The New York Times has an article, A Beach Shared by a Tight-Knit Clan, and slide show celebrating the serene beachfront Neponsit neighborhood in Queens, which is in Queens kind of like the Green Zone is in Baghdad. The beach is supposedly public, but there's a big chainlink fence on the sand separating it from Jacob Riis Beach, where there's public parking. No parking is allowed on the neighborhood streets during beach season, so to go to the beach you pretty much have to know somebody who lives there who will let you park in his driveway:
According to census data, the population is about 2,000; 95 percent are white, 2 percent Asian, 2 percent Hispanic, and fewer than 1 percent black or multiracial.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
According to census data, the population is about 2,000; 95 percent are white, 2 percent Asian, 2 percent Hispanic, and fewer than 1 percent black or multiracial.
ReplyDeleteCity Councilman Eric Ulrich, whose district includes the neighborhood, said that compared with other areas, Neponsit is "fairly easy to represent" -- a place defined by a high quality of life and few problems.
What's with the bad high school though?
ReplyDeleteThat's a barrier? For who? Whatever happened to the tough residents of 'Crooklyn' I always read about or saw in Spike Lee movies?
ReplyDeleteI could get through (or around) that thing.
It practically screams to little kids, "go on try to get through me. I dare ya. I double dare ya"
I'm very disappointed at the residents of a place that used to give the US some of its great tough guys. (I blame it all on the wimps who have moved into Brooklyn Heights).
I hope this isn't the kind of thing paleos are recommending for the southern border, or you're going to be speaking Spanish yesterday.
Lake Forest, Illinois does something similar to control access to its beach.
ReplyDeleteThere's not merely public parking at nearby Riis Park, there's an absolutely enormous amount of public parking.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who wants to use the beach at Neponsit can park in the Riis lot and just walk along Rockaway Park Boulevard into Neponsit. It's probably no longer than it would be to walk along the beach if the fence weren't there.
Farther east in the Rockaway peninsula are the communities of Arverne and Edgemere ... or what used to the communities of Arverne and Edgemere. Most of the summer houses that once occupied the beachfront parts of these communities were demolished in the 1970's in anticipation of urban redevelopment projects that never happened. More than 30 years later much of the prime beachfront land is occupied by nothing but weeds.
Peter
The people of Neposit had better hope that no one in Gen. Holder's rejuvenated Civil Rights Division reads the New York Times.
ReplyDeleteMy bad. I should have said Queens. (Crooklyn is next door anyhow)
ReplyDeleteAnyhow this barrier would impede a squirrel in what, a New York minute?
I presume this NYT piece is a shot across the bow from Eric Holder's office?
ReplyDeleteI presume the Neponsites have done their favor banking, time will tell if there is enough credit in their account.
Saw the lastest Money mag. It had it's "'Best' Places to Live" ed. One stip. was that the town could not be anymore than 96% White. ???
ReplyDeleteLooking at that first picture in the link -- it struck me that Neponsit residents might be a certain kind of white folk, if you get my meaning. Nothing else screamed out, however.
ReplyDeleteGarland -
ReplyDeleteMost "local" high schools in NYC tend to be awful, since the best students are funneled toward the elite schools like Styvesant or Bronx Science. That leaves the NAM detritus to attend the rest.
Not only is the fence separating Neponsit from Riis Park scarcely a Berlin Wall-style impenetrable barrier, it's also doubtful that Neponsit residents have any responsibility for it. My guess would be that the National Parks Service, which operates Riis Park, built and maintains the fence in order to control access to the park.
ReplyDeletePeter
Scholander, Shapiro, Lubowitz
ReplyDeleteI don't think they'll be hearing from Holder anytime soon.
Now if it were Wadsworth, Stuart, and Anderson there would be a full blown senate inquiry and civil rights investigation.
What's with the bad high school though?
ReplyDeleteIt draws students from much of the Rockaway peninsula. Neponsit and its eastern neighbor Belle Harbor are decent areas, but most other parts of the peninsula are not.
Peter
Grew up in Brokklyn a short ride to Riis Park and Neponsit. ironrailsironweights has it right. We used to park at Riis and walk over to Neponsit.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting thing about intelligence is that you cannot see it like a physical attribute. Everybody understands immediately that size, looks, and racial features are hereditary. When you make the same connection to intelligence most people are a little uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteThat's a barrier? For who? Whatever happened to the tough residents of 'Crooklyn' I always read about or saw in Spike Lee movies?
ReplyDeleteThe Wikipedia article for Neponsit is kinda short and sweet and charming [what would Joe Biden call it - clean and articulate?]: "Neponsit is unique in that its land usage is zoned as R-1 Zone, a rarity in New York City. This category of zoning prohibits any commercial structures and only allows single family homes to be built. Due to this, and its secluded beach location within the boundaries of New York City, homes in the area can be mansion-like, and the average market price for Neponsit properties has exceeded $1.1 million since 2006."
But the picture which accompanies the Wikipedia article clearly shows the chain link fence sitting atop a stone jetty, and the beach erosion from the jetty is so severe that the hook in the coastline shows up on Google Maps.
I presume this NYT piece is a shot across the bow from Eric Holder's office?
Good thing that Van Jones didn't have time to learn that the white folk were stealing beach sand from the persons of color.
It's like a little enclave of pre-1965 America... the way things were, the way things ought to be, alas gone forever.
