HISTORY

ROCKAWAY POINT COMPANY

During the year 1911 Vandeventer started the Rockaway Point Company as part of the Southern-Pacific Railway Company. The 900 acre property was to be transformed into a tent city of a thousand tents and several well-placed bungalows. In those early days there were still only six or seven hotels at the point. 

The new city was to have stores, a dance hall, and churches for various denominations. The lumber for the boardwalks, bungalows, stores, and new hotels was to be brought to the point from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where by boats, the secondhand lumber from the old giant hotels being torn down would be loaded up and ferried to the point.

The tearing down of the big hotels had been going on for a time at old Coney Island. It has been reported that whole buildings were also brought over to the point on barges. Evicted residents of Coney Island were looking for a new area for seasonal and year round shore living. The exodus from Brooklyn to the point was a success, with some bringing their own buildings minus an old kitchen sink or two (If you will!).

Kennedy's comes to the point

A gentleman named Maxwell Kennedy ferried or barged a building over to the point and set it down on pilings at the bay side of the point, at what is at present Beach 210 street north of Rockaway Point Boulevard. Formerly the structure had been at the old Sheepshead racetrack in Coney Island, but now it was Kennedy's Pavilion at Rockaway Point.
In later years the place was known as Kennedy's Casino, with a huge sign on the roof that said such, and as the Breezy Point Hotel.

With just minutes to spare

In February of 1919 Kennedy's dock and pavilion were saved from being blown off the face of the earth by a time span of just ten minutes or so! Naval personnel from the air station to the east were to transfer a new type of underwater depth bomb to the Rockaway Shoals area on the beach side of the point.

The six men brought the bomb loaded with 120 pounds of TNT to Kennedy's dock by boat, and from there on it was necessary to carry the devise full of TNT to the beach side. Ten minutes after they started to trek along the beach sand and about five hundred feet from Kennedy's the bomb exploded. The explosion left a big crater in the sand and the sailors that were carrying the bomb were not to be found. Why this particular route was taken is still a mystery, but at this time all americans were patriots... and America and the protection of our country came first above all!

As we know it now

By 1920 there were 2250 bungalows in the point colony, and tenants united against the Rockaway operating company. This is when the Rockaway Point Association and the Roxbury Association were formed. The battle was long and hard until the final victory came with the incorporation of Breezy Point Cooperative in the years before Gateway National Recreation area moved in on the point, when common sense was in vogue here in New York City. But that story would fill volumes... and it did!