This summer, 94 years after it laid the foundation for the "People's Beach," and more than 50 years after it was closed and abandoned by the City, the Jacob Riis Bathhouse is being reborn as the Rockaway Ocean Club: a semi-private, $88 million oasis that has stirred up controversy for its members-only, SoHo House-meets-National Park vibe.
On a scorching hot Wednesday in late June, Ursula Damani, one of the club's co-owners, and Brian Carey, heading up the club's beverage program, were giddy as they gave reporters a tour of all three floors of the bathhouse, a little more than a month ahead of the targeted opening date of August 7.
Anyone will be able to rent a room at the Ocean Club's hotel, or dine at its restaurants, or grab a bottle of Banana Boat (or, for the tony crowd, Supergoop!) from its beachside store. But in order to ascend to its second-floor members-only lounge, or relax by its U-shaped, 3,200 square-foot pool, people will need to join the club at a range of prices, starting at $1,000 for individual members living in the five zip codes closest to the club, and climbing up to $4,000, plus a $750 joining fee, for the "regular" annual membership for a family of four. Members will also get access to certain areas of the bathhouse and special events, discounts on hotel rooms, and a parking rebate.
As we walked around the space, Damani said the proprietors are trying to be very up front about what beachgoers can realistically expect this summer: limited bar operations, a café, a food truck, and hopefully the backyard outdoor spaces, pool included, Friday through Sunday. The hotel and the full slate of bars, restaurants, and retail aren’t set to open until 2027.
"I truly believe from a business standpoint in the concept of crawl, walk, run," she explained. "If we actually flipped a switch and turned this all on, that is like a recipe for disaster. We want to make sure that even if we're doing it the limited capacity, we're doing it right—allowing us to figure out those kinks this summer, like, is our Wi-Fi working right, can we process payments, give us a chance to do that, so by next year when we do like our big grand opening, we'll have those pieces figured out."
Right now though, the Rockaway Ocean Club's main selling point is the dream of a certain kind of lifestyle. The club is offering members the prospect of a private beach retreat that's closer than the Hamptons—cheaper, too—and so much more New York City than hauling ass all the way to the East End.
According to Damani, more than 600 people have already inquired about joining the Ocean Club, even in its nascent stage. "It is the People's Beach, and we really want to invoke that feeling here," she said, looking out over what will be the club's outdoor event space. "What makes New York so incredible? It's because it's this great selection, this tapestry of humanity. And so far, our membership inquiries have been really great families, singles, the creatives, retired firemen, really just the whole spectrum."
On our way to the third floor, we stopped by what will be a store with beach essentials like sunscreen and towels, gazed upon an outdoor event space on the city-facing side, peeked through the glass at a future beachside café with New American fare at a reasonable price, and wove through the member's lounge with huge, oceanfront windows, until we finally emerged in the open air. Look one way from the roof of the Ocean Club and you'll see the rolling, blue-gray Atlantic; look the other way, past the National Parks Service's parking lot, and you'll see the glittering Manhattan skyline.
"If my bartenders were ever feeling bad, I'd grab some beers, and I'd bring them up here and say: 'Ready? This is where you work now,'" Carey said, smiling, as we stood on the third floor, facing out towards the ocean. "That was my tactic, and it always worked—and I barely had to do it. Bartending here is like, look at where you are! You could be in a dive bar in Brooklyn, like I was for 20 years."
The bathhouse has long been a feature of Jacob Riis Beach, named after the muckracking photojournalist Jacob Riis, reformist champion of the tenement slums. It first opened its doors on August 6, 1932, and soon received significant upgrades from notorious Parks Department Commissioner Robert Moses. (One Moses addition to the bathhouse complex, according to his biographer Robert Caro? Its 9,000-car parking lot.) It remained under the purview of the City for the next 40 years, when it was given over to the National Parks Service in a state of disrepair. By 1974, the building and the beach it sits on were absorbed into Gateway National Recreation Area.
Since then, the building hasn't housed much more than sandy bathrooms, gaggles of pigeons, and piles of rotting swim gear—detritus and contraband confiscated from beachgoers by the park's ever-dwindling number of lifeguards and secreted into the abandoned building.
Riis Beach itself, on the other hand, has been thriving—the People's Beach, as it is colloquially known, plays host to New Yorkers from across the city willing to make the schlep via public transit. But, perhaps most famously, Riis has played host to an exuberantly, explicitly queer beach since the 1940s that was once further cordoned off from the rest of the park by the now-demolished Neponsit Beach Hospital.
Currently, queer New Yorkers congregate at Bay 2 on the easternmost side of the beach to drink nutcrackers, take off their tops (and sometimes bottoms), bump house remixes of Mariah Carey songs from portable speakers, dip in the ocean with all their jewelry on, pass joints, flash tattoos and top-surgery scars, and just generally see and be seen from May until October.
In the years leading up to the Rockaway Ocean Club's Riis Bathhouse takeover, a few vendors held leases along the Riis boardwalk—poke bowls here, an Italian ice stand there. Nothing compared to the club's proposal. Spectro, the only restaurant still operating near Bay 2, is managed by Riis Beach Co., which also runs the vendors at Bay 9. A double cheeseburger at Spectro costs $19 before tax and tip, fries not included.
