FIRE ZONE

What's up with fire zones on Rockaway?

Here is a typical street in the Beach 140s between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach:



Interesting how there are no cars parked on the street. Why are there no cars parked on this street? This might have something to do with it:



A fire zone--or lots of fire zones--lining both sides of the street, prohibits street parking - not just on weekends, or on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8 and 11, but always.



This is true of every street between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach until you get to this street (Beach 125 Street), where, predictably, the mansions stop:



The situation is also different one block inland:



Here there are cars parked on both sides, but this is only owing to the fact that it is still April:



Why FIRE ZONE (and to a lesser extent, NO PARKING ANYTIME) is in the Arsenal of Exclusion hardly needs to be explained. The wealthy owners of these opulent beach front mini-mansions declared their entire neighborhood a fire zone to keep away the summer riff-raff. FIRE ZONE is thus in the same category of BEACH PERMITS, FIRE HYDRANTS, and those famous low UNDERPASSES that Robert Moses built to ensure that buses couldn't deliver the poor, urban masses to Jones Beach. (For our Arsenal of Exclusion / Inclusion installation in the IABR, William Tenhoor and Meredith Tenhoor wrote about FIRE HYDRANTS in this capacity.) Granted, there must be enormous demand for street parking around these parts, but Rockaway is still part of the city, and shouldn't be closed off in such a manner.