Blue steel! (MTA)

The "I Survived the Frankenstorm" shirts had already hit street corners and Etsy shops within days of the hurricane battering New York. But here's some Sandy swag that actually goes toward a good cause. The MTA has created a limited edition line of H train memorabilia, including T-shirts, hoodies, pins and magnets, and all proceeds go to the Graybeards, a Rockaways charity that has been helping out with the superstorm recovery. And who better to model the new line than MTA chief Joe Lhota, hero of the storm.

“We were looking for a way to use our licensed products to help out in the recovery efforts taking place in the Rockaways,” Mark Heavey, MTA Director of Marketing & Communications, said in a release. “The H Line has piqued a lot of interest in subway service in the Rockaways and, with the help of a few of our product licensees, presented us with a unique opportunity to promote the service and to provide tangible assistance to efforts to rebuild that community.”

The gear is available on the MTA's Transit Museum online store.

The H train began running a few weeks ago, providing free shuttle service within the storm-battered peninsula. After the Broad Channel crossing was nearly destroyed by Sandy, it will take months for A train service to resume as normal.

Correction:The gear is only available online, not at the Transit Museum's retail outlets in Brooklyn and Grand Central, as previously reported. The Observer regrets the error.

The damage done. (MTA/Flickr)

The Broad Channel A-train crossing is at right. (Bing Maps)

The Rockaways have been one of the hardest hit areas of the city following Superstorm Sandy, with lives lost, houses destroyed, crime on the streets. It has also been a remarkably resilient place, with diehard New Yorkers beginning the daunting work of rebuilding. It will be a long time before the Rockaways returns to normal, though, and it turns out that goes for subway service to the area, too.

At a press briefing Thursday night, MTA chief Joe Lhota said it would be some time before A-train service could be restored to the Rockaways due to extensive damage to the Broad Channel crossing that carries the train between Howard Beach in Brooklyn to the Rockaways.

"The amount of destruction on the A-train over Broad Channel is indescribable," Mr. Lhota told reporters. "I've seen it, I've seen pictures of it, the amount of damage, this was almost a direct hit. It's over water, it's through marshland, it's going to take quite a long time to rebuild this, and I'm talking about rebuilding this. I'm talking about the water that went underneath and really affected the structural integrity. This part of the world, what happened in the Rockaways was really devastating. Not only that, but this A-train, that extends from Howard Beach over here, it's just nightmarish."

The Broad Channel crossing runs over three bridges and miles of track just feet from the waters of Jamaica Bay. It can make for a beautiful seen of families on the beach and fishermen, of herons and egrets taking flight, as well as planes from JFK. But during a severe storm such as Sandy, this can prove a liability. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness, as the Governor Cuomo has said time and again.

The Observer asked if the damage might be as severe as to the Port Jervis line, which was damaged during Hurricane Irene, when debris twisted the tracks out of alignment. It was a job that took three months to complete, but one that was also finished ahead of schedule. Mr. Lhota's answer underscores just how difficult, and lengthy, rebuilding may prove to be.

"I think it's worse than the twisted tracks," Mr. Lhota said. "That was at least on the ground. The foundation of what's holding it up is severely shot, we have to rebuild it."

There are regulatory issues as well. Because the line travels through Gateway National Recreation Area, as well as a bird preserve, the federal government has some oversight over any repairs, which means the MTA could have to submit to not only state but also federal environmental reviews when it comes time to approve the rebuilding plan.

"There's some other issues here, but this is going to take quite a long time, this is going to be a lot of intervention from various different entities that have different oversight over environmental issues—EPA, National Parks, National Wildlife, it's significant," Mr. Lhota said.

The situation remains dire and vague as of today, according to a release this morning from the MTA about the restoration of service: "The Rockaway branch of the A train requires extensive reconstruction and no timetable has been established for resumption of service there."

But what if instead of building a park, a subway or light rail line ran along the Far West Side?

It is not a ludicrous idea. Light rail has proven a boon in downtown Portland and elsewhere, and with the extension of the 7 train to Hudson Yards, the line could well have hooked up with the High Line and made a whole swath of under-developed Manhattan real estate more accessible.

A glittery park has achieved just as much, but this exact same debate is taking place in Queens, according to the Daily News. An old LIRR trestle that closed in the 1960s has been dubbed QueensWay by a group of park advocates hoping to turn the 3.5-mile stretch (three-times as long as the High Line) into a park.

The line stretches from Rego Park to the Rockaways, and it turns out those two communities are now at odds as those further from the city center lobby for the tracks reactivation instead of a park.

“Certainly a quick trip to JFK Airport from the core of the city is something people have talked about from Year One,” said George Haikalis, a civil engineer who heads the Institute for Rational Mobility, a nonprofit umbrella group for transit advocates. “Nobody in the rest of the world would be so dumb as to let a valuable asset like that sit there.”

[snip]

The Rockaways' drop reflects a general housing stagnation throughout the city's largest borough by area. It is also an ominous reminder that the housing decline nationwide started with your average, middle-class home far from the glitz of Manhattan's condos; and that that decline will not reverse itself until those homes, through more readily available credit, start selling again.

The simpler one- to three-family homes that dominate the Rockaways' housing stock not only experienced the steep sales decline, but prices for them also dropped significantly from 2007. The median sales price was down 7.1 percent, to $390,000, and the average down 6.6 percent, to $410,394.

Moreover, the ZIP code 11691, which covers much of the Rockaways, had the city's eighth-highest number of first-time foreclosure auctions in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a report (PDF) from PropertyShark, behind six other codes in central Queens and one in Staten Island.

Precipitously lower sales, drooping sales prices, copious foreclosures: bad signs all for the solidly middle-class Rockaways, where the median household income rests at around $43,500, near the median citywide income of $46,480.

Queens, generally, faired poorly in the fourth quarter. Sales were down 45.2 percent annually; the median sales price was down 11.4 percent, the average down 12.4 percent.

It's like with Manhattan and Brooklyn, which also at 2008's tail end saw sales drops: The housing boom is definitively over. Its end started outside the most expensive sectors of the market, like the Rockaways, and moved to the summit.