ARVERNE
Geographic Setting
Bounded by Beach 77th and Beach 79th Streets to the west and Beach 59th Street to the east, Arverne lies along the central Rockaway Peninsula—an oceanfront community defined by its proximity to both the Atlantic shoreline and Jamaica Bay. The neighborhood’s geography is strikingly dual: to the south, endless beaches, dunes, and boardwalks open to the Atlantic horizon; to the north, the bay’s wetlands and tidal inlets form a quieter counterpoint of reeds and shallow light. Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Beach Channel Drive, and the A Train (serving stations at Beach 67th Street and Beach 60th Street) serve as the neighborhood’s main arteries, linking it eastward to Far Rockaway and westward toward Rockaway Park. The wide grid of numbered “Beach” streets, remnants of early 20th-century resort planning, still gives Arverne its unique sense of order along the sea—each block a measured step between surf and bay.
The neighborhood’s terrain is flat and wind-swept, shaped by both natural forces and human reclamation. To walk its length is to experience a compressed geography: ocean breakers, dunes stabilized by sea grass, stretches of residential redevelopment, and broad parklands created from once-vacant tracts. The salt air permeates daily life here, reminding residents that Arverne has always been both a place of retreat and resilience.
Etymology and Origins
The name “Arverne” derives from Remington Vernam, the 19th-century lawyer and developer who purchased the tract in the 1880s and coined the name by blending the letters of his own middle and last names—R. Vernam—into “Arverne.” Vernam envisioned an oceanfront resort to rival Coney Island and Long Branch, with elegant hotels, seaside cottages, and pavilions catering to New York’s growing middle class. By 1888, his “Arverne-by-the-Sea” development began attracting summer visitors from Manhattan and Brooklyn, who arrived via the Long Island Rail Road’s Rockaway Division, disembarking near Beach 69th Street to find broad promenades, bathing houses, and Atlantic breezes described by contemporary newspapers as “curative to the urban soul.”
Before Vernam’s project, the Rockaway Peninsula had long been the domain of Canarsie and Rockaway Native peoples, whose seasonal fishing villages occupied its marshy terrain. Dutch and English settlers gradually claimed the land in the 17th century, using it for grazing and salt hay. The opening of the Rockaway Turnpike in the 1830s and the arrival of the railroad in the 1860s transformed this barrier island into one of America’s earliest urban seaside playgrounds. Arverne was among its most ambitious attempts to merge luxury and accessibility—a planned community defined by both aspiration and the restless Atlantic.
The Neighborhood
19th Century: Resort Ambitions and Seaside Grandeur
In the final decades of the 19th century, Arverne flourished as a fashionable seaside resort. The Arverne Hotel, completed in 1888, stood as its crown jewel: a vast wooden structure fronting the ocean, with turrets, verandas, and gaslit dining halls accommodating thousands of guests each summer. Cottages and villas filled the surrounding blocks, while the boardwalk bustled with orchestras, dance halls, and bathhouses. Rockaway Beach Boulevard, then a sandy thoroughfare for carriages and omnibuses, linked the new resort to neighboring communities like Edgemere and Hammels.
Ferries from Manhattan’s Battery and Canarsie Landing carried visitors to the peninsula, where special trains brought them directly into the heart of Arverne. The neighborhood’s layout—long, narrow blocks running parallel to the ocean—reflected Vernam’s plan for sea breezes to reach every home. Local promotional materials boasted of “a seaside Eden within an hour of Wall Street.” Yet even in its first years, the resort’s fortunes were precarious: storms frequently damaged its piers and hotels, and fires, the constant enemy of wooden seaside construction, periodically ravaged entire blocks.
Early 20th Century: Transition to Year-Round Community
By the 1910s, Arverne’s identity began to shift from resort colony to residential enclave. As New York’s middle and working classes sought affordable housing within reach of the city, the grand hotels gave way to bungalows, duplexes, and modest frame houses. The LIRR Arverne Station became a commuter lifeline, carrying residents to jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Seasonal boarding houses were converted into apartments, and local shops sprang up along Rockaway Beach Boulevard to serve year-round needs.
The construction of Boardwalk No. 5 in 1928 unified the Rockaway shoreline, linking Arverne more closely to its neighboring communities. Public beaches replaced private pavilions, marking the city’s democratization of the waterfront. Yet nature continued to shape the neighborhood’s destiny: storms in 1914, 1922, and 1938 repeatedly destroyed sections of the boardwalk and devastated beachfront housing. Still, the area’s resilience—and its reputation for clean air and affordable seaside living—drew new residents, particularly Jewish, Irish, and Italian families from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.
