Long Beach boardwalk memories: Generations of beachgoers recall summers past

Stretching 2.2 miles along the Atlantic and decades back into history, the Long Beach boardwalk during the postwar years was a place where lasting memories were made — of playing Skee-Ball, enjoying the rides at Playland or devouring Izzy’s Knishes.

“In that time of my life, from when I was 5 to when I went away to college, Long Beach was just fun,” remembers psychologist Jim Oshinsky, 73, of Oceanside, who was raised in Manhattan and spent summers on the Long Beach boardwalk. “Arcade games and ice cream on a summer night with your friends or your girlfriend — I mean, for that phase of life it didn't get any better.”

Generations of beachgoers have felt much the same way since 1880, when the Long Island Rail Road got extended to Long Beach that spring and the new Long Beach Hotel fully opened to the public on July 24 — the first of many such resorts for the rich. A boardwalk went up in 1908, in an atmosphere more genteel than that of the more honky-tonk Coney Island. A developer even brought in elephants to help with construction, and to get a little publicity in the process.

Then in the 1930s, after the opening of Tower Baths for daytrippers to change into their beach gear and shower off sand afterward, that haven for the wealthy began evolving into a destination for Depression-era workers wanting someplace new to escape the city heat. Many would also rent rooms for the summer at hotels along the boardwalk. The Long Beach boardwalk transformed into something generations of Long Islanders remember well.

There were storefront amusements. Isidore Faber and his wife, Esther, ran the various Faber’s establishments all along the boardwalk — Faber’s Skee-Ball, Faