The Rockaways, on a roll again. (MTA/Flickr)

All aboard. (Second Avenue Sagas)

Among the indignities visited on the Rockaways by Hurricane Sandy was the destruction of its sole subway route, the A train. As The Observer first reported, this was not merely a case of flooding, but the very foundations of the Broad Channel crossing washing away, creating months, or longer, of reconstruction work for the MTA.

Still, the agency took the unusual step of trucking a bunch of subway cars out to the Rockaways so it could at least run shuttle service along the peninsula, with a bus in Far Rockaway then ferrying riders to the A train in Howard Beach. The service will be up and running as of 4:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, and Governor Cuomo even announced that it would be free until regular subway service is restored. Free subway service—finally some good news for the Rockaways.

As for those wondering why it is called the H train, no, it is not a reference to hurricanes or heroin. That was the original name of the Rockaways shuttle, the run from Broad Channel that runs south to Beach 116th Street. Actually, it was the HH train, when the system merged in 1967, and then it became just the H train when the double letter trains were eliminated.

The H train name was retired in 2004, when the line became a branch of the A train. But as Second Avenue Sagas notes, sometimes, when the subway signs on the older models are mis-rolled, the old designation can still be visible.

As an added bonus/humblebrag, the MTA has posted a video of its workers hoisting the new shuttle trains into place.

Correction:A previous version of this post said that H train service had begun today. It will not be running until tomorrow morning. The Observer regrets the error.

Speaker Quinn weathers the storm. (NYSUT/Flickr)

"Millions of New Yorkers have stories" from the hurricane, Council Speaker Christine Quinn declared this morning during a soaring, post-Sandy speech at the Association for a Better New York. Among those stories was Ms. Quinn's own.

It was an emotional moment that came during what was otherwise a wonky, if powerful, policy-laden address to the city's business leaders during which the council speaker (and presumptive mayoral candidate) called for at least $20 billion in new infrastructure across the five boroughs to protect against future disasters. The story, from the summers of Ms. Quinn's youth, underscored her belief that the city must seize upon this disaster to create a stronger (or at least drier) future.

"My grandfather came over on a boat from Ireland with a third grade education and worked his way up through the ranks of the Fire Department," Ms. Quinn explained. "Rockaway Beach offered him a chance to rent a bungalow in the summer, to afford a little place on the ocean just like the rich people he saw in the magazines. It was his own piece of the American Dream."

And also Ms. Quinn's. "I can remember walking along the boardwalk as a young girl with my late mother and aunt," she said. "It’s one of my favorite memories of my mother, of how much that place meant to her and to my whole family.

But it is no longer a place for dreamers, at least not now. "Last week, visiting with families in the Rockaways, I saw that boardwalk lying in pieces, tossed into street corners or crashed into people’s homes."

As if defying Mother Nature, Speaker Quinn wants to make sure that never happens again. She announced today that the City Council, in partnership with the Bloomberg administration, will accelerate two studies analyzing what kinds of risks the city faces from storms, and what could be done to mitigate them.

She expects New York will spend billions implementing new infrastructure to combat future disaster, which she predicts would cost around $20 billion. Ms. Quinn believes the federal government should cover most of those costs, pointing to the government response to Hurricane Katrina as a precedent. She also announced that Senator Chuck Schumer is putting together a study of his own with the Army Corps of Engineers that will help the city determine the best defense for the city from future disasters, as well as the general rising of the tides due to climate change.

"Let me be clear, this is not an academic exercise," Ms. Quinn said. "It will produce a concrete blueprint for action, along with a price tag for any and all projects."

The speaker pointed to the now very voguish topic of Dutch-style sea barriers as one possible solution for the city.

"In the Netherlands, they’ve spent billions of dollars on miles and miles of connected barricades like dams, dikes, walls, and levees," Ms. Quinn said. "In more recent decades they added massive storm surge barriers at critical locations. The largest one, which has a really, really, long, unpronounceable Dutch name, stretches five and a half miles from end to end."

"At the City Council," she added, "we would have just called it the Ed Koch Barrier." The crowd all chuckled, this being a reference to a fight earlier this year over whether or not to rename the Queensboro Bridge after the former mayor.

On the smaller side, the speaker called for major investments in the city's sewers, to stave off sewage flow into the city's waterways during storms, due to our combined sewer overflow system. She also wants soft infrastructure that will help absorb stormwater, like permeable pavement and green streets, or new marshlands, known as bluebelts, that help purify runoff. She called for buffers around subway grates, raising station entrances, even out-there technologies like industrial balloons that would seal the subways and other subterranean infrastructure off.

There should be revisions to the building codes and the development patterns, which the city's Building Resiliency Task Force will undertake. Through the Urban Green Council and the Real Estate Board, the task force will be holding emergency sessions to assess the rebuilding effort following the storm.

