Rockaway, New York

Rockaway is the name of a peninsula of Long Island, most of which is located within the borough of Queens in New York City; the peninsula's easternmost section forms the town of East Rockaway, in suburban Nassau County.

Once a popular beach resort, tourism declined in the Rockaway Peninsula (or as it is often called, "The Rockaways") when most of the waters surrounding New York City became progressively more polluted during the middle third of the Twentieth Century. Rockaways Playland, a well-known amusement park, was located there, but closed in 1985. In the years immediately following World War II, several public housing projects were built in the region, and these eventually became hotbeds of crime and related social pathologies. This provoked a backlash from some of the peninsula's more established residents (many of whom are of Irish Catholic ethnicity), and in the mid-1980s a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was found to be in existence there.

The peninsula's main "town" is Far Rockaway, situated near the stem of the peninsula, just inside the city limits. Other important neighborhoods on the peninsula include Arverne, Belle Harbor, and Breezy Point, the latter a seniors-only gated community at the peninsula's western tip. Also located in the Rockaways are Jacob Riis Park, Fort Tilden, and the Neponsit Home For The Aged, a city-run nursing home for the elderly indigent which closed in 1998.

Broad Channel, located on its own island in Jamaica Bay between the peninsula and the mainland of Queens, is generally considered to be psychographically part of the Rockaways. The Rockaway area, including Broad Channel, is served by two New York City Subway lines, the A-8 Avenue Express and the S-Rockaway Shuttle, although both lines run completely above ground locally.

In 2002 a revival in the area began as a residential development began construction in the Arverne neighborhood in the center of Far Rockaway.