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New Jetties Are Coming To Rockaway

Friends of Rockaway Beach toast their victory with bubbly on the beach


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Community activists John Cori and Eddie Pastore broke out the champagne on March 1 as residents and elected officials gathered on Beach 86th Street to celebrate the greenlighting of a project that will install new groins along 60 blocks of beach.

The victory is the culmination of a nine-year grassroots effort by Cori and Pastore, who co-founded the Friends of Rockaway Beach in 2011. The group rallied a groundswell of support, calling on the city, state and federal government to finish funding a long-overdue U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study on beach erosion, and urged the USACE to install new rock jetties – known as groins – to protect the eroding shore.

“We did it,” was the mantra echoed by celebrants as they raised their paper cups to toast the occasion.

“They said it couldn’t be done, but this community didn’t give in to that defeatist attitude,” Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato said triumphantly. “They made sure Rockway was put on the map.”

The USACE announced on February 28 that Colonel Thomas Asbery signed off on the $700 million restoration project that will include 13 new groins extending from Beach 86th Street to Beach 149th Street, reinforced sand dunes from Beach 24th Street to Beach 149th Street, and additional reforms to protect the Jamaica Bay shoreline. The bidding process will begin shortly, according to the USACE, and work is expected to start in May.

Cori said he’s grateful to Community Board 14, the peninsula’s civic organizations and a host of politicians, including former Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder, Congressman Gregory Meeks and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, who provided a united front to help secure funding and get the beach improvements approved.

Cori quipped that “if it is said that the noisy wheel gets the grease, then it must be said that the noisy beach community gets the groins.”

 

One response to “New Jetties Are Coming To Rockaway”

  1. Tom says:

    Hi. The article is from March. It is now mid September and there has been no Visible activity on this project.
    Are there any updates as to when &/ or IF it is ever going to start ?

    Thank You
    TomS

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