In 2017, the National Parks Service put out a call for proposals concerning the decrepit Jacob Riis Bathhouse. (The NPS put out a similar call for proposals related to two existing beach clubs on Breezy Point, also in Gateway National Recreation Area, at the beginning of July.) Enter Brooklyn Bazaar co-founders Belvy Klein and Aaron Broudo, known for operating a Greenpoint concert venue by the same name, as well as concessions at the Riis boardwalk under the moniker Riis Bazaar. In 2018, Brooklyn Bazaar submitted the winning proposal for the "Bathhouse Lodge," as memorialized with a letter of intent between the future lease holders and the federal agency.
"Brooklyn Bazaar proposes to develop the Bathhouse Complex into a unique seaside destination, and to return Riis Park, the 'People's Beach' to its heyday of decades past," National Parks spokesperson Daphne Yun wrote in a press release. "Using a phased development plan, certain things will be open this summer, while other aspects of this site should be open by summer of 2020."
While the date was off by six years, the fact remains that in 2022, Brooklyn Bazaar signed a 60-year lease with the National Parks Service, secured a $15 million tax credit thanks to the building's historic landmark status, and began its work on the Rockaway Ocean Club in earnest. The project, once opened, will join a number of other facilities that the NPS leases to private operators. Leasing "success stories" on the NPS website include Bathhouse Row in Arkansas's Hot Springs National Park and Floyd Bennett Field, elsewhere in Gateway National Park.
Damani told Hell Gate that she became attached to the project around its inception, along with Abe and Scott Schnay, the father-son team behind SK Development. "We have a small group of intrepid New Yorkers that came together and figured this out over nine years of extreme hardship, extreme challenges, but we're all still at the table," she said. "I joke, when we started this project, there were maybe two kids amongst all of us, now there are 10! A lot of life has happened, but this project and our belief in this has been the constant, and it's kept us all together."
Yun, the NPS spokesperson, told Hell Gate that the agency selected the Brooklyn Bazaar proposal because it "was the most responsive to the requirements outlined in the solicitation, including rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of the historic Jacob Riis Bathhouse consistent with NPS leasing authorities and the purposes of Gateway National Recreation Area."
In a 22-page letter to the Department of Interior, Gateway National Recreation Area Superintendent Jennifer Nersesian wrote in 2021 that the intent of the ROC was "to revitalize the historic facilities within Jacob Riis Park to correct the deterioration, fulfill the objectives of the NPS to use the Bathhouse as a major visitor use facility, retain existing concession activities within the building, and continue to provide essential public services for recreation, athletic, entertainment, retail, and restaurant uses," and that the club would "return the site back to its historic vibrant public facility." This letter does not explicitly mention a private members club, but does mention the bars, restaurants, hotel rooms, pool, and event spaces that ROC is set to have.
When asked whether the members club was a part of the original proposal, Parks spokesperson Yun responded that "the only private member area at the Riis Beach Bathhouse is the swimming pool…NPS lodging facilities throughout the National Park System may include amenities, such as swimming pools, that are limited to registered guests rather than the general public." (According to figures from the Rockaway Ocean Club team, around 60 percent of the Riis Bathhouse space will be open to the public.)
While leasing buildings on public land to private entities is standard operating procedure for NPS, some of Riis Beach's most passionate denizens have raised alarm bells as to what such an operation would mean for the People's Beach.
"I grew up in South Jersey, loved going to the beach, and was very nervous about what transitioning meant for my beach time, and then another Black trans person told me there was this special beach, and so I went for the first time early that summer in 2015 and then went back nearly every week after that for the rest of that summer," Jah Elyse Sayers, one of the co-founders of the Riis Bloc Association, which is currently calling for a boycott of the Ocean Club, told Hell Gate.
"There's just so few other places, or if any, where working-class queer and trans people can take the subway and the bus and be together and outside in the sun during the daytime, you know, and just be in our bodies and get to see other people in their bodies," they said. Bloc Association members have spent recent weekends at the beach handing out zines outlining previous failed attempts at privatizing the bathhouse and calling on beachgoers to decline to spend money or perform at ROC.
Sayers said they've been following the beach club's progress for the past few years, and attending Neponsit Property Owners Association meetings through other changes to the beach, like the demolition of the Neponsit Beach Hospital and the greenlighting of the natural gas pipeline that would run under Riis. (Sayers, who has a doctorate in Earth and Environmental Sciences, wrote their dissertation on a political geography of erosion as approached through queer Riis.) "Just looking at the history of the beach, it is so possible to have robust public infrastructure and a queer beach and a Black, queer, working-class presence—those things are not actually in conflict," they said. "We would love the backdrop to be renovated—but for the public, and not for the pockets of these developers and venture capitalists."