Mid–Late 20th Century: Decline, Displacement, and Renewal
The mid-20th century brought profound change. The construction of the Cross Bay Bridge (1939) and later the Marine Parkway Bridge (1937) opened the Rockaways to automobile traffic, but also eroded its sense of isolation. As postwar prosperity reoriented leisure toward Long Island and suburban beaches, Arverne’s hotels and bungalows fell out of favor. Many properties were subdivided or left vacant, while new public housing projects, including the Arverne Houses (completed in 1955), altered the social fabric.
By the 1960s, economic disinvestment and urban renewal policies had scarred large portions of the Rockaways. Vast tracts of Arverne’s oceanfront were cleared under city plans that promised redevelopment but delivered decades of empty lots and windblown sand. Yet even amid decline, the community endured: local churches, corner stores, and schools remained vital gathering points, and the neighborhood’s proximity to the sea continued to shape its identity.
The 1970s and 1980s brought slow recovery. Community activists fought to preserve housing, reopen shuttered schools, and advocate for equitable development. The beach itself remained a refuge—both physical and psychological—offering continuity amid uncertainty. By the 1990s, new initiatives such as the Arverne Urban Renewal Plan sought to reimagine the neighborhood as a mixed-income, transit-connected seaside village, laying groundwork for the rebirth that would follow.
21st Century: Arverne by the Sea and the Return to the Shore
In the early 2000s, Arverne entered a new chapter with the Arverne by the Sea redevelopment, one of New York City’s largest master-planned communities since the 1960s. Stretching from Beach 62nd to Beach 81st Streets, the project transformed decades of vacant land into a network of modern townhouses, parks, and retail spaces centered around the Beach 67th Street subway station. Built in phases beginning in 2002, the development sought to balance environmental sustainability with coastal resilience, incorporating dune restoration and stormwater management alongside pedestrian boulevards and open plazas.
Hurricane Sandy (2012) tested these ambitions, flooding much of the peninsula and devastating older housing near the shore. Yet Arverne’s rebuilt infrastructure—with elevated homes, reinforced dunes, and a renewed commitment to climate adaptation—proved a model for coastal resilience citywide. In the years since, new restaurants, surf schools, and cafés have taken root along Beach 67th Street and the Rockaway Boardwalk, attracting both longtime residents and newcomers. The YMCA on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, opened in 2014, now anchors community life, symbolizing the neighborhood’s evolution from disinvestment to renewal.
Today, Arverne is a study in contrasts and continuities. Its southern edge hums with surfers, joggers, and families on the boardwalk, while inland blocks retain the rhythms of everyday life—rowhouses, playgrounds, and small churches echoing the neighborhood’s diverse heritage. The ocean remains its constant: a vast frontier of beauty and risk, resilience and reinvention.
Spirit and Legacy
Arverne’s story mirrors that of the Rockaways themselves—a cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth shaped by human ambition and natural force. From Vernam’s Gilded Age resort to the modern Arverne by the Sea, the neighborhood has embodied New York’s eternal tension between aspiration and endurance. Its dunes have been washed away and rebuilt, its houses lifted and replaced, yet the sense of place endures: a community bound not just by streets and sand, but by the memory of those who refused to abandon the shore.
New York City
Use this custom Google map to explore where every neighborhood in all five boroughs of New York City is located.
The Five Boroughs
One of New York City’s unique qualities is its organization in to 5 boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. These boroughs are part pragmatic administrative districts, and part vestiges of the region’s past. Each borough is an entire county in New York State - in fact, Brooklyn is, officially, Kings County, while Staten Island is, officially Richmond County. But that’s not the whole story …
Initially, New York City was located on the southern tip of Manhattan (now the Financial District) that was once the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Across the East River, another city was rising: Brooklyn. In time, the city planners realized that unification between the rapidly rising cities would create commercial and industrial opportunities - through streamlined administration of the region.
So powerful was the pull of unification between New York and Brooklyn that three more counties were pulled into the unification: The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. And on January 1, 1898, the City of New York unified two cities and three counties into one Greater City of New York - containing the five boroughs we know today.
But because each borough developed differently and distinctly until unification, their neighborhoods likewise uniquely developed. Today, there are nearly 390 neighborhoods, each with their own histories, cultures, cuisines, and personalities - and each with residents who are fiercely proud of their corner of The Big Apple.
