The beached whale struggling in the water near the shore in Breezy Point yesterday. (Photo: Getty)

Residents in Breezy Point, which was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, were hoping the rescue of an endangered finback whale that washed up on the beach there yesterday would provide a happy ending to what has been an incredibly difficult year for the neighborhood. However, it was not meant to be. Rob DiGiovanni, the executive director and senior biologist of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, which was attempting to help save the animal, told The Observer the whale did make it off the beach, but it seems to have died.

"As of right now, the animal was lost last night," Mr. DiGiovanni said. "It looks like it moved a little off the shore, relocated and it does appear to be dead."

Rescuers gave the whale a grim prognosis, but they were keeping it wet and hoped it might be able to move offshore with the high tide. Mr. DiGiovanni said he received the information about the whale's condition from Riverhead Foundation staffers who were on scene. He was en route to the whale's location when he spoke to us a few minutes ago and did not have information about the animal's time of death.

Whales often beach themselves when sick or injured. Mr. DiGiovanni said he believed this whale was no exception and was probably already near death when it washed up on the shore. Prior to its death, the whale was bleeding from its mouth and tail and Mr. DiGiovanni said it weighed "less than half of what we would expect an animal of that size to be."

"It did present itself as a severely emaciated animal," he explained. "I don't think it was the case that it was stuck on the beach ... It was sick and it was in the process of dying. It didn't move far because it didn't have any of the energy to do that."

Guess what else is swimming in the water? (Moonman82, flickr)

New Yorkers seeking a day at the beach might find themselves enjoying an extended visit to the bathroom instead.

The New York-New Jersey area has the fourth-highest rate in the U.S. for exceeding the national recommended daily standard for bacteria, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And given that those standards are pretty lax, this means that New York's waters are, well, less than pristine.

Thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly revised standards for water quality, water containing enough bacteria to infect one in 28 swimmers is considered “safe” for recreation, The New York Times reports. Hey, those aren't the best odds, but the water's fine, come right in!

Last year, New York beaches nearly doubled the number of closings or swim advisories, while New Jersey’s just slightly increased, according to The Times.

The problem facing beaches of the New York-New Jersey region is the makeup of our sewer system, which has both storm water and waste traveling through it. Periods of heavy rainfall lead to not infrequent overflows and subsequent leaks into the New York waters.

And this past year the greater New York region had lots of things working against it—heavy rainfall, Hurricane Irene and that fire at the sewage treatment plant on the Hudson River in Harlem, The Times notes.

So what counts as an infection? The current EPA standard states that there must be a fever present for an illness to be considered gastrointestinal. We’re assuming they’ve not recently experienced the perils of ingesting bad water–fever or no fever.

Still there is hope on the horizon—to combat whatever heavy rainfall New York has yet to experience this summer, the city council is looking to invest in porous pavements in the sidewalks to absorb the excess storm water.

We can't help but wonder if bacteria might save Fort Tilden from being overrun with Bushwickians. And while the EPA claims that their policy will “protect more than 99 percent of swimmers from gastrointestinal illnesses," we think we might be taking a short hiatus from the trenches of Coney Island this summer.

sgrothjan@observer.com

First, they came for Rockaway Beach.

They came with their trend pieces and gossip items and fashion trendspotting. And it was written:

The Manhattanites who read about it on Thrillist and Daily Candy will clamor for entry, eventually getting it, and everyone who preceded them will have already started to repeat the process somewhere else (in all likelihood, 5.9 miles down the road, at Fort Tilden).

And it was written again:

Either batten down the hatches, or take refuge somewhere still too remote for the Times‘ intrepid Styles Section. That place was once Fort Tilden, but it, too, shall be ruined in good time.

We spoke too soon.

Fort Tilden, meet your maker:

This Tweet even came with a photo essay, and some words:

Mariana Garay, her husband and their two sons (one of whom is in the sixth slide) have driven down to Fort Tilden from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on summer weekends for the past three years.

