nightmayer

Belle Harbor-ites, Rockaway-ites, anyone living in a beach community, take note!

Fascinating that it got made at all — a labor of love, no question, for documentary filmmaker Robert Sarnoff — “The Block” on Amazon Prime is an of-the-moment portrait of the block in Belle Harbor, NY he lives on. At the western end of the Rockaway peninsula, near Jacob Riis Park, the block in question is Beach 138 St. At that point the peninsula is all of four blocks wide; the film focuses exclusively on the residents of a single beach block.

Sarnoff and his wife Lynda must have been (and I hope still are!) beloved by their neighbors because they elicited often surprisingly frank comments along with the expected hosannas about what wonderful neighbors everyone is. How much of the humor is intentional and how much not is part of the fun in watching, particularly the first half of the hour-long film. It’s a heck of an editing job by Michael Belmont juxtaposing the comments.

The fact is many on the peninsula have been tested on their neighborliness repeatedly, demonstrating deep friendship and resilience in the face of many storms and other catastrophes. Two are at the heart of the second half: The crash of American Airlines flight 587 a few blocks away just weeks after 9/11, and Hurricane Sandy, when many of the houses closest to the shore were carried out to sea and literally every house and business in the area suffered major damage.

Proud full disclosure: I grew up one block across and one block over between B. 136 and B. 137. And my close friend Gerry Cohen, who I’ve known since we were 13 and marked our bar mitzvahs one week apart, grew up on that now infamous B. 138 St. beach block. Gerry makes a brief appearance (though his name is misspelled in the credits), recorded on a day he happened to have headed to his old stomping grounds from Westchester and his long-ago neighbor Bob Sarnoff spotted him riding his bicycle down the block from Riis Park to visit.

For my part, I particularly related to the segment on shared driveways. And while my mother still lived in Belle Harbor when that American flight went down and my sister and I frantically tryied to reach her for hours until a neighbor called us on her cellphone (“Mom said, why should I call them? I’m fine.”), I lived through Sandy in Brooklyn. However, one vivid childhood memory is when the ocean and the bay met on my parents’ front porch during Hurricane Donna in 1960. Here’s a short video of that storm.

Two other documentaries about the Rockaways, both by Jennifer Callahan (I haven’t watched these yet; the second was broadcast on PBS):

The Bungalows of Rockaway

Everything is Different Now

And “Between Ocean and City” is an excellent book offering a deep history of the Rockaways by Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan.