The Silver Gull Beach Club likes to do things the old-fashioned way. When The Observer first saw the club it was the Fourth of July and there was a band of hefty middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts playing “Sweet Caroline” and little kids flinging themselves into the pool and leathery old women in loungers deepening their already very-deep tans. Having wandered over from the hipster-strewn stretch of Breezy Point, the club seemed like a mirage—a vision of an earlier Brooklyn, another Brooklyn. In fact, it was—the club opened in 1963 and has managed to stay largely as it always has been, a cabana club long after cabana clubs’ cultural moment passed.

Nor does the club intend to let Hurricane Sandy do what time could not. While the storm destroyed some 200 of the club’s 460 cabanas—particularly those built on a pier that juts out into the sea—club management intends to rebuild the whole shebang, against the wishes of Gateway National Recreation Area, which owns the club and the rest of the beach, reports The New York Times. Read More