Following years of economic decline, poverty and a growing crime rate, the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens was finally on the mend. The blue-collar oceanfront community and once -popular summer resort had seen something of a revival over the last decade as new residential and commercial development dotted the shoreline. When surfing was legalized there in 2009, Rockaway Beach began attracting cool young twenty-somethings from nearby Williamsburg—the Ramones sang about it, after all—and as these tattooed, pierced and vintage-clad scenesters opened trendy shops and restaurants along the boardwalk, some even began calling it the “Hipster Hamptons.”
That was before Superstorm Sandy.
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