"We also must rethink the way we build in neighborhoods that were destroyed by the storm," Ms. Quinn said.

She called on Con Ed and other utilities to strengthen their substations, protect their power plants and to bury their electrical wires where it makes sense. "I want to send a clear message to ConEd today," the speaker declared. "We will not tolerate you simply passing these costs on to ratepayers." She also said the region needs to improve its gas and oil infrastructure to prevent the kind of shortages and long lines New York saw after the storm.

We must do all these things not only for us, Ms. Quinn said, but also, and more importantly, for the future.

"Millions of New Yorkers have stories just like mine," the speaker said. "We will make sure our children and our grandchildren have those stories too–not of a Rockaway destroyed, but of a Rockaway reborn."

“The damage to the A line in Jamaica Bay is absolutely unprecedented, and so is the MTA’s response,” MTA Chairman and CEO Joe Lhota said. “Restoring the entire A train will take months, but the MTA is committed to doing it and to providing alternatives to our customers in the meantime.”

Original post: The Rockaways have been devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and that is not just the homes, but the infrastructure, the very fabric of the peninsula. But the city and the MTA have been working nonstop to return life to normal, and that goes for mass transit as well.

The MTA has been working all week to truck subway cars out to the Rockaways from a trestle in Brooklyn so that a shuttle service might be set up between Beach 116th Street and Mott Avenue/Far Rockaway. "We're going to do what we can to get the Rockaways back to normal," MTA chief Joe Lhota told reporters over the weekend, when the MTA was putting together its shuttle plan.

The shuttle became a necessity after Hurricane Sandy caused severe damage to the Broad Channel crossing, all but destroying the A train connection between Howard Beach and the Rockaways. The shuttle will help subway riders commute within the Rockaways, but they will still be forced to take a shuttle bus in Far Rockaway to connect to the A train in Queens to get into other parts of the city.

A better option for commuters might be a new ferry service the Bloomberg administration is launching. The Rockaways got a ferry service to much fanfare in 2008, but the steep $6 fare and hourlong trip could never sway riders off the subway, and the service was shut down in early 2010. Now, without that option, the ferry might start to look more attractive.

A big boon this time around is the ferry service will cost only $2, less than the cost of a subway ride, even. (Update: The service only runs during the weekdays, however.)

“Thanks to quick work by Seastreak and the Economic Development Corporation, residents of the Rockaways will now have an affordable and reliable way to get to and from Manhattan,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement announcing the program. “Ferry service is one of the many ways the city is helping these New Yorkers begin the enormous work of recovery from Hurricane Sandy.”

The Economic Development Corporation, which has overseen the popular East River Ferry Service as well, spent the past week creating a temporary ferry landing at Beach 108th Street, with service to both Wall Street's Pier 11 and Midtown's 34th Street ferry landing.

“Community groups, charities and local residents have all rushed to help people living in New York and New Jersey,” Seastreak Chairman James Barker said. “Businesses must also play a part in relief efforts, and Seastreak is doing what it can to bring a sense of normalcy back to the community.”

It will be interesting to see if the experiences of Sandy, and perhaps better fares, might transform this service from a temporary fix to a devastated system to a permanent transportation option for the Rockaways. Here is the schedule for the service for the time being:

The road to recovery. (Kristen Artz/Mayor's Office)

A storm from the tropics blew through town last week. It left wintry weather in its wake, along with a path of destruction that has left as many as 40,000 New Yorkers temporarily homeless. Half of them are expected to be unable to go home for weeks or months, assuming they even have homes to return to. Serious damage to heat and electrical infrastructure in apartment buildings and homes on the waterfront are among the most serious issues that have created a housing crisis for the city following Hurricane Sandy.

"Many of the fears we have is that with cold weather coming, we have to make sure people can stay warm," Mayor Bloomberg said at an afternoon press briefing. "Among the hardest hit are the Rockaways and Staten Island. A lot of places aren't gonna have electricity but are going to experience the cold. That is the next big problem for us."

At a separate briefing with the mayor and FEMA this morning, Governor Cuomo echoed the Bloomberg administration's concerns. "People don't like to leave their homes, but the reality is going to be in the temperature, and then we are going to have tens of thousands of people who need housing solutions right away, and a variety of housing solutions," the governor said. He added that a morning meeting with local, state and federal officials was mostly spent figuring out ways to house those in need for weeks or even months.

Temperatures are expected to fall to 37 degrees tonight in the city, with a high in the mid-40s tomorrow and a low in the mid- to low-30s tomorrow night. Areas on the water are expected to be even colder, with temperatures falling into the mid-20s in the Rockaways and Coney Island.

