At Rockaway Beach, 1892

This is one of my favorite family beach photographs. We do have quite a few, what with Martha's Vineyard summers starting in the 1920s - and then there are the New York City area beach photos. But this is my absolute favorite. It was taken at Rockaway Beach, Queens, probably in the summer of 1892, as my grandmother Grace Hicks looks about 3 years old, and she was born in June 1889.

I can't identify all of the children but four of them are Hicks siblings. The seated boy in the middle (who looks a bit thin and pale, as if he had recently been ill) is Grace's eldest brother Harry. He would have been about ten years old. The boy next to him, with an arm around Harry, is his brother Charlie, about five years old. Standing directly behind them is sister Alida Mabel (Polly) who is eight. And Gracie, the youngest, age three or so, is sitting on the sand in front of Harry, hanging on to his knees.

My grandmother said that she was embarrassed to have the photograph taken because her hair was cut like a boy's and because she had bare feet. She said that that was why she has her feet tucked in. I hope that she would not mind me posting this, because I think that it is a lovely picture.

The backdrop is the photographer's standard beach backdrop with waves and little boats. And there seems to be sand on the floor for the beach effect. This was probably taken at a studio on the Rockaway boardwalk.

Rockaway Beach was just beginning to become popular in the 1890s, but the town would not be known as Rockaway Beach until 1897. It is a thin peninsula of land, as you see on the map below, and the towns there were originally called Hammels and Holland.

The Hickses would have travelled to the beach on the New York, Woodhaven and Rockaway Railroad, which had opened in 1880 to allow visitors access to the beaches. The Hickses lived in Ozone Park, Queens, just north and a bit east of Rockaway, and this would have been a convenient place for them to go.

Here are some wonderful old photographs of Rockaway Beach, including postcards. There would have been a boardwalk, shops and hotels, and amusement areas there in the early 1890s, but Rockaways' Playland (the most famous amusement park there) was not built until 1901. Below is a detail from my Hagstrom's Pocket Atlas of the City of New York (ca 1965) - the peninsula jutting to the left, at the bottom, is Rockaway. Ozone Park was north of this, in southeastern Queens. (My Google Maps are not loading so I may edit this when they start cooperating...Apologies for the small size of the map, the Google Map is better!)

[For the Carnival of Genealogy at Creative Gene]