The Story of Rockaway Beach, New York
Rockaway Beach is New York City’s improbable surf town — a miles-long ribbon of Atlantic sand on the ocean side of a barrier peninsula in Queens, and the only place inside the five boroughs where surfing is legal. It is a genuine big-city surf scene, reached not by a coast highway but by the A train, a shuttle and a ferry, where wetsuited surfers share the subway with beachgoers riding out from Brooklyn and Manhattan. There is no reef and no single peeling line here: swell fills in over sandbars groomed by the rock jetties that punctuate the shoreline, throwing up shifting peaks — soft and forgiving for learners on small days, shorter and punchier when a real groundswell arrives. Behind it all sits Jamaica Bay; ahead, the open ocean.
A Surf Beach at the End of the Subway
What makes Rockaway singular is how you get there: not by a coast highway but on New York City public transit. The A train runs the length of the peninsula and stops right at Beach 67th Street, steps from one of the two legal surf zones; for the western breaks you ride the A to Broad Channel and change to the S — the Rockaway Park Shuttle — out to Beach 116th Street, with the sand a short walk from the platform. A year-round NYC Ferry lands at Beach 108th Street, and a summer beach shuttle fills the gaps. On a good swell the trains fill with wetsuited surfers, boards under their arms.
The beach itself is a miles-long strand of Atlantic sand backed by a boardwalk and the dense street grid of central Rockaway, with the commercial hub clustered around Beach 116th Street. That boardwalk carries the neighborhood’s recent history: Hurricane Sandy tore much of it apart on October 29, 2012, hurling planks into nearby houses, and the city rebuilt it not in wood but in storm-resilient, steel-reinforced concrete, a project completed in 2017. The rebuild came with hard defenses — the Army Corps of Engineers pumped millions of tons of sand back onto the beach and reinforced the rock groins — so the promenade you walk today is engineered to take the next big storm.
A Barrier Peninsula Between Ocean and Bay
Rockaway is a classic barrier peninsula — a thin bar of sand with the open Atlantic on its ocean side and the sheltered shallows of Jamaica Bay directly behind it. That bay is a wildlife refuge and part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, the sprawling federal park that runs from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to Breezy Point at the peninsula’s western tip. Follow the sand west past the townhouses and the strand turns wild: Jacob Riis Park, with its grand 1932 Art Deco bathhouse, and then Fort Tilden, a decommissioned Army coastal battery whose dunes and concrete bunkers passed to the National Park Service in the 1970s. Punctuating the ocean shoreline are the rock jetties and groins that, reinforced in the post-Sandy rebuild, trap sand and groom the offshore banks into more organized sandbars.
That exposure is what makes the waves. Rockaway faces the open Atlantic with nothing to block a swell, so the surf lives and dies by distant storms. Autumn is prime, when hurricanes and post-tropical systems tracking up the seaboard fire clean, powerful groundswell into the bars; winter nor’easters bring the biggest and coldest days, and summer stays small and consistent — ideal for learners. The best sandbar surf comes on a south-to-east swell with an offshore wind out of the northwest. The water swings hard, from the low-to-mid 70s Fahrenheit in August toward the high 30s in late winter.
The City’s Only Legal Lineup
Rockaway is the only beach inside New York City limits where surfing is legal — effectively designated in the mid-2000s and confined to marked surf-only zones, principally Beach 67th to 69th Street and Beach 87th to 92nd Street, kept separate from the guarded swimming beaches. There is no reef and no single peeling line: waves break over shifting sandbars groomed by the jetties, so the peaks wander with the sand and tide and you read the beach fresh each session. Both lefts and rights come through, with some of the better-known walls peeling off the jetties around Beach 90th Street, near the ferry and the food; the Beach 67th zone tends to run a touch smaller and friendlier for beginners. The overall character is mellow-to-punchy, and the main hazards are rip currents around the jetties, the rocks themselves, summer crowds and cold water.
For all that it sits at the end of a subway line, Rockaway has grown a real surf culture — a notably diverse, homegrown urban scene, with board shops, surf schools and a boardwalk food scene that comes alive in summer around the Beach 86th and 87th Street concessions, where spots like the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, Rippers and Tacoway Beach draw crowds off the sand. The beach had a foothold in pop culture long before the current boom: the Ramones’ 1977 single “Rockaway Beach,” written by bassist Dee Dee Ramone for the album “Rocket to Russia,” became the band’s highest-charting song and turned a Queens beach into a punk-rock anthem.