In The Continuing Series: I Remember The Rockaways -

  
The original WaveCrest Long Island Rail Road train station. In a photograph taken July, 1939 from the top of the crossover footbridge - facing due east. This is the rural Far Rockaway at its very best as shown in this colorized photograph showing the south-side waiting station and platform, the small gatekeeper's booth, a grouping of corner stores (southeast corner of Beach 25th Street), and backyards of bungalows which still exist to this very day. Today, the railroad areas have been incorporated into the Rockaway Freeway - which is towered over and capped by the raised tracks and platforms of the New York City Rapid Transit System. There is no known completion date of the trestle but it is thought to have been placed into full service sometime by the end of year 1941.
 

It was already old when I first saw it. Although I was assured it was only four years old than I, to me it definitely appeared to be ancient. I was born in 1943 and this concrete overhead railroad trestle was erected in 1940. Later on, I would discover that this date was incorrect; not my birth date but the year of the imposing structure's completion.

It was mid September of 1953 and I was in fifth grade - attending a newly-built educational facility dubbed Public School #215. Back in those days, the area in which that elementary school was located looked extremely rural. Mostly surrounded by massive virgin woods, there were few if any homes in the vicinity of the school - a building fronted by an unkempt forest of large trees - a seemingly endless rustic woods at its rear - to the south was an undeveloped workmen's field of hilly land, littered with a variety of debris - now completely abandoned by those same workmen. Today, that leveled "hill" hosts an adequate children's playground, but back in my day there were no benches, swings or handball courts, nothing paved. As a child, I sat on felled tree limbs and kicked stones - ample amusements for a nine year old at that time of the century.

Behind the school was a small narrow street - separating the building from those neighboring woods. There was also a foot path - leading north then northwest which would connect up to an alleyway emptying out onto Beach 25th Street. During our long lunch hour, my friends and I would take advantage of that pathway. Stopping along the way to throw stones at and into the missing windows of an abandoned two-story house - our destination was a luncheonette on the southeast corner of Beach 25th Street and the Rockaway Freeway.

And there it stood: This large concrete trestle - with automobiles whizzing by that super structure. Of course I would never have dared to cross underneath. Even though there were stop lights,. I found the heavy volume of vehicles and the apparent speed at which they traveled quite intimidating. What was on the other side? My friends threatened me with stories about a frightening high school only a few blocks up that street - where "big kids" were "lying in wait" to beat me up. I was nine! Just being a "little kid" was reason enough for an "ass pounding" so I never dared venture across that boulevard but remained on the south side of the "tracks."
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