A neighborhood in southwestern Queens, Breezy Point lies at the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula; it includes Rockaway Point and Roxbury. The area remained undeveloped until the early twentieth century, when the Rockaway Point Company rented tent sites for about $20 a summer to visitors, most of whom were Irish. By the 1920s, a colony of residents owned bungalows on rented land. In 1961, the firm of Northern Properties bought for $17.5 million all the land west of Jacob Riis Park (except for Fort Tilden) to erect a high-rise development for a population of 220,000. Residents formed the Breezy Point Cooperative and paid $11.5 million for the land. Construction began on two fourteen-story apartment buildings but ceased when the city announced plans to acquire the peninsula for parkland in 1963; the unfinished apartments were demolished in 1978. The city’s plans to condemn the entire neighborhood were opposed with particular vehemence by residents who had taken pains to make their cottages habitable year round, and a compromise permitted all to remain. Land owned by the city was incorporated into the Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972, and property of the Breezy Point Cooperative was excluded from it. In the mid-1990s, the community had about 2,800 houses, with an estimated population of five thousand year round, and twelve thousand during the summer.

Jeffrey A. Kroessler, Encyclopedia of New York City, Edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1995.