THE ROCKAWAY I KNEW
By Matthew Bashie

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: FIRE! A ROCKAWAY TRADITION

"Matty, Come quick! Come quick! The luncheonette is on fire!" And indeed it was. In less than an hour, the entire store front housing that "hub of social activity" was a wasteland littered with a variety of assorted and worthless debris.

While I didn't consider myself much different from other little boys, playing with matches was "not my thing." Setting stuff on fire, I concluded, was an excellent way of getting yourself seriously burned. Ample supplies of "book" matches were always available to us as children. A series of vending devices, including a cigarette machine were located in the basement of our apartment complex, Wavecrest Gardens, a 14-building "project" located on Crest Road and Seagirt Boulevard in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Often times people purchasing those twenty-three cent packs would ignore the matches that "dropped" into the chute when the cigarettes were delivered. Anyone walking past the machine could reach in and liberate a stray booklet and many of the local kids did just that. One or two of the boys could often be found in the playground, setting fire to small "hills" of trash they collected - the "thrill" of seeing something one minute, gone the next.

I had other things to worry about. I had watched the motion picture "Rodan" at the RKO Strand movie house in town and now I was convinced that some creature from the ocean was going to rear its ugly head one night very soon and was going to attack our apartment building - specifically it was going to attack MY bedroom. "The Monster Who Attacked Wavecrest" now playing at your local theater. Some of my friends had other issues, perhaps something to actually worry about like an airplane hitting into our building. It seems that the six-story brick structure was directly underneath a landing strip for the local Idewild airport (now Kennedy International} and sometimes planes would come in very low and the place would literally shake from the vibrations.

My friend Ralph was standing on the fire escape directly outside my bedroom window, in fact he had opened my window and he had his upper torso completely into my room while he was quietly urging me to wake up, get dressed, and to "go see what was happening." It seems that Ralph's kitchen window shared the same metal staircase as my bedroom so it was a way in which he could "get hold of me" without ringing our front doorbell and disturbing my parents - especially at four thirty in the morning.

Within a minute or so, I was dressed and out the window with my pal and we quietly scampered down the fire escape and jumped the few feet from the second landing to the ground. Then off we ran in the direction of the small shopping mall which had been erected as a service and convenience to the tenants of the large apartment complex. It was not a far trip and we arrived in plenty of time to see the civil servants practicing the art of fire fighting extinguish (what we later learned was) a major inferno caused by ignited grease in a vent duct. It was exciting to watch all the policemen and firemen gathered around, shouting orders to each other, and plying the blaze with water from large hoses. Little boys really do enjoy watching events like that. They really do! We "hung around" all morning and when they started to board up the large (now missing) plate glass windows, we decided that the action was over, and so we went back home.

Fire has never been a stranger to the Rockaway peninsula. From the earliest recordings of the history of the area, there are hundreds of documents attesting to major fires which ripped through and destroyed homes, hotels, and stores. In 1892, a major fire in the Seaside area (around Beach 101st Street) destroyed much of the shore front property; in 1911, yet another fire in the same area removed many of the gaming concessions and some popular and major hotels. Yet another fire in April of 1922 burned down over ten complete blocks in the Arverne section leaving hundreds of people homeless. When discussing the history of the Rockaways with the local press in the late 1930s, then City Planning and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses commented that such fires are indicative of and common to "slum resorts" (a name he applied to many sections of the Rockaways and Coney Island) due to lack of proper maintenance and the inability to protect and to secure wooden structures that were erected prior to the turn of the century.

During the years I lived in the Rockaways, I was witness to many many fires - mostly in private homes but also more spectacular fires which damaged stores - businesses in which my parents and I had shopped. Thinking back, it is the store fires which I now remember so vividly.

Shortly after we had purchased our new television from VIM, a shop on the east side of Central Avenue, the store burned completely out. I remember the charred glass lying outside on the sidewalk; the blackened carcasses of the console television sets - the table model machines still sitting on now-sagging shelves, "mouths wide open" where once glass screens had been. The lofts over the TV store now windowless, blinds and curtains moving carelessly about with a breeze, and a torn and twisted metal door frame that had hurriedly been pried away by firemen in an attempt to quickly reach the blaze.

A few years later a double-store fire "did in" the Pickwick restaurant and its next door neighbor Neveloff s Stationery. In my mind, I can still see the half-eaten food sitting on the counter of the diner - a sight that would remain exactly the same for over a month, and I still remember a poster which was placed on the display glass window of the card store - ''Please excuse our appearance - the firemen's hoses realty did a job!" Although the Pickwick/Neveloff fires did not completely destroy the buildings or even "gut out" the store fronts, it took both shops months to reopen.

Shortly before that event, there had been a major gas-main explosion on the corner of Mott and Central Avenues and I went down to see that disaster with my father. Store fronts were completely missing, windows in the large commercial building (the Smith Building) had littered the sidewalks and street with tons of broken glass. I can still see the Whalen's Drug Store without windows, same with the Woolworth Store, and many many others. It looked like a bomb had been dropped on the area - and in effect, with a gas explosion, I guess that is the way you can expect it to look.

Many years later (as an adult) I drove over to see the fire devastation that reduced the St. Mary's "Star Of The Sea Church" to complete ash. There was absolutely nothing left of the building. Later on in time, I watched as large cranes dismantled the slightly-burned out remains of the town's library building. Apparently nothing in the library was salvaged because I saw books still sitting neatly on shelves when the derrick claws "bit out chunks" of the building and "spit them out" into waiting dump trucks. Later yet, I sat in my car next to the old National Bank of Far Rockaway building (then boarded up) and watched as workmen tore down an English-Tudor style two-story commercial building that sat directly on the northwest side of Mott and Central - next door to the bus stop. The structure which had been a landmark in the small town for over seventy years "made way" for an intersection extension to facilitate the flow of an anticipated increase in auto traffic in the years to come.

When another landmark building burned - the RKO Columbia Theatre (which had been a B.F.Keith Vaudeville house in the 20s and 30s) I actually went inside to survey the damage and spent about twenty minutes looking around before someone noticed that I was there and had no reason to be, so I was told to leave before I was arrested. By the time the Columbia burned (it had been renamed "Town" shortly before) most of the stores in the small village that I had known as a child were no longer there. Even the large structure housing a W. T. Grant Company store (with a bowling alley overhead) would soon be damaged by fire and would shortly thereafter be completely torn to the ground - leaving a lot that would be vacant for almost a decade.

The fire at the local luncheonette had really done a job. The heat was so intense that the large plastic signs placed outside over the plate-glass windows announcing "WaveCrest Luncheonette" and Coca-Cola" had melted and looked rather bizarre. How do you describe fire damage in words? Counter stool posts sticking straight up in the air - the seat pads burned away, hundreds of dollars worth of candy bars lying one on top of each other, now wrapperless, oozed together into a clump of nothingness, a gumball vending machine, melted to half it size with its plastic display looking like a half-burned candle, wires and beams hanging from the ceiling in a odd arrangement, and the smell - the overpowering odor of fire damage mixed with water.

In the years that would follow, I would see many more fires, many more disasters, and watch as even more buildings and landmarks were demolished. Each time something was removed from the landscape, I would say to myself, "and another small part of Rockaway has died."

If you wish to contact me at any time, feel free to do so through this web site.

matt@rockawaymemories.com

I always love hearing from my fans and friends. M. B.