Exposing their feelings: Rockaway residents not into nudity

Reeling from nude sunbathers who assault both their eyes and their standards of decency, Rockaway residents are begging for a large fence to shield them from an adjacent nudist beach.

Hurricane Irene destroyed the fence that once served as a barrier between the bare-naked beach bums at Riis Park and the more conservative bathers at Neponsit, who are none too fond of the breast-barers frolicking nearby.

“The city needs to put the fence back up, plain and simple,” City Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Queens) told the New York Daily News. “This is about protecting families and children. This is about protecting the community. This is about protecting decency.”

But despite Mr. Ulrich's heroic stand to safeguard modesty, city officials are hesitant to restore a fence, citing a law that requires “undivided public access to beaches below the high tide line,” the Daily News reports.

Those in favor of a fenceless beach (and bare bums) argue that a barrier would impede on the beauty of the beach. They also challenge rumors that bathers at Riis Park are having sex on the beach, claiming that those on the Neponsit side are the ones guilty of “lewd” acts, like sneaking a peek at the nude sunbathers.

While we imagine the disagreement may lead to some awkward confrontations between the opposing parties in the coming months, at least there's little chance of the conflict turning physical.

sgrothjan@observer.com

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

Liam McMullan, Aesha Waks

"LET ME TAKE YOUR PICTURE," Liam McMullan said. It was late May at the Southampton Social Club, and the lanky 23-year-old stood in front of me with a camera covering his face. He was there on assignment for his father, Patrick McMullan, the house photographer to the city’s social set.

The camera shutter clicked.

“Oh, why don’t you smile?” he implored. “You don’t want to look like that on the site.”

We smiled. Another click.

“That’s good—oh, this is my fiancée, Aesha,” Liam offered, introducing the small-framed woman in a flower-print dress who stood beside him.

When we ran into her again later that day, she was chatty, pretty and porcelain—and she wanted us all to be friends. “You’re the same age as Liam,” she pointed out.

That was Sunday. The first message came on Friday.

“It was nice seeing you. Will probablly be out in Hamptons every weekend n in Rockaway beach where we live,you are welcome2the beach.”

We responded that we would love to drop by.

AESHA WAKS MET LIAM MCMULLAN in May 2009, when she was 31 and he was 21.

“Patrick Matamoros, he’s a vintage clothes guy, really known around downtown,” she recounted. “He had a party I was spinning at one night, and Liam showed up. After that night we kept running into each other every time we went out and every day too.”

For the uninitiated, her crowd was, and still is, a group that tends to have birthday parties covered by the party-photo site Guest of a Guest—all of which is just fine with Ms. Waks.

According to her, she wasn’t looking for a relationship with Liam—“because of the crowds of women and the groupies and the stalkers”—but they fell into together anyway. A month later, they were engaged. Aesha got a “Liam” tattoo and Liam got an “Aesha” tattoo.

The crash pad of choice was Patrick McMullan’s Fifth Avenue apartment, near N.Y.U., where Ms. Waks was taking classes.

“We took over his life,” she said, of her new father figure. “I was literally wearing his boxers to bed every night.”

Ms. Waks had something of a career as an actress—cameras of all sorts seem to exert a pull on her. In the mid-90’s she stared in a few pictures, including Arresting Gena, with then-unknowns Sam Rockwell and Adrien Grenier, in which she played a girl with a mother in a coma. By the aughts she was appearing in ever-smaller roles in ever-smaller films.

Her ambitions have shifted since then, and these days she is in an artistic way. This week, instead of stepping before the camera, her art will be on display at the Town House Art Gallery in Park Slope. The big works are messy and neon, consisting mostly of wooden planks splayed with text and assorted detritus—Page Six cut-outs, cigarette wrappers, party flyers, trash, American flags, JC Penny bags, Patrick McMullan photos, Warholesque axioms, cereal boxes, pictures of Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber with a mustache, Liam McMullan and Aesha Waks.

“We had to look through Patrick’s trash every day while he was recycling, and I found a lot of cool things,” she said. “I started making collages out of his garbage.”

Now, she works out of the home she was raised in, a tumbledown-but-stately 1940’s mansion overlooking the water at Rockaway Beach. The house was built by her grandfather, the walls painted by her mother and the payments settled by her father, who owned a cut-rate women’s clothing store on the main Rockaway strip of 116th Street. He quit town five months ago and went down to Florida with a new girlfriend.

With its cracked marble and creeping rust, the house demands a name, and indeed it has one: “The Mindy.” Its namesake, Ms. Waks’s mother, died in that house, collapsing in the living room after a stroke and falling into a coma from which she would not awaken. “She had serious tumors at this point, and she’d literally fall down the stairs in the middle of the night because she couldn’t even walk,” she remembered dolefully. “And I would have to pick her up at 4 in the morning from the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ I’d ask. And she’d say, ‘I’m going down to the guest room to print out pictures of pink flamingos to paint tomorrow.’”

