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The club, eight hours before Sandy hit.
The Silver Gull Beach Club likes to do things the old-fashioned way. When The Observer first saw the club it was the Fourth of July and there was a band of hefty middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts playing Sweet Caroline and little kids flinging themselves into the pool and leathery old women in loungers deepening their already very-deep tans. Having wandered over from the hipster-strewn stretch of Breezy Point, the club seemed like a mirage—a vision of an earlier Brooklyn, another Brooklyn. It was—the club opened in 1963 and has managed to stay largely as it has always been, a cabana club long after cabana clubs' cultural moment passed.
Nor does the club intend to let Hurricane Sandy do what time could not. While the storm destroyed some 200 of the club's 460 cabanas—particularly those built on a pier that juts out into the sea—club management intends to rebuild the whole shebang, against the wishes of Gateway National Recreation Area, which owns the club and the rest of the beach, reports The New York Times.
The club management, Ortega Family Enterprises, which has a 10-year contract with Gateway that started last year, intended to who have the whole operation up and running again by Memorial Day. However, plans may be put on hold due to a federal stop-work order mandating that the cabana pier not be rebuilt (the rest of the cabanas are slightly set back from the water, up a short, but somewhat steep rise).
In defense of the decision to rebuild the cabanas, general manager Bob Ordan pleads the "we're paying for it," defense, which seems, at least on the face of it, perfectly reasonable: Ortega is funding all the repairs to the wiped out pier, and understands that it may be wiped out again, why shouldn't they be allowed to rebuild?
“It’s our risk,’’ Mr. Ordan told The Times. “If it gets destroyed again next year, then it’s our money gone.”
He estimated that the club has already spent $2 million of the $3 million needed to rebuild after Sandy, money that management will not be reimbursed for given that it did not have flood insurance. And, unlike seaside homes that were damaged in the storm, the club should be vacant when the next hurricane season hits (meaning that the city shouldn't need to expend any of its resources evacuating it).
Meanwhile, it seems that Gateway didn't make itself entirely clear before issuing the stop-work order: the January memo sent to the club noted that rebuilding of the pier cabanas would be “not favored” in its comments and recommendations section. Hardly a prohibition. Here's hoping that Silver Gull and Gateway can work out their differences before the summer. Given that Fort Tilden will likely remain closed this season, we'd like to think that at least someone will be able to use the beach. Especially given that Silver Gull seems to be one of the magical zones where hipsters and longtime Brooklyn residents get along, well, swimmingly. Late last summer, during yet another long walk on the beach, we spotted a hipster couple asking a woman with a killer tan and short platinum gray-blonde hair what the place was.
"It's cabanas," the woman replied.
The hipsters pleaded ignorance. "You don't know what a cabana is?!" the woman cried, setting aside the thick beach novel that she was holding in her ring-laden fingers. "Let me show you!"
kvelsey@observer.com
