The Rockaway Hotel + Spa

Not since our year of the lord 1970 – with $30k SoHo lofts and bartered Basquiats – has anyone remarked on New York prices in a positive way, but I would like to start this review with a crucial Public Service Announcement. The ferry to Rockaway costs $2.75, and is – in a million ways – the coolest.
 
It might be the fact that the ferry dock is next to the heliport. It may be that it kind of looks like a yacht. It may be the wine (organic) on board. And it might be the reminder – something that can easily slip out of sight – that New York is a city surrounded by water. 

Even before we set sail, the sense of seaside is already in the air, with fresh juice stands and salty-cheeked couples carrying both laptop bags and surfboards. As the ferry whips us away from the city, silver shoals of fish pop up out of the water, and beyond them, Coney Island rides throw fairgoers into the air. 
 
Get ready to have your head spun too, because the Rockaways are delightfully weird. Like a scene put together by a collage artist with a taste for the surreal. It clashes together a thousand things which shouldn’t quite go together but do: arepa trucks and Irish flags, roses and shingle siding. Christmas lights on balconies in August, kickboxers on the beach, and planes flying low out of JFK over bright white sand dunes. 
 
Sitting like a central diamond on the long brooch of the island is the Rockaway Hotel. A stone’s throw from the ferry – the hotel’s crowning flag waves a hello as you disembark at the dock – at ground level, it’s enveloped with technicolour murals by artists like Julia Chang; above the murals, the hotel’s siding mirrors the whipped-sea blue-greys of the beach houses around it. At the door, a trio of low-ride cruisers await: the kind of bike with wide handlebars that call you to ride them, in lazy curves, into the sunset. 
 
We walk into a lobby that unfolds into a perfectly-judged scandi-surfy-sexy threeway – blonde wood, soft white walls, and decadent low seating around a fireplace you can imagine lit in winter. As we check in, we park the last of our city hangover with the glass of rosé champagne poured at the desk by Raheem, who we very swiftly love, and who, like the lion’s share of the staff here, was born and raised on the peninsula, so is full of expert tips. 
 
Where we are, the island is a slender three-blocks-wide at most, so views explode from either side. One way, the boardwalk and the ocean, with all its wildly beautiful mood swings. The other way, Jamaica Bay: grassy marshes, birds and butterflies – and the Manhattan skyline, which rises out of the water like turning up the volume on a song you love. 
Up on the roof deck, as the sun starts to dip and glare red, we add a third view too: perfect shrimp cocktail with sauce hot enough to elicit a cough, and a mezcal riff on a Paloma. 
 
Back in our room, teak and rattan turn rose-gold in the last of the light. From our cinema-screen-sized window, the skyline really does shimmer. In and out of focus, stars or a mirage. 

Lying back on the bright white bed, Mrs Smith looks for an answer. On Google rather than in the recesses of her mind, but let’s not ruin it. The city lights are played with by pressures in the atmosphere, she tells me: heat and humidity. And the technical term – yes, really – is ‘twinkliflying’. 
 
Over breakfast, under awnings by the pool, we plot our day. This is the plan: I, a sloth, will embark on My Morning of Rest and Relaxation, lazing by the pool on a canary yellow striped beach towel, listening to Motown and eating a cryogenically frozen coffee with a spoon from the in-house coffee bar. Mrs Smith – for whom a red flag is a magnet, or else she wouldn’t be with me – will go surfing: riptides and regular shark-spotting only adding an extra sprinkle of je ne sais quoi.
 
Afterwards (she’s alive!), when I meet her for a taco, I have never seen more freckles on her face – far from a constellation, a new galaxy – and she cannot stop talking about surfing. 

In fact, she has worked out a plan. We could live here on the Rockaways, she insists. She pulls up Zillow listings. Or… we could live in Manhattan and take the ferry over each morning? Look, the timetable totally works out! I look at her and her resting face is the kind of happy you could call basking. She is fantasising about her second lover: the sea. 
 
The Rockaways are a place where it makes sense to fall in love with beach life. Yes, this ocean can be a fickle lover – there are days when golf carts tour the shore to warn people of strong currents – but it seems, in so many ways, to be a place made with people in mind. 

The boardwalk is broad enough for bikers and bladers. As the sun sets, groups of teenagers splash in seafront showers. There are lifeguards on tall umpire chairs, there’s even public sunscreen, but it’s the beach itself, too – speckled with giant blue clamshells, danced on by plovers. It is a place where all of life happens. 
 
A mother cuts her son’s hair, moving along the length of the sand to get better light. A surfer older than my father dons his Rockaway tuxedo. There are fishermen and families, barbecuers and dancers. It’s a place for everyone to go, and this is an ethos that the hotel has embraced too – offering local kids free swimming lessons in the pool, plus breakfast before and lunch to take home afterwards.
 
On our last afternoon, we borrow the hotel’s low-riders and cycle to the westernmost end of the island: Breezy Point Tip. As we glide past Jacob Riis beach with its extraordinary queer history, houses fall away and the scene turns castaway.

I cannot recommend pushing a bike through sand dunes, but when we emerge, arms aching, onto the last beach of the island, it’s suddenly worth it. I’m looking at Mrs Smith as her face transforms. Shock… then suddenly tears. 
 
Behind me, not far off the shore, a whale – an actual, bonafide, humpback whale, ribbed and winged and as big as a bus – has lifted out of the water. She spins me around, hands shaking slightly, so I catch the champagne-pop explosion of its blow. For nearly half an hour Mrs Smith keeps her eyes locked on the horizon, and as we cycle home, she keeps saying, still in disbelief: ‘Whale, I saw a whale.’
 
Back at the hotel, we raise a glass to her new life as a professional surfer and whale-watcher at Margie’s, the hotel’s ground floor knock-out, with stamped tin ceilings, mid century light fixtures and gentle jazz standards lilting, live, through candlelight. 

Maritime Italian, it’s inflected with just the right cocktail of Fifties, Sixties and now: seafood platters overflow (one’s even called the Kraken), pasta dishes, too, are almost unfeasibly copious, and there are lashings of rich, smoky red sauce which Mrs Smith eats by the spoonful. 
 
We meander to bed via a tour of the hotel’s walls: extraordinary photographs and paintings which show the role of the beach and the sea – particularly this beach and this sea – in so many lives and worlds and stories. A surfboard being waxed under the raised, aqueduct-like Rockaway train line; the shaven head of a teenager contemplating getting into the water for the first time. The excitement, the awe, the beauty. 
 
Back in our room, twinklifying Manhattan in miniature waits. 54 minutes, and an entire world away.