page_title: Rockaway Beach, Queens
section_title: Early development
hierarchical_section_title: Rockaway Beach, Queens / History / Early development
caption_attribution_description: English: Identifier: historyofqueensc00newy (find matches) Title: History of Queens County, New York, with illustrations, portraits, &amp; sketches of prominent families and individuals Year: 1882 (1880s) Authors: Subjects: Queens Co., N.Y Queens Co., N.Y Publisher: New York W.W. Munsell Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto View Book Page: Book Viewer About This Book: Catalog Entry View All Images: All Images From Book Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book. Text Appearing Before Image: e place is a city in popu-lation during the summer season. Forty years ago, with the exception of SaratogaSprings, Rockaway was the most famous watering placein America. About the year 1833 the renowned MarinePavilion was built. It was two stories high, and con-tained about 150 rooms. Its piazza was 200 feet longand 25 feet broad. It was consumed by fire in 1864.Since that time have sprung up many large hotels at FarRockaway, the beautiful hotel at Long Beach and thoseat Rockaway Beach, including that colossal structure theRockaway Beach Hotel, THE LARGEST HOTEL IN THE WORLD. In 1881, while not yet completed, a part of it wasopened to the public about the ist of August. Thebuilding is 1,188 feet long by 250 feet wide. It hasseveral hundred rooms and over 100,000 square feet ofpiazzas. It fronts the ocean, and the beach is unsur-passed. Near the hotel are a large number of bathinghouses. The water and gas supply is furnished from thecompanys own works, a Holly pumping machine forcing i Text Appearing After Image: ROCKAWAY BEACH HOTELS. 163 I the water from a large well to all parts of the hotel.The drainage system is complete; all the refuse matteris discharged through massive iron pipes at a pointdistant from the hotel, and is carried by direct currentsinto Jamaica Bay. The rooms are heated by steam.The observatory on the top of the hotel is 200 feetsquare and there are two elevators to it. An unob-structed view of the ocean, the bay and the Long Islandcountry for many miles is obtained from this elevation.The new iron pier, constructed by the Rockaway BeachPier Company, is the largest of its kind in the UnitedStates. It extends about 1,300 feet into the ocean, be-yond the breakers, affording water sufficiently deep forlanding from large steamers. Its general width is 31/^feet, the pierhead being 81^ feet wide. Every span isbraced. OTHER HOTELS, ETC. To James S. Remsen belongs the credit of being thepioneer in promoting the interests and welfare of Rocka-way Beach. He was born at Jamaica, L. Note About Images Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original work.
context_page_description: Rockaway Beach is a neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula in the New York City borough of Queens. The neighborhood is bounded by Arverne to the east and Rockaway Park to the west. It is named for the Rockaway Beach and Boardwalk, which is the largest urban beach in the United States, stretching from Beach 3rd to Beach 153rd Streets on the Atlantic Ocean. The neighborhood, with 13,000 residents as of 2010, was once known as the "Irish Riviera" because of the large Irish American population in the area.
context_section_description: What is now Rockaway Beach was formerly two different hamlets, Holland and Hammels. In 1857, Michael P. Holland had purchased land and named the area after himself. Soon afterward, Louis Hammel, an immigrant from Germany, bought a tract of land just east of Holland. In 1878, he decided to give portions of his land to the New York, Woodhaven and Rockaway Railroad in order to build a railroad station for the peninsula. The area around it became collectively known as "Hammels". On June 11, 1897, Hammels merged with Holland and they incorporated as the Village of Rockaway Beach. One year later, it was incorporated into the City of Greater New York and became part of the newly formed borough of Queens. However, the neighborhood, along with the eastern communities of Arverne and Far Rockaway, tried to secede from the city several times. In 1915 and 1917, a bill approving the secession passed in the legislature but was vetoed by the mayor at the time, John Purroy Mitchel.
  In the early 1900s, the newly built railroad station opened up the community and the rest of the peninsula to a broad range of the population. The wealthy no longer had a monopoly on the peninsula, as various amusement parks, stores, and resort hotels attracted people from all over the city to spend a day or a whole summer there. Much of the area was developed by James S. Remsen and William Wainwright. In this era, it became known as "New York's Playground".
  Rockaway's famous amusement park, Rockaways' Playland, was built in 1901 and quickly became a major attraction for people around the region. With its growing popularity, concern over swimming etiquette became a problem and early in 1904, the Captain of the NYPD, Louis Kreuscher, issued rules for those using the beach, censoring the bathing suits to be worn, where photographs could be taken, and specifying that women in bathing suits were not allowed to leave the beachfront.
  The park was grand for its time. One of its most popular attractions, the Atom Smasher roller coaster, would be featured in the beginning of This is Cinerama, a pre-IMAX type movie, in 1952. An Olympic-size swimming pool and a million-dollar midway also were built within the amusement park; they would serve the community for over eighty years.
  The Temple of Israel Synagogue was built in 1921, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
caption: Rockaway Beach in the 1880s, with new railroad and resort hotel
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