A report from Truthout linked the ROC to real estate developer Jonah Bamberger, who currently lives in Tel Aviv and is the chief operating officer of Aulder Capital, a group whose website and LinkedIn pages previously listed the Riis Bathhouse as one of its development projects. (A recent Google search shows those references to ROC have since been removed.) Bamberger appeared on the New York City public advocate's list of the worst landlords in New York City in 2023 and 2024, thanks to the number of Housing Preservation and Development violations and complaints that his buildings collected.
Brandice Taylor-Davis, a tenant living in a rent-stabilized apartment in a Flatbush building Bamberger owns, told Hell Gate that she has been trying to raise the alarm about her landlord's involvement in the project since she found out about it in 2024. Taylor-Davis, who's lived in her apartment since 2014, says she is currently in the process of litigating an HP action against Bamberger in New York state housing court. "I emailed National Parks, I called National Parks, I called the Bureau of Land Management, all trying to figure out how this man is participating in this project to get $15 million in tax credits, and we're literally living in squalor," Taylor-Davis said.
Bamberger himself has spoken publicly both about the project and, seemingly, his decision to purchase Taylor-Davis's building in 2015. On a 2024 episode of "The Best Ever CRE Show," which bills itself as "the world's longest-running daily commercial real estate podcast," Bamberger described buying rent-stabilized buildings as "the worst deals we've ever done," adding, "as far as I'm concerned, give 'em away to charity."
About the Rockaway Ocean Club, though, Bamberger was sunnier: He described the new venture as a "Miami-style beach club" where he and his team would be selling $30 lobster rolls.
Damani told Hell Gate that Aulder Capital—which also lists the McCarren Parkhouse, the Williamsburg park eatery that Brooklyn Bazaar cofounders Broudo and Klein also operate—has zero involvement in the development process of the Ocean Club, and that the firm was only included in the project as a "silent investor." The co-owner said that she was actually intending on sending Bamberger himself a cease-and-desist to get him to stop talking about the bathhouse.
Bamberger did not respond to a request for comment from Hell Gate.
Truthout also tied the presence of the Ocean Club to a recent uptick in policing around the People's Beach, citing a specific incident in which a woman was asked by "park police" to put her top on while walking to one of the public restrooms in the bathhouse, "something she had done regularly for years without incident."
Damani told Hell Gate that the Ocean Club team has had zero contact, ever, with the U.S. Park Police officers who patrol Riis Beach, and that she and her co-owners intend to be responsible members of the Riis community. "My hope is that we can, from a community standpoint, just be another advocate, another voice in the room when it comes to things like the beach erosion, and when it comes to other issues around the parks that the community is struggling with," Damani said. "We've invested a lot of money in this building, and nine years, so we want to get it open, but we also want to make it sustainable. We have a 60-year mandate!"
Even unfurnished and unfinished, it's clear that the ROC team is taking that mandate seriously. The attention to detail is already visible in the bones of the club. For example, at least some of the lobby furniture has been rescued from an abandoned dentist's office, and is vintage, from the '50s. Then there's the tiling that lines one stairwell. It's half refurbished from the bathhouse's first life, and half new in a nearly identical color—because, per National Parks Services rules, the renovators were forbidden from perfectly matching the shade of the original ceramic.
Thanks to all the history, it's charming in a way that the other boutique hotel on the peninsula, the Rockaway Hotel, will never quite be. The closest analog might be the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport—they've got the same historic charm, photo-friendly atmosphere, and yes, they both have a pool.
The U-shaped pool behind the Jacob Riis Bathhouse is still empty—for now. It's ringed by cheery, tropical-colored pool chairs, imported from Italy, wickedly comfortable and emblazoned with three initials in tiny white lettering: "ROC" for Rockaway Ocean Club.
But out on the beach, after the tour, the vibe was much more skeptical.
When Fernando, a regular Riis-goer wearing blocky sunglasses and carrying an iridescent totebag, first heard about a private members club on the beach, he said he told himself, "Well, there goes the affordability!"
Would he ever become a member of something like ROC? "I would consider it if it was in my tax bracket, but I know that it won't be," he laughed.
Darren Coursey, a lifelong Rockaway resident who paused his dog walk to do some stretching on the beach, said he was thrilled to see someone stepping in to revitalize the long-neglected bathhouse.
"Our federal parks in New York City are the most neglected in the entire state—in the entire country, I should say," Coursey said. "In different states, the national properties are fantastic, they're well-manicured." He nodded towards the parking lot. "Here, you think you're driving through the Serengeti. You're waiting for a pack of hyenas to attack your car, it's a disgrace!"
Still, when asked about ROC membership, Coursey's answer was unequivocal. "I live here," he said. "I would never go there."
Chandler, waiting for a drink at Spectro with her girlfriend, was chillier on the ROC.
"I'm sure that Jacob Riis could use more money to upkeep itself, and they thought this would be the way to do it," she said, gazing at the bathhouse a few bays away. "It always seems like people think that funding for these things can only come if there's a level of exclusivity involved. Public restaurants, a public event space, that sounds great. But the mention of a private pool and members-only club, I'm like, yeah, it sounds like you're just trying to get more wealthy people to come to this beach. I don't want to say it'll take away character, but it'll maybe add something that will change the way it feels to be here."