Rockaway, Queens

The Rockaway Peninsula, commonly referred to as The Rockaways or Rockaway, is a peninsula at the southern edge of the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, New York. Relatively isolated from Manhattan and other more urban parts of the city, Rockaway became a popular summer retreat in the 1830s. It has since become a mixture of lower, middle, and upper-class neighborhoods. In the 2010s, it became one of the city's most quickly gentrifying areas.

The peninsula is divided into nine neighborhoods or sections, with Riis Park in between two of such sections. From east to west, they are:

The peninsula is part of Queens Community District 14 and is patrolled by the 100th and 101st Precincts of the New York City Police Department. As of 2020, the peninsula's total population is estimated to be 124,185. All ZIP Codes in Rockaway begin with the three digits 116 and the central post office is in Far Rockaway.

The name "Rockaway" may have meant "place of sands" in the Munsee language of the Native American Lenape who occupied this area at the time of European contact in the early 17th century. Other spellings include Requarkie, Rechouwakie, Rechaweygh, Rechquaakie and Reckowacky, transliterated in Dutch and English by early colonists. The indigenous inhabitants of the Rockaways were the Canarsie Native Americans, a band of Lenape, whose name was associated with the geography. The name Reckowacky was used to distinguish the Rockaway village from other Mohegan villages; "Reckowacky" means "lonely place", or "place of waters bright". This area was mistakenly documented as occupied by a band of Mohawk people in a 1934 source; this Iroquoian-speaking tribe primarily occupied the Mohawk River valley in central New York, north and west of the Hudson River and Long Island.

Other interpretations of the peninsula's indigenous name have also been proposed. One possible interpretation is "Reckonwacky", which translates to "the place of our own people", while another is "Reckanawahaha", which translates to "the place of laughing waters". Other phrases, such as "lekau" (sand) "lechauwaak" (fork or branch), also referred to the area's geography.

In September 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew were the first Europeans recorded as seeing the area of the Rockaways and Jamaica Bay. Hudson was attempting to find the Northwest Passage. On September 11, Hudson sailed into the Upper New York Bay, and the following day began a journey up what is now called the Hudson River in his honor.

By 1639, the Mohegan tribe sold most of the Rockaways to the Dutch West India Company. In 1664, the English defeated the Dutch colony and took over their lands in present-day New York. In 1685, the band chief, Tackapoucha, and the English governor of the province agreed to sell the Rockaways to a Captain Palmer for 31 pounds sterling. The Rockaway Peninsula was originally designated as part of the Town of Hempstead, then a part of Queens County. Palmer and the Town of Hempstead disputed over who owned Rockaway, so in 1687 he sold the land to Richard Cornell, an iron master from Flushing. Cornell and his family lived on a homestead on what is now Central Avenue, near the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. At his death, Cornell was buried in a small family cemetery, Cornell Cemetery.

The Cornell property was split into 46 lots in 1808 following a partition lawsuit. Several wealthy New Yorkers created the Rockaway Association, which brought many of the lots and started developing resorts in the area in 1833. Rockaway became a popular area for seaside hotels starting in the 1830s, with the first resort being founded at Far Rockaway in 1835.