ReplyDeleteAnon1250
ReplyDeleteThis situation is a total crock. Neponsit is not a separate town with a beach that it owns and maintains. It’s a neighborhood in NYC. The fence separates two stretches of beach both sides of which are owned by the same NYC! Are their similar privatized parks in Harlem? Here is yet another example the great thing about socialism for SWPLers: if you are well connected, you get an effectively privatized beach/school/college/life paid for or subsidized by us white trash you despise. It’s a nice life if you are born into it whether by family or group entitlement or by individual intellectual giftedness. Nice while it lasts.
What's with the bad high school though?
ReplyDeleteJudging from Google Maps, it looks as though the two closest schools are:
1) Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah of Belle Harbor
2) Stella Maris High School / Maura Clarke Jr High School [Sisters of St. Joseph]
And way down the road, there's the
3) Beach Channel High School
[which was profiled in the article].
**********
Looking at that first picture in the link -- it struck me that Neponsit residents might be a certain kind of white folk, if you get my meaning.
My guess would be that their kids go to Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah of Belle Harbor or maybe something like Brooklyn Tech [Bronx Science would be a really long commute, although Stuyvesant isn't all that much further than Brooklyn Tech].
**********
PS: A little off-topic, but I just noticed that if you google Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah of Belle Harbor, then this is the third hit that you'll get:
3 Yeshiva Students Arrested For Harassing Catholic Girls
By Howard Schwach
February 1, 2003
rockawave.com
Three young Jewish students from the Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah of Belle Harbor on Beach 130 Street were arrested last Saturday night for aggravated harassment in a case that involved three 13-year-old Catholic girls.
Police say that the three 16-year-old yeshiva students approached the unidentified girls, who were on the shopping street and began to make anti-Catholic remarks...
"About 15-20 boys surrounded the girls on Beach 129 Street," a father said. "They asked her what religion she was. When she told them she was Catholic, they called her an 'Irish slut.' She laughed and said that she was Italian and they called her a "Guinea W___!' They knocked her down and punched her. One boy tried to kick her with a karate kick but missed her head. They kept calling her a 'Catholic slut' and demanded that she 'give it up' to them".
One of the boys said to her, "Your priest probably had sex with you," the father said.
The mother of one of the girls lives on the block. She saw what was happening and ran to the scene. "I stopped a serious incident from happening," she said...
I guess the big boys of Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah Senior High School don't much care for the little girls of Maura Clarke Junior High School [Sisters of St. Joseph].
First, the easy answers. Neponsit and nearby Rockaway neighborhoods are overwhelmingly Irish and Jewish. Firemen, cops, schoolteachers. Some of their kids work/worked on Wall Street.
ReplyDeleteSecond, Beach Channel High School also draws from much less attractive neighborhoods in Rockaway. The seven other elementary schools which used to feed into Far Rockaway HS and Beach Channel HS are, let’s just say, not as good as PS 114.
Third, as to the effectiveness of the fence, you don’t need much fence to keep out people with very low motivation. Outsiders from Brooklyn(mostly) have to drive a half an hour and pay $2 or so each way to go to Riis Park. Riis Park on a summer weekend has bathrooms, concession stands, and beaches with plenty of other Brooklyn kids. To get to that fence, you have to ignore the ocean beach right in front of you when you leave the parking lot, walk the equivalent of three long city blocks on the sand past a baseball field and a boarded-up old folks' home to get to a fence. If you do that, and then you decide to go around/under/over the fence, you’re in a residential neighborhood with no boardwalk and no stores in a neighborhood where everybody pretty much knows everybody else. Why bother?
A little further west of Neponsit and Riis Park is Breezy Point which has the highest percentage of Irish surnames than any ZIP code in the USA.
ReplyDeleteIt's existed since the 1930s and I can't wait for the Times to "discover" it.
Steve, the fence doesn't even go down to the water's edge. How would that keep anyone out?
ReplyDeleteSaw the lastest Money mag. It had it's "'Best' Places to Live" ed. One stip. was that the town could not be anymore than 96% White. ???
ReplyDeleteThey probably got sick of Vermont cornering the survey.
Saw the lastest Money mag. It had it's "'Best' Places to Live" ed. One stip. was that the town could not be anymore than 96% White. ???
ReplyDeleteMoney Mag is nihilistic - in the sense that they want to go belly up after begging their white subscribers to pull the plug.
I give them bonus points for still having signs that read 'Dead End' (see the first picture, above the article) rather than the modern 'No Outlet' or other similar modern replacement.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, is the NYT trying t suggest something sinister with the use of the word "Clan" in the title of the article???
ReplyDeleteThis situation is a total crock. Neponsit is not a separate town with a beach that it owns and maintains. It’s a neighborhood in NYC. The fence separates two stretches of beach both sides of which are owned by the same NYC!
ReplyDeleteRiis Park and its beach is federal, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. It's located on the site of a former naval air station. Come to think of it, the fence might well date back to Navy days.
Peter
America has many places which are informally segregated through judicious tweaking of parking rules; zoning rules; bus routes; and so on.
ReplyDeleteJacob Riis Beach? Wow. Talk about a warning sign. That's like "Martin Luther King Boulevard."
ReplyDeleteConfessions of a low-income home-ownership advocate:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f64a9e36-9da3-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html