The Coldwell Banker® System is comprised of company owned offices which are owned by a subsidiary of Anywhere Advisors LLC and franchised offices which are independently owned and operated. Coldwell Banker and the Coldwell Banker logos are trademarks of Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. Real estate agents affiliated with Coldwell Banker are independent contractor sales associates and are not employees of Coldwell Banker. Operating in the state of New York as GR Affinity, LLC in lieu of the legal name Guaranteed Rate Affinity, LLC. You are not required to use Guaranteed Rate Affinity, LLC as a condition of purchase or sale of any real estate. Learn more!Ĭoldwell Banker Realty and Guaranteed Rate Affinity, LLC share common ownership and because of this relationship the brokerage may receive a financial or other benefit. As an Argentinian woman who married a local man told the newspaper, "For me it's a backward community.Protect your home and budget with an American Home Shield® home warranty. The story in the Times said except for prices (the sort of cottage we bought for $750, today starts at $70,000), it hasn't changed much. And when we got into our teens we fell in love and danced on the ferry pier to the music from inside Kennedy's, the one tavern there was, set on stilts out over the water of the bay. We swam and played ball and had block parties and sat out nights on the deck telling ghost stories and remembered boys from up the Walk who were away in the war. People came out and cheered as she passed and she waved, like the queen. Aunt Kate, old and fat, sat in the red wagon and we pulled her from the parking lot. You walked, cycled, and/or pulled a red wagon. Kildare Walk and the other paths were too narrow for a car, designed that way. No cars except along the single blacktop road and the bordering parking lots. It was heaven! And even then there was a gate. Ten people full time with three bedrooms. Uncle Martin was allowed to have his family out once a year. Here's who lived there: my mother, my brother and me Aunt Helen and Uncle Martin and their three kids Uncle Tom Aunt Mary. Maybe we'd lose the war and what would it be worth then? So we bought the place.Ī three-bedroom bungalow, no heat, running water, screened-in porch, wooden deck outside, OK kitchen, small bath, two showers, one outdoors, fully furnished (some of the big wicker armchairs were great), knives and forks, dishes and a few cups, as I recall, the whole deal, seven hundred and fifty bucks. There were blackouts there were actual ship torpedoings offshore (oil and debris would wash up) there were shortages and summer bungalows were hardly in hot demand. The family bought the house (you didn't buy the land, that belonged to something called the Point Breeze Association to whom homeowners paid modest yearly dues) in 1942, just after the start of the war. Although my family sold off the place 25 or 30 years ago, we once owned a bungalow in Breezy Point, at Number 40 Kildare Walk, and for many summers that was where we went. Hey, they can't get away with that! Why can't Breezy Point be just like everywhere else? As the paper put it: "a tantalizing prospect in Queens acres of unspoiled land in a gated community with private beaches and practically no crime." While, at the same time, the number of family-owned houses in the community has remained flat, at about 2,800 dwellings. The news peg to the Times' piece was the geological fact that since 1960, because of the tidal flows and the surf and the oddities of the Atlantic Ocean itself, Breezy Point has added about a hundred acres of beach to its expanse. Why should the Irish and the Jews have all the fun? And Seagate in Brooklyn, not all that far away and also on the water, said to be "98% Jewish," by one account.Īnd naturally, since Seagate and Breezy Point are both pretty desirable places, there is an outcry every few years to tear down the gates and let everyone in. The story in the Times dealt with the fact there are still a couple of old, "gated" communities around New York, actually part of the city itself, one of them being Breezy Point, which is and long has been essentially blue-collar Irish and Catholic. No traffic and within an hour of midtown Manhattan? Wait just a damned minute. A house you could afford on a working man's wage? Breezy Point. Great, swimmable water? No pollution? Breezy Point. Right on the beach, no intervening road to cross? Breezy Point. The front page of The New York Times last month reminded me. The summer people pack up and go back to the cities. Martha's Vineyard where the Clintons sported.
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