The Bronx's Lost, Gated Community

Back in the 1920s, fed up with their sticky ghetto summers, Bronx residents began wondering where their Coney Island was. By then, even Queens had a summer retreat, out in the burgeoning enclave of Rockaway. In the Bronx there was only one direction in which to look, and that was eastward, out to the tidal basins of the Long Island Sound and the East River. Small bands of Irish, Italian and Jewish civil servants and laborers started tent and cottage towns out by Orchard Beach, and farther south along the smaller spit of sand known as Silver Beach, on the Throgs Neck peninsula.

So these working- and lower-middle-class people created their own seaside resorts. Weekends were given over to all-day chowders and fish fries. City-born men learned to build and set lobster traps, and mastered surf fishing. Bronx kids became excellent swimmers, and their complexions took on a healthy hue from outdoor living.

Then, in the early 1930s, Robert Moses turned his flinty eye toward Orchard Beach and decided that these low-rent monkeys had had enough fun. He directed the Army Corps of Engineers to destroy the Orchard Beach shantytowns and build a good solid beach with a cement boardwalk, and no damn tents. Esthetically, Moses' beach was more pleasing, but from the accounts of the old-timers, you always got the sense it was less fun. Some never forgave Moses, and labeled his new shoreline Horseshit Beach.

In the following years, Silver Beach's residents?cops, firemen and their families?ducked and covered. The bungalows began to be built closer and closer together, as if they were huddling, seeking safety in numbers against a changing Bronx. Silver Beach sits on the south end of Throgs Neck, which is a three-quarter-mile-long finger of land. The Throgs Neck peninsula points out toward where the Long Island Sound and the East River meet. Throgs Neck is one of the forgotten neighborhoods of the Bronx, and Silver Beach is the forgotten part of Throgs Neck. There was always a timelessness about the place, an eerie insularity?a New England fishing village that dropped down from the sky into an unlikely location.

Then, in 1954, a shudder of fear coursed through the community when Robert Moses came calling again, this time with plans for the Throgs Neck Bridge, which would hook up with the Cross Bronx Expressway, another of Moses' pet projects. Luckily, Moses shifted his aim. The Expressway went slightly north of Silver Beach as it ripped through the Bronx, tearing out the borough's heart. For residents of the increasingly less rustic beach community, a sad lesson was confirmed: the less they had to do with the rest of the Bronx, the better.

I visited Silver Beach once, in 1971. I knew a kid whose grandparents owned a cottage there, and he invited me out for a day of sun and surf. His grandparents lived on our block. By then, unworldly Bronx kid that I was, I knew that having an apartment in the Fordham Rd. section of the Bronx and a summer cottage in the same borough was a little sad. To still vacation in Silver Beach was a reminder of a vanished way of life, a melancholy anachronism.

But to the beach we went. We hit the minuscule strip of sand, which was empty, and proceeded to strip to our bathing suits. What I found out later was that the beach happened to be empty because everyone else knew that raw sewage was being dumped into the East River. I stood on the sharp, cutting sand and minced up to the water. A few feet offshore a turd floated by. When I turned away in disgust, I saw a huge wharf rat scurry across the sand. I ran back to the cement block where I'd left my clothes and got dressed, figuring that if I had to put up with shit and rats, I was better off doing it clothed, like I did back on Fordham Rd.

Our beach adventure over, we roamed the narrow streets of Silver Beach, and ran into a ragtag group of little Irish pirates who demanded, "What are youse doin' here?" Their leader was a freckle-faced redheaded kid with big ears. These Hibernian punks weren't satisfied with whatever answer we gave them, so they chased us back to my friend's grandparents' house, where we waited out the rest of our beach day. That was my visit to Silver Beach: playing Risk in a stuffy bungalow on one of the hottest days of the summer.

Those honkytonk summer cottage days are gone now. By 1972, the 350-home community became incorporated. Now, in order to buy a home in Silver Beach, you have to have three homeowning Silver Beach residents willing to vouch for you. Then, everyone in your family?including children?has to be interviewed separately by the co-op board, which votes on whether to approve you. If they do, and if you can muster up the necessary $160,000 to $200,000, plus another four to seven G's to buy the land underneath the house, you, too, can be part of the Silver Beach community. Which all seems like quite a lot of trouble to go to just to live in the Bronx. But I guess people are happy there, and couldn't care less what the rest of New York thinks.

Silver Beach is a gated community, one of the few in New York City. I drove out there one weekday night recently, cutting through Throgs Neck's Pennyfield Ave. There's no sign to let you know where to turn to reach the place. If you don't know where it is, you probably have no business being there.

A young Hispanic man was sitting in a guard booth, lift-gate down, barring cars from entering. I asked him if he'd lift the barrier so I could drive in and look at the neighborhood.

He gave me a pained look and shook his head.

"Yo, man, I'm sorry. I can't let you in just to drive around. It's my job, yo. You got to be here visiting somebody that lives here. It's the rules, yo. But if you come back in the day and I'm not here, and then?"

I continued down Pennyfield Ave., then walked into a bar on the waterfront, where the Bronx fades out and the East River begins. Three mangy bar hounds stopped talking and clocked every move I made. It was unnerving. I went for the phone. I felt like I was in some Southern roadhouse, and these fellows at the bar were checking out a stranger who'd just blown into town.

I returned to Silver Beach on a weekday morning. The Yo Guard was right. At this time of day you can pull right in and drive around. But you'd better drive slowly. The streets are narrow, and there isn't much room to move. The close-set bungalows are painted in the bright pastels of summer. The streets are quiet, the sidewalks are lined with trees. The avenues bear handmade wooden signs with bucolic names like Magnolia, Acorn and Poplar. Going down Magnolia I thought it was Flag Day. Every other house displays the Stars and Stripes proudly out front. The streets were empty, so I stopped to listen to the silence. Silver Beach is a neighborhood so cut off from New York that you don't even hear that white-noise city buzz you hear everywhere else?the background hum of traffic noise and voices. Nothing but blue sky and bungalows surround you.

I found one store in Silver Beach, a deli, and I tried to talk with some residents. I didn't have much luck. The people of this isolated burg are a silent lot, and don't want anyone to know about their little world. You can't blame them, given what happened to the rest of the Bronx. I went into the deli and smiled when I saw that they still had an old 1950s-style commercial refrigerator, with the white Formica panels and glass windows all held closed by solid-steel handles. I hadn't seen one of these monstrosities since the early 70s.

Later I walked down Indian Trail, the last street in Silver Beach before it slopes down into the East River. Indian Trail is a 5-foot-wide walkway of asphalt. To the left of the path sit the classic bungalows, which were once summer cottages. They're close together, and have mailboxes in front of them with names like O'Brien and Murphy. Looking out from Indian Trail to the north, you see the Throgs Neck Bridge, which at night, when the lights around the cables are lit, is one of the Bronx's most glorious sights?a string of pearls. Directly below is the actual beach. The only swimmers on a winter day were a gaggle of brown ducks bobbing in the wake of a passing freighter. A wooden staircase leads down from Indian Trail to the beach.

The intrigue of Silver Beach is just where the name came from. One yarn has it that some forgotten pirate ship sank nearby with a hull full of silver. But the real reason?and you have to look hard to see it?is that the sand has a shimmering, silvery quality to it. That's where the romance ends, however. The reason sand shimmers in the winter sunlight is the same reason some New York sidewalks glisten in the light: ground glass is mixed into it. I drove home, thinking that it's a poor excuse for sand.

E-mail: [sullivan@nypress.com](mailto:sullivan@nypress.com)