The neighborhood is centered around Beach 116th Street, a two-block street that runs from Beach Channel Drive southward to Ocean Promenade.[6] At the street's northern end is Tribute Park, which has a memorial to the 343 firefighters killed in the September 11 attacks,[7] and at its southern tip is a memorial to the 265 victims of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed nearby in Belle Harbor on November 12, 2001.[8]
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, which caused massive infrastructure damage to the A train south of the station at Howard Beach – JFK Airport, ferry operator SeaStreak began running a city-subsidized ferry service between a makeshift ferry slip at Beach 108th Street and Beach Channel Drive in Rockaway Park and Pier 11/Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District, then continuing on to the East 34th Street Ferry Landing. In August 2013, a stop was added at Brooklyn Army Terminal.[11] The service was extended multiple times,[12] finally ending on October 31, 2014.[13] On May 1, 2017, NYC Ferry's Rockaway route started operations between Pier 11/Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District and Beach 108th Street in Rockaway Park, with a stop at Brooklyn Army Terminal.[14][15]
^"NYC Planning | Community Profiles". communityprofiles.planning.nyc.gov. New York City Department of City Planning. Archived from the original on June 22, 2019. Retrieved April 7, 2018.
^Grace, Melissa. "Boro goes for brogue"Archived May 29, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, New York Daily News, March 9, 2007. Accessed July 13, 2017. "On Saturday, leprechauns scampered by bagpipe bands as New York State’s second largest St. Patrick’s Day parade struck out through the thickly Irish communities of Belle Harbor and Rockaway Park.... Also in the Rockaways — which was known in the 1950s as 'the Irish Riviera' — Belle Harbor’s house parties, which for years have drawn the city’s top politicians, swung into the evening Saturday."
^Chan, Sewell. "Crash Memorial Evokes Peace and Home"Archived October 1, 2019, at the Wayback Machine, The New York Times, November 13, 2006. Accessed September 17, 2019. "Nearly 1,000 mourners gathered under a foggy sky in Queens yesterday morning to mark the fifth anniversary of the crash and to watch as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dedicated a long-awaited memorial to the 265 victims.... The city spent about $9.2 million on the memorial, on Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park, next to the wooden boardwalk that runs along the Atlantic Ocean.... In the end, the city opted for a 7,115-square-foot site at Beach 116th Street, which is in a commercial district and close to a subway station."
