The beach club opened in the summer of 1911 along a half-mile crescent of sand a few miles south of the Narrows. Named for a stand of trees near its inland boundary, Cedar Grove started out as a modest affair. That first year, it comprised a row of campsites where families slept inside army-style canvas tents, cooled by the easterly breezes off the Lower Bay.
Those campsites soon gave way to single-story bungalows with screened-in porches facing the sea. Most of the wood-frame buildings sat on brick pilings, raised a few feet above the sand in case of a hurricane or storm surge. Their airy interiors were laid out shotgun-style beneath exposed beams and roof rafters.
The inevitable Robert Moses
My grandfather, a captain on the Staten Island Ferry, bought one of the Cedar Grove bungalows in the 1920s, and our extended family spent every summer there for nearly 40 years. Some of my earliest memories are from that tidy little cream-and-green house with its outdoor cold-water shower and perpetually sandy floral carpets. We left in 1963, when I was five.
By then, the city had seized the Cedar Grove property by eminent domain to make way for a shorefront parkway envisioned by Robert Moses – an inevitable presence in New York stories of this kind. After the parkway project fell through, the bungalows were leased back to their former owners, but the city reserved the right to retake the land for public use. City Hall finally exercised that option last year, saying the cottages would be torn down to make way for a municipal park.
The Cedar Grove families spent the summer of 2010 fighting the closure. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful. On October 1, the deadline imposed by the city, they had to leave.
For the moment, the now-vacant cottages are caged inside a rugged chain-link fence that the parks department has installed. Their demolition is on hold. Predictably, the planned Cedar Grove park is mired in bureaucratic wrangling and budget shortfalls.
Meanwhile, in a final indignity to the evicted residents, HBO has been granted a license to shoot scenes for Boardwalk Empire in the picturesque seaside ghost town. But it may be a challenge for the producers to capture the early 20th century look they’re going for. While a handful of the bungalows are well preserved in their original Arts and Crafts details, many were substantially altered over the years. Aluminum and vinyl siding predominate, though some of the cottages still wear their weather-beaten cedar shakes like a badge of honor.
Strong ties with summer neighbors
In conversations with longtime beach dwellers, it quickly becomes clear that architectural integrity was never the club’s defining quality. For them, friends and family were at the center of Cedar Grove life.
