SEA GATE, the gated community on the western tip of the Coney Island peninsula, is shielded from the rest of Brooklyn by a guardhouse and a long fence along West 37th Street. But in recent years, the neighborhood has been under siege along its exposed southern flank — from the sea itself.
Photographs by Ramin Talaie for The New York Times
Although erosion has shrunk the beaches of Sea Gate, federal engineers plan to replenish them.
The waters of the Atlantic Ocean have been sweeping sand away from the community’s private beach, around Norton Point, and onto property facing Gravesend Bay and Coney Island Creek, depleting beachfront land where residents want it and adding it where they don’t. Now, local leaders say they will soon have enough government money to keep much more of the closely guarded land from washing away. The issue was reported in The Brooklyn Graphic, a local weekly.
According to the office of Representative Jerrold Nadler, who represents the area, money to install rock jetties known as T-groins along the beach, a total of $10.9 million, is now in the provisional budget of the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2008 fiscal year, which begins this October.
The area has long had erosion problems, but in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the corps started a project to stem erosion along the entire peninsula, Sea Gate’s homeowners association opted out of some measures.
Work went forward on the rock jetty at West 37th Street, after the corps promised that the sand level on Sea Gate’s beach would not diminish further. So far, the work has been a success in Coney Island, east of the jetty, but erosion in Sea Gate has worsened to the point that the existing jetty could be destabilized, said Frank Verga, the corps’ project manager.
On April 18, Robert Castro, community manager for the Sea Gate Association, the homeowners group, said of the repair work: “It’s badly needed. We just had that small northeaster come through, and the beaches are gone.” At some spots, he said, the sand level drops sharply by five or six feet, or long-buried rocks are exposed.
Because Sea Gate’s beach deteriorated after the work nearby, despite the corps’ promise, the corps’ corrective work would not require Sea Gate to open the land to the public.
In the eyes of some, the arrangement allows the gated community to benefit while giving up little.
“The end result is, Sea Gate is going to get a nice, new, wide, replenished beach at public expense, without providing public access,” said Ida Sanoff, a resident of nearby Brighton Beach and chairwoman of the Natural Resources Protective Association, a nonprofit group. “I feel very badly for the people there. They have a major, major problem. But I think they should provide public access, or they should foot some of the cost.”
Mr. Castro, however, said that not just Sea Gate but also Coney Island and other local communities would benefit from the work to ensure the stability of the West 37th Street jetty.
Sea Gate, meanwhile, remains in grave danger in the event of a major storm, like the one in 1992 that damaged several houses there, said Rob Gottheim, a spokesman for Mr. Nadler. “The federal government and the State of New York do have a responsibility to put them back to where they were before,” Mr. Gottheim said, “not to harm them.”
The mid-April northeaster did not help matters. Referring to the Sea Gate beach club, Mr. Castro said: “They lost their beach. They have nothing.”
By Jake Mooney
Going Coastal Magazine 