grassy field—a muscular guy...