BROAD CHANNELFighting for the place he calls home
Standing on the dock of the bay: Dan Mundy Sr. and his deep blue backyard.
Posted: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 10:30 am | Updated: 12:14 pm, Wed Nov 12, 2014.
For outside observers, the worst crisis to ever befall the small community of Broad Channel might seem like it happened two years ago. But for lifelong residents like Dan Mundy Sr., Hurricane Sandy was just the latest in the many crises the small community in the heart of Jamaica Bay has had to weather throughout its history, including a time when the very existence of the neighborhood was at stake.
And Mundy was there for many of them.
The retired firefighter was born in Broad Channel and raised there. When he was a kid in the 1940s, the community, which sits on an island in the middle of the bay, was a different place.
“You grew up more or less isolated, but that’s where you made all your friends,” he said. It’s where you worked and played and had a good time. Children would go to school here through the eighth grade.”
Isolated from the rest of the city, connected only by bridges, Broad Channel residents learned to be fairly self-reliant and make do with what they had, which was plenty of green space and the large body of water that surrounds it — Jamaica Bay.
“There were no city parks; we made our own ballfields,” he said. “You kind of made do. Being deprived of those things was not at all bad, because you had the environment here no one else had.”
But if they didn’t really need City Hall, City Hall apparently had no use for them either. Broad Channel was very nearly wiped off the map half a century ago, not by a natural disaster, but an act of man. As the city sought to expand JFK Airport, in the mid 1960s residents were close to being told to leave.
Broad Channel’s residents did not own their homes until the 1980s. Before that, their properties were leased by the city. At the beginning of John Lindsay’s administration, the leases were changed to monthly, meaning residents did not know if they would be able to stay in their homes after 30 days. That, Mundy said, was taken as a sign the city was forcing them out.
For him, that was his call to civic service. As a young man just starting out raising his family in the neighborhood, he felt a call to protect it. After all, the neighborhood had just received an incredible national honor. Broad Channel’s Boy Scout troop, which Mundy had helped reorganize, had just marched with President Lyndon Johnson at the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
“I think what kept me involved in civic affairs is that the community was always fighting for its existence,” he said. “People were panicking at that time. There was a real possibility that all your dreams were going down the drain.”
Mundy was on a committee that hired a surveyor and was one of the five people appointed to help negotiate the land sale so Broad Channel residents could own their homes, which finally happened in 1982.
But that wasn’t the end of the neighborhood’s troubles.
In the late 1980s, the state Department of Environmental Conservation began handing out fines or threatening massive violations to residents due to environmental infractions that Mundy said no one even knew about.
“They came in here like gangbangers,” he said. “That was a terrible thing to go through.”
That led Mundy to help fight for sewers to be constructed under neighborhood streets. Over the next few decades, Mundy took part in fights to build a new library and help preserve and clean Jamaica Bay, which he continues as part of Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers.
Today, many of the neighborhood’s residents are legacy denizens, their families having lived there for generations. That includes the Mundys. Dan Sr. married “the girl around the corner,” and the two raised their children in the neighborhood. His son, Dan Mundy Jr., is also a civic activist and took a leadership role in fighting new flood maps that threatened Broad Channel with higher flood insurance rates after Sandy, which the senior Mundy noted affected “every single resident of Broad Channel.”
At 76 years old, Mundy isn’t calling it quits just yet. Earlier this month he stood alongside Mayor de Blasio as the city’s top official touted the city’s Sandy recovery program, Build it Back, which Mundy said still has its problems.
And Mundy’s agenda is still packed. In the first week of November alone, the activist said he would attend meetings with the Federal Aviation Administration over the airplane noise problem from JFK Airport, and with city officials over the Build it Back program. He has also helped successfully get the city to raise several street levels in the neighborhood.
“Every time I think I want to slow down, I get a phone call and something new was on the table,” he said.
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