Queens Apartment
Rental Info:

Most historians believe Rockaway is a corruption of either "Reckonwacky," a name given to it by the Indians and meaning "place of our own people." According to the Forgotten New York website, it is called "far" based on its distance west from the older town of Near Rockaway (now called East Rockaway) in Nassau County.

In 1685 an Englishman named John Palmer bought the land of Far Rockaway from the Indian chief Tackapousha for 31 English pounds. Palmer then sold most of it to Cornell in 1687, and he settled here in 1690. A Quaker, he is considered the first European settler on the Rockaway peninsula. The Cornell Family Cemetery, a designated New York Landmark, is one of the oldest in New York. Far Rockaway's post office on Mott Avenue and Russell Sage Memorial Church, which contains a large glass window designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Far Rockaway was a popular seaside resort town in its height in the mid-1800s and had dozens of Victorian mansions (enough to rival those in Cape May, NJ) built near the water's edge, as well as casinos, parks and nightclubs. Bayswater in the northwestern section of Far Rockaway, was a planned community laid out by developer William Trist Bailey. It was home to yacht clubs and attracted a wealthy crowd with aristocratic pretensions. British-style fox hunts, complete with hounds, were once held here.

Today the waterside mansions and clubs are all gone. Far Rockaway has never fully recovered from its faded past. The gracious Victorian homes notwithstanding, most of Far Rockaway is gritty and has old housing projects. There are miles of undeveloped seaside land. It desperately needs to makeover.