Fort Tilden, which we thought wouldn't be part of the New York Trendsetter's Manifest Destiny Agenda for at least another year, we were sorry. We are wrong. After all, can something be a "secret" when the largest newspaper in the Western World is writing about it?

Of course not. Yet, it shouldn't go without mention that, as is the case with "_____ is a great secret," all of this "______ is OVER" business—even on our part—should be taken with a some degree of granulated salt.

Because, after all, there's nothing new under the sun, especially beaches. Especially at the New York Times:

Arts, November 9, 2001: Run by the National Park Service, Fort Tilden was a secret slice of paradise.

New York/Region, June 3, 2003: A free shuttle bus will take passengers around Riis Park, which has nearly a mile of ocean beach, or to Fort Tilden (just west of the park) or Floyd Bennett Field (across the Parkway Bridge).

Arts, July 21, 2006: Regulars at Fort Tilden smile to one another as if sharing a great little secret. And they are.

Arts, August 15, 2008: If that's not your idea of exotic, try Fort Tilden, a decommissioned military base in the Rockaways where huge concrete bunkers, old munitions sheds and defunct nuclear missile silos share space with the sand dunes.

City Room, August 4, 2010: But the back flip he turned Saturday afternoon on the sands of Ft. Tilden, a defunct military installation in the Rockaways in Queens, was different. 

Styles, June 15, 2011: Not long ago, the remote beach at Fort Tilden, a former military base along the peninsula’s western side, hosted scattered picnickers, gay nudists and Russian fishermen reeling in spiny sea robins. Nowadays, the beachgoers are more likely to sport tattoo sleeves, Wayfarer sunglasses and Brooklyn ZIP codes, and fall between their mid-20s and mid-30s.

New York/Region, August 5, 2011: He, like many cyclists, is a fan of the area’s remote Fort Tilden Beach.

[Hilariously, three of these entries are by the same reporter. Can you guess which three?]

Anyway, the point is: Newspapers recycle stories, and they'll recycle them with increasing frequency until they make these stories "happen," which, when it finally does, will eventually strip away at the unmolested nature of that which existed before its press coverage to the core—like leaving an unripened fruit in a brown bag, to the point where it gives at the oh-so-slightest touch, its way of communicating to you that in your quest to eagerly bring it ripeness for your selfish consumption, or need to fill a hole in the paper, you have ruined it—something it did not ask for and yet received, such is the nature of progress, unwelcome or otherwise.

Alternately, just get to Fort Tilden before they start shooting episodes of Girls there.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

There was The Taco Stand.

Then appeared Trend Pieces.

Soon, The Hoteliers.

Eventually, the Page Six Sightings.

Now, those for whom this was once a special, low-profile place—one unmolested by the terrors of popularity with moneyed Manhattanites—ruination is upon them and their beach. Because if a New York Times trendspotting fashion piece in the Thursday Styles isn't a sign of The End, one would shudder to think what is.

Explains the Times:

It is a pleasure, then, to note that — along a length of the Rockaway Boardwalk, particularly that stretch east of the Rockaway Taco stand near Beach 96th Street informally known as Bushwick on the Beach — New Yorkers show signs that a trip to the shore is at once an occasion for getting semi-naked in public and for preening one’s fashion sense. Take the group of women riding out to the beach on the A train, a subway caravan right out of Lena Dunham’s "Girls."

Of note:

1. We don't know who informally calls it "Bushwick on the Beach," or where it's informally known as such (as a Google search turned up nothing for the term), but kudos to the Times for excavating lexicon previously unwritten for  the rest of humanity to (informally) utilize prior to this.

2. And thus, the trope of referring to Girls to characterize any group of young women traveling in a pack of four to anywhere other young, mostly Caucasian people travel in New York City was less crystallized than it was calloused.

Also of note:

And it is only here that a sunny beauty like Sabine McCalla, the woman behind the guacamole takeout counter at Rockaway Taco, shows up for work in a T-shirt celebrating Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose lead singer, Alynda Lee Segarra, is to a certain group of Brooklyn women what Sarah Jessica Parker is to readers of Vogue.

