Things to Do in Rockaway Beach, Queens: Surfing, a 5.5-Mile Boardwalk, and the Beach the Ramones Sang About

Surfing at NYC's Only Two Legal Surf Beaches

The headline activity in Rockaway Beach is surfing, and it is surfing in a genuinely unusual context: New York City Parks has designated exactly two official legal surf beaches within city limits, and both sit inside this stretch of the Rockaway Peninsula. The Beach 67th-69th Street surf beach opened in 2007, and the Beach 87th-92nd Street surf beach opened in 2005. NYC Parks and multiple outlets have described Rockaway as "the only one of New York City's beaches that sees significant surf" -- not a marketing line, but a description of a real, structural fact about this coastline compared with every other city beach.

That designation is the single fact that most separates Rockaway Beach from a generic city beach day: elsewhere along the five boroughs' coastline, boards are effectively not part of the beach-day picture in any officially sanctioned way. Here, two specific, mapped stretches of sand exist for exactly that purpose, and the surf culture that has grown up around them -- surf shops, board rentals, a beach-day crowd built partly around wave conditions rather than just sun and swimming -- is one of the more distinctive things this particular neighborhood offers that neither Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Arverne, nor Far Rockaway can claim in the same documented way.

A 5.5-Mile Boardwalk and a Beach Called the Largest Urban Beach in the US

The boardwalk running along this shoreline is not a short, single-block affair -- it stretches 5.5 miles, from Beach 9th Street to Beach 126th Street, built up over decades rather than all at once. The city-owned segment from Beach 109th to Beach 126th Street opened in May 1923 at a cost of $133,000, with three further expansion phases following between 1928 and 1930, and the concrete section from Beach 9th to Beach 19th completed in 1963 as part of a $1.373 million rebuild. That long build-out history is part of why the boardwalk reads less like a single tourist strip and more like real, load-bearing city infrastructure that has been extended and rebuilt across nearly a century.

Behind that boardwalk sits an even bigger number: the overall beach spans 170 acres across 7 miles, running from Beach 9th Street to Beach 149th Street, and is often cited as the largest urban beach in the United States. That scale -- a 7-mile public beach with a 5.5-mile boardwalk running alongside most of it -- is the physical fact that anchors nearly everything else worth doing here, from the surf beaches at either end of Rockaway Beach proper to the long stretches of open sand in between.

The Rockaways' Playland: A Real Amusement Park That No Longer Exists

Before there was a boardwalk-and-surf identity, there was an amusement park -- and it is worth including here as documented history, not as something a visitor can still go and ride. Rockaways' Playland opened at Beach 98th Street in the early 1900s (sources give either 1901 or 1902), built by William Wainwright during the era when this part of the peninsula was widely known as "New York's Playground." It featured the Atom Smasher roller coaster and an Olympic-size pool, and for decades it was one of the peninsula's signature attractions.

It closed permanently in 1987, and the reason is specific and documented rather than vague: insurance costs for operating the park soared from $50,000 in 1985 to $408,000 in 1986, a jump the operation could not sustain. A housing development now occupies the former Playland site. There is no current amusement park at Rockaway Beach -- this is history worth knowing precisely because it explains part of the area's arc from early-1900s resort destination to today's surf-and-boardwalk identity, not because there is anything left to visit at Beach 98th Street today.

Rockaway Beach in Song, Memoir, and Film

This exact stretch of shoreline has a documented cultural footprint beyond the beach itself. The Ramones released "Rockaway Beach" in 1977 on their album Rocket to Russia, written by bassist Dee Dee Ramone; it became the band's highest-charting single, reaching #66 on the Billboard Hot 100. The connection to this place is not incidental -- frontman Joey Ramone was raised in the Rockaway Beach/Queens area, and Dee Dee Ramone was a frequent beachgoer here, which is part of why the song reads as a real, lived reference rather than a borrowed beach-town name.

Two other documented references round out the cultural record: musician and writer Patti Smith wrote about living in Rockaway Beach in her 2015 memoir, M Train, and Woody Allen's 1987 film Radio Days was filmed on location here. None of this is invented set-dressing -- it is the specific, sourced cultural record tied to this neighborhood, distinct from the broader Rockaway Peninsula's history.

What This Page Doesn't Cover

This page focuses on what direct research could confirm for Rockaway Beach specifically: the two NYC Parks-designated legal surf beaches at Beach 67th-69th and Beach 87th-92nd Streets, the 5.5-mile boardwalk and 170-acre, 7-mile beach, the history of the now-closed Rockaways' Playland, and the documented Ramones/Patti Smith/Woody Allen cultural touchpoints. It does not list current restaurants, surf shops, rental outfitters, or event dates, because no specific, current business names or festival dates for this neighborhood were confirmed in the research behind this page, and none are invented here to fill that gap. It also does not cover Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Arverne, or Far Rockaway, which are separate neighborhoods on the same peninsula with their own distinct histories and attractions. Confirm current surf conditions, beach access rules, and any seasonal programming directly with NYC Parks before a visit.