Getting on our train, the A train, going towards Queens instead of Manhattan, one can get to, in twenty minutes to a half-hour, the Howard Beach station, which has the JFK Airtrain connection to the eponymous airport.
The next stop along the A train towards the Rockaways, after a four or five minute jaunt over what appears to be ocean, is a stop called Broad Channel. Past Broad Channel is another over-water jaunt before you get to the various communities along the Rockaway Peninsula.
Broad Channel is a community, technically in Queens, that sprouted up in the middle 1800s along a salt-marsh archipelago and estuary that built up over thousands of years of run-off from rivers that flowed through Brooklyn and Queens. It sits in Jamaica Bay, a nearly enclosed briny body of water, corralled by eastern Brooklyn, south-western Queens, Kennedy Airport, and the Peninsula.
In certain places at Broad Channel, a visitor can view old-timey photographs taken when the community was in infancy, with wooden decks, boardwalks, and bridges linking up everything too small for the boats to accommodate. They were still at the whim of Mother Nature, and have been routed before by hurricanes.
Since the 1950s though, New York City industry and population had taken their toll, and around twelve-thousand acres of salt-marsh have disappeared. The people of Broad Channel got their voices heard, and over time, sewage has been diverted, laws against certain locations for developed have been enacted, and a concerted effort to stop the receding estuary and preserve the fragile diverse ecosystem have been implemented.
Today, it resembles any modernish beach community, like Pismo or Gordita, with a varied history resembling more of swollen Mississippi River towns mixed with New York-style Venice. All built up upon a freaking salt-marsh...
Here's a couple of pictures.
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