1. Fact-check: Is it only at Rockaway Beach that beautiful young women show up to work wearing T-Shirts celebrating a band?

2. And furthermore, is the lead singer of a New Orleans band with a very niche following—or "certain group of Brooklyn women"—that most people haven't heard of legitimately comparable to Sarah Jessica Parker for these women (an assertion that makes the music writers who practically discovered them scoff)?

3. Is this week's Thursday Styles dedicated to simply trolling anyone at a computer with a palm to apply to their face and a link to give them in exchange for the distinct pleasure of being prompted to do so?

You be the judge, unless you have been in Rockaway Beach for a while, in which case, we suggest you either batten down the hatches, or take refuge somewhere still too remote for the Times' intrepid Styles Section. That place was once Fort Tilden, but it, too, shall be ruined in good time.

We live in an era in which Three Mile Island may now seem the most viable option.

Boardwalk? Try Catwalk [NYT/Styles]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Rockaway Beach: A well-established Hipster Hamptons of sorts for the last few years, a place many thought would hit fever-pitch sometime this summer, the moment when—like Williamsburg and Bushwick and Red Hook and hell, the rest of the entire borough of Brooklyn before it—well-heeled Manhattanites discover it, and then, ruin the fun for those who were ostensibly there "first."*

First came The Taco Stand.

Then, the Trend Pieces.

Then, The Hoteliers.

And now: The Page Six Item. 

Yes, if you're the ornery, traditionalist, orthodoxy-of-cool type, this is the moment you can singularly declare Rockaway Beach "over": When Page Six gets—and publishes—sightings there.

Which happened today.

In a "Sightings" column that also included the New York Giants' Victor Ortiz, Jon Bon Jovi, Harry Belefonte, and Josh Lucas, the top item was:

Patti Smith and MoMA PS1 head Klaus Biesenbach strolling the Rockaway Beach boardwalk . . .

Three things of note, here:

1. Patti Smith and Klaus Biesenbach rated higher than Victor Ortiz and his girlfriend. In the New York Post.

2. Unlike the majority of gossip column sightings entries, this one was clearly not a plant. Either someone tipped them off, or a Page Six-er hangs out in Rockaway Beach.

3. This is, as far as we can tell, the first Page Six sighting in Rockaway Beach, ever. The precedent for notable sightings in Rockaway Beach in the New York Post: A bloodthirsty "Shark (or Ray)."

This is how it begins.

Soon, Rockaway Beach will be flooded with all different kinds of Sevigny and Ronson. Pop-up French clubs with doors that only open for people with personal texts from Larry Gagosian or Daenerys Targaryen's dragons will be erected. The Walkmen will re-locate there, and record an album. Madras-sporting Conde Nast warlords and ink-merchants will eventually venture out via towncar, ostensibly in search of "authentic" lobster rolls at first, lying about being on a wayward detour to Martha's Vineyard—we got lost on the way to Teterboro, har har—but eventually bringing their friends, convincing them that putting $1M into renovating a local standby clam shack with leather banquettes, a hostess who can only read names printed in boldface, and a chef whose greatest talent is an ability to upsell the shaving of truffles over anything from a burger to an artisinal Ritz cracker. Finally, the Manhattanites who read about it on Thrillist and Daily Candy will clamor for entry, eventually getting it, and everyone who preceded them will have already started to repeat the process somewhere else (in all likelihood, 5.9 miles down the road, at Fort Tilden), but not before Kanye West has built a replica Coliseum nearby, where he will show a movie on twelve screens of him using King Tut's tomb as a urinal.

Or, of course, this could all be a matter of semantics, and not even remotely a tipping point inasmuch as a curious anomaly: A Page Six item in Rockaway Beach, oh my, how whimsical (but otherwise insignificant).

...Which may also be what they want you to think.

Summer at your own risk.

[*Excluding, of course, those locals who have been going to Rockaway Beach since its lifeguard union was basically The Warriors. They are simply an adorable accessory of the local charm, and nothing more.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek