Belle Harbor, Queens

The opening of passenger railroad service in 1880 to Rockaway Park from Long Island City and from Flatbush Terminal (now Atlantic Terminal) in downtown Brooklyn, via the Long Island Rail Road's Rockaway Beach Branch, facilitated population growth on the Rockaways Peninsula.

The makings of Belle Harbor began in 1900, when a New York State judge ordered that the land west of Rockaway Park be put up for auction. The area that makes up Belle Harbor and the neighboring community of Neponsit was bought by Edward P. Hatch, who, after a couple years, sold it to the West Rockaway Land Company in 1907.[5] Residential lots in Belle Harbor were auctioned off in 1915.[6] The president of the company, Frederick J. Lancaster, who had earlier developed the Edgemere neighborhood, officially gave the community its name.[7]

Prior to Lancaster's acquisition of the land, however, a group of men wishing to form a yacht club entered into a grant agreement with the West Rockaway Land Company in 1905. The group, which had named itself the Belle Harbor Yacht Club, bought property from the company for four thousand dollars. The agreement included two hundred square feet of land and thirty plots of upland. That same year, the group received corporation status by the State of New York, and by 1908 began participating in its first inter-club ocean races with some of the city's other yacht clubs.[8]

The earliest homes in Belle Harbor were built circa 1910. Over the next four decades, hundreds of single- and two-family houses were built from beach to bay, filling most of the land by the early 1950s.[9] In the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood became a haven for working class and lower-middle-class families looking to escape the congestion of "mainland" Brooklyn and Queens. Many civil servants, including teachers, firefighters and police officers owned homes in the neighborhood. The housing bubbles in the late 1980s and early 2000s brought a different mix of residents but many many third and fourth generation residents remain.[10]

The neighborhood suffered heavy losses from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These included several members of the Fire Department of New York—ranging from probationary firefighter to captain—and people who worked at the World Trade Center. The names of the 343 firefighters killed at the World Trade Center are listed on a monument at Tribute Park on Beach Channel Drive and Beach 116 Street, a 0.83-acre (0.34 ha) park marking the 75 area residents killed in the attacks, which then-mayor Michael Bloomberg cited as "more than any other neighborhood in the city".[11][12]

On November 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587, bound for Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, crashed in the center of Belle Harbor, killing all 260 passengers and crew on board, as well as five others on the ground. Many of the passengers on the plane were from the Dominican community in Washington Heights.[13] After consultation with families in the Belle Harbor and Washington Heights communities, a memorial was erected at Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park, a major shopping district and transportation hub in the area. Although a temporary memorial was developed at the actual site of the disaster, on Newport Avenue, many still annually gravitate toward the Rockaway Park area for commemoration. In 2001, a resident stated to The Guardian, "It's impossible to understand unless you live here."[14] Father Michael Geraghty, a priest quoted in the same article, said that it was common for people to live in the houses that their parents lived in and that many families lived in the same houses for generations. "[14]

Belle Harbor was further devastated by Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012. The storm surge from the Atlantic Ocean completely inundated the peninsula, sending waves through the streets and into Jamaica Bay. In addition, more than a dozen homes and the Harbor Light restaurant were completely destroyed by fire.[15] The neighborhood has almost completely recovered.[16]