After a sticky hour on the train to Rockaway Beach, The Observer tucked himself into the back of Mr. McMullan’s gray jalopy. Ms. Waks, wearing a dandelion dress she bought from her father’s store and colossal black sunglasses, rode shotgun. A plan was made for a cookout.

We arrived at a narrow driveway, a tongue of pavement rolling out from the split-level house. A defunct fountain, tiled with swirling prisms of color, stood out front, and iron war figurines dotted the stone staircase to the door. A red awning hung above the front door.  Inside came a wash of orange sherbet walls and paintings done in the old style, by Ms. Waks’s mother—a painting of Victorians with golden mirrors and men in riding pants nursing cocktails. The house’s spaces spilled out onto a deck, and beyond that was a pool filled with a foot or two with bulbous green gunk.

Inside, Liam jiggered a nugget of weed into a one-hitter.

The Observer walked to the window to take in the view.

“The city skyline, you can hold it in your hand,” Ms. Waks noted.

We squinted at Manhattan, focusing through the fog.

“Let’s fire up the grill,” came the suggestion.

It had been announced several times that despite Liam’s strict veganism Ms. Waks gleefully consumes meat.

“I got myself over borderline anorexia,” she said, after the tiny burner produced a sufficient flame. “Since then, I’ve been doing health consulting.”

She has a book in the works, The Model Body, that will promote proper eating and fitness with pictures of beautiful women—all shot, of course, by Patrick McMullan.

“These are the girls that people get anorexic over,” she said, dragging on a cigarette. “I want to fix that.”

Soon, a crowd filled the living room: Ms. Waks’s brother, her brother’s girlfriend, her brother’s girlfriend’s kid, the kid’s friends, the guys fixing the pool, the pool guy’s buddies.  She suggested a tour of the house. Her bedroom was a disaster, clothes and canvases and guitars spilling out over the mottled carpet. Some of her collages hung on hooks beside her bed; others, packed away for the trip to Brooklyn, for the next week’s exhibition. There were printouts of McMullan shots on the walls, including one of Ms. Waks with Liv Tyler.

She explained that her mother too was an artist. “Something like this is what she did when she was sick,” she said, holding up a work rendered in cobalt-ash smearings. “She wasn’t trying to be a cool abstract artist, it’s so strange.

“And then she did this of my grandmother,” she said, pulling out one of her mother’s portraits, a more conservative style, from before the tumors started. Ms. Waks began to tear up. Immediately behind the minicanvas, we noticed, was a copy of Patrick McMullan’s Kiss Kiss, his collection of celebrities locking lips, with Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson on the cover.

“When are you and Liam going to get married?” we enquired.

“We’re waiting—right now we have a couple of sponsors and TV shows talking to us,” she replied. “Who knows? Maybe Tori Spelling will throw it for me. She has her wedding show.”

She paused.

“Who’s helping me put it together? I don’t have a mom, my grandmother’s in Florida, she just got over getting ill. It’s just, like, how am I supposed to do this on my own?”

"IS THIS THE AESHA WAKS SHOW?" asked a frumpy man in his late 20’s. It was a Monday evening, on the corner of Second Street and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.

Inside, the Town House Art Gallery was empty, but for two people.

Ms. Waks’s collages occupied much of the wall space. They consisted of New York Post clippings, barcodes, hair ties, sparkly plastic jewelry, the word “MONEY” big and sideways. Mr. McMullan had designed postcards to accompany the show. “Aesha’s hope is to continue the legacy of Andy Warhol and create a new factory,” the text read. The reverse side featured a patchwork chaos, in the middle of which was a cover of Artnews, that asked “Who Are the Great Women Pop Artists?” The name “Aesha Waks” appeared directly underneath.

“You made it!” Aesha enthused as she walked in, Mr. McMullan in tow, camera around his neck.

“Go stand over there,” he ordered, “I want to take a picture of you two.”

He pointed out a collage featuring images of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Mario and Luigi, a symmetrical banner printed from a page from Guest of a Guest—and, naturally, Liam McMullan and Aesha Waks.

Mr. McMullan raised his camera once again, obscuring his face.

“Smile,” he said.

We did, and the camera shutter clicked.

With Hurricane Earl bounding up the Eastern Seaboard at a speed of 15 knots, the beach bums are grabbing their boards and heading to Rockaway. A story in the Daily News investigates just how stoked the city's surfers are for the bodacious waves headed this way.

The surfers, they say, are "salivating." "It's gonna be double overhead on Friday — double your height!" Jessica Findley, a 33-year-old designer from Williamsburg, told the Daily News. 

So while North Carolina residents are being evacuated from their homes to protect themselves from what could be the worst storm to hit the Atlantic Coast since Hurricane Bob in 1991, New Yorkers can take advantage of the less-threatening weather and shred the riptide. Hang ten, dude!