Otober 25, 2014

"Shannan" 2012   [Photo by: Maureen Drenan]

Bouncing Back

Broad Channel, the Island in the City

By COREY KILGANNON OCT. 25, 2014

For many New Yorkers, Broad Channel is a blur of a neighborhood they pass, by car or A train, from mainland Queens on the way to Rockaway Beach. That was the case for the photographer Maureen Drennan, who had been shooting pictures of surfers in the Rockaways in 2010 when she got off the A train in Broad Channel one day and started walking.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is crazy, houses on stilts, what’s this all about?' ” she recalled. “I just started walking around photographing.”

Ms. Drennan, 43, a native New Yorker who teaches photography at LaGuardia Community College, was immediately fascinated with “this beautiful place, totally different from the rest of New York.”

Broad Channel is an island in Jamaica Bay, in Queens. The narrow, mile-long neighborhood is populated by several thousand residents, many of them active or retired firefighters, police officers and other civil servants. Some families have been there for generations.

Ms. Drennan spent time in the homes and bars and boat clubs, and in a local veterans’ hall, also attending a funeral, a christening and other family events. All the while, she took photographs using medium-format film, resulting in nearly square images.

After Broad Channel was devastated by Hurricane Sandy  two years ago, Ms. Drennan was not attracted to the usual photos of destruction, she said. Rather, she made subtler pictures: a penciled line on a door to mark how high the storm surge rose; a freshly spackled wall behind a dining room table in a rebuilt home. “The destruction was not interesting to me,” she said. “What was interesting to me was the resilience.”

The hurricane, and the struggle to come back to normal, drove home the paradox of living close to the water. “They’re enriched by the water, it defines them,” she said. “But it might ultimately be the thing that forces them to leave the area, because the water keeps rising, and you can only come back so much.”