The mayor said that once power is restored by the various utilities, from Con Ed to the Long Island Power Authority, which provides electricity to the hard-hit Rockaways, many people will be able to return home to their houses and apartments with heat and light, bringing down the estimated evacuation count from 40,000 to about 20,000. But many buildings, even once power is back, will not be operational because of damage to their internal utilities from the storm surge.

"Over the past few days, we have been going block by block to identify the issues blocking many of them from getting the power back on," the mayor said. "We're resolving many of the issues one block and even one house at a time. Even when some of the power is turned back on, the buildings are going to be out of commission for a long time because of damage to their boilers and electrical systems."

Both the mayor and the governor are stressing that people without power should go to one of the city's 15 shelters for protection from the elements. The city has also set up warming centers to help combat the conditions. "If you find yourself shivering uncontrollably or see someone who is disoriented, those are signs of hypothermia," the mayor said. "You really should get to a warm place, covered with blankets, a hot water bottle, anything you can do to get them warm quickly."

A big issue has been for public housing residents, whose buildings are aging and have fragile infrastructure. "Some 45,000 public housing residents live in the coastal areas designated as Zone A, many of them in the Rockaways," the mayor said.

The desperation of the situation was underscored by FEMA director Craig Fugate, who made it clear that many more New Yorkers have been seriously effected besides those currently without reliable shelter. "Our administration numbers give you some sense of the magnitude, but right now, as of this morning, we have 86,000 households have registered for assistance already directly deposited into those accounts is $96 million," Mr. Fugate said.

Those numbers are only expected to rise in the coming weeks as people get power back and lives return to enough normality that more claims can be filed.

"We don't have a lot of empty housing in the city, so it's hard to find it when we need it," Mayor Bloomberg said during the closing remarks of his afternoon press briefing.

Not cool, bro, says the mayor. (gsz/Flickr)

So the mayor announced at today's Frankenstorm briefing that school is, for now, still in session come Monday, as is work for all government employees. Talk about a bummer. But as a precaution, parks will be closing early, at 5 p.m. Sunday, and events will be over by 2 p.m. Double bummer.

Oh, and the beaches are now closed, so don't even think about going surfing, dude.

"Let me say something again and again and again—the beaches are dangerous and surfing is extremely dangerous. No surfing, please, tomorrow," Mayor Bloomberg stressed, perhaps his most emphatic pronouncement during his 20 minute presser.

It's not you that the mayor is worried about—knowing Mayor Bloomberg, who will suffer no fools, you'd be welcome to risk your life—but the people he would be forced to send back in after you.

"You may want to run the risk, but if we have to send our emergency workers into the ocean to save you, their lives are at risk, and you just don't have a right to do that to somebody else," the mayor said.

He is even hip and with it, and knows surfing is the cool new deal, but so was smoking in bars and trans fats, and the mayor wasn't having any of that, either.

"So please, tomorrow, I know the surfing looks attractive, and there's more surfing done around here than ever before, but this is just much too dangerous a storm," Mayor Bloomberg concluded. "For a small amount of pleasure, you life could be in danger, but certainly the emergency workers will be in danger."

Update 10/28, 11:50:Mayor Bloomberg, doing his best Roy Scheider impression, yet again reiterated his call for surfers to stay out of the water during his Sunday storm briefing.

"Everybody is trying to protect themselves, and I think a storm surge is life threatening, but if you take precautions, it's not going to threaten your life," the mayor said. "One of the things we're worried about is young kids going out and surfing. You just can't do that. If you do that, your putting the life of the people who are going to have to save your life or try to save your life, their lives are at risk, as well."

Lovely Beach 116th Street. (Forgotten NY)

The Times has been surfing the wave of Rockaways revelry all summer, praising the food, the parties, the sun dresses, the food, and, sure, the surfing. But sometimes life's not all a beach. The Daily News has turned up at least one stretch of the Rockaways that is far from gentrified.

Things may be jumping over on Beach 96th Street, but Beach 116th Street goes wanting. The clams are still fried and the sun is shining, but an S.R.O. and other rundown properties—and the flotsam and jetsam that wash up with them—is ruining the fun.

Locals have long complained that Rockaway has become a dumping ground of sorts for the mentally ill, substance abusers and other government-subsidized tenants who live in SROs and nursing homes that were once shorefront hotels. But they say the situation has worsened since the Rockaway Park Hotel switched owners and clientele more than a year ago.

"Things have definitely intensified since that opened," said Danny Ruscillo, head of the 100th Precinct Community Council, who has tracked dozens of complaints and 911 calls related to the hotel in recent months. "There was a resident of that establishment who threatened someone with a boxcutter. People are getting harassed when they go to the bank, when they shop."

The city launched a Rockaway task force last year that locals hope will help, but who knows how long that will take? Clearly the quickest solution is for the hipsters to move in, replacing the dirty drugs with clean ones, the graffiti with street art.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC