To be sure, the community put up a good fight. This one beach where it’s safe and peaceful,” she told GO. “It’s really awful to think we can’t just have one thing. Quincy is concerned about the future of this haven. It was important for Quincy to grow up around role models at the beach, people she could look up to, before she knew she was bi: “Seeing people who were confident in their own skin, confident in their own body and queerness.” My mom, my sister and I are all queer.” Quincy Mangi with her sister and mother at Riis Beach I’ve been going my entire life…It feels very welcoming. My mom’s been going since before I was born. The college student has memories dating back to early childhood, and recalls celebrating birthdays on the sand. Quincy Mangi, 19, was also upset to learn about the changes underway around “The People’s Beach,” as Riis is also known. “Sure, we can just choose to set up on the farthest borders…but that’s encroaching more upon the space that has historically been occupied by cis heterosexual families,” Blue added. Commissioned by the Army Corp of Engineers, about 2.5-3 miles off the Rockaway coast, a ship had been dredging up sand and pumping slurry back to shore to build out the area, according to Megan Place, Project Manager with Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company, LLC. Indeed, in addition to the facility demolition, separately, a $12.3 million beach expansion project was underway at the start of beach-going season which found the queer section off-limits to Blue and friends. And so queer people have used it as a safe place because people don’t care what happens over there. “Having an abandoned building there decreases the likelihood that the average person might want to go there. “I think it represents a tension taken to the beach by people who are not using it, from a development and land value point of view,” offered Blue’s friend, Jay. Blue approached the usual entry point with two of their friends, but were met with yellow caution tape. “I think that for everybody in the queer community right now, there’s a lot of fear that if this is taken from us, there’s not going to be a beach that is just for us,” Blue, a community member walking the boardwalk, told GO in May. Photo by Margaret Hethermanĭays later, queer beachgoers could be seen seeking space to relax by the water. Briefly, the machinery spared the painted eyes that famously adorned the beach-facing top-eyes overlooking pink cloth affixed to a razor fence. In early May 2023, yellow bulldozer claws began pummeling the last bit of structure to the ground. Then it happened, with hardly a witness to the final demise. Riis Beach’s popularity has spanned generations. The building, in all of its iterations, provided a layer of privacy, and cast some shade (in a good way!). Photo by Margaret Hethermanīut the queer community always embraced the building’s wreckage, showed it love, coloring its walls with graffiti that shouted: “KNOW YOUR POWER.” According to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, the spot first became a destination for sunbathing and cruising in the 1940s, and went clothing optional in the 1960’s. Closed once from 1955 – 1964, it reopened as the Neponsit Home for the Aged and later, a city-run nursing home until permanent shut-down in 1998, when 282 residents were bussed to other locations in the middle of the night following a storm. It has seen many iterations-a home for the aged in the 1930’s, Merchant Marine Hospital for TB during WWII, and another children’s facility in 1954. Opened initially as The Neponsit Beach Hospital for Convalescent and Tubercular Children in 1918, its balconies overlooked the ocean, providing ocean air for sickly lungs. Then in April 2022, the announcement came: the former Neponsit Adult Home on Beach 149th Street would be demolished. Victoria Cruz and friends on Riis Beach, courtesy of Victoria Cruz Photo by Margaret Hethermanīut for many in the LGBTQ+ community, it was this very state of decay that beckoned throngs of queer beachgoers to a special section of Jacob Riis Beach over time, laying claim to a place that no one else seemed to want. City officials deemed the structure an eyesore, its 4-story red brick facade speckled with broken and boarded-up windows. For years, the queer landmark sat derelict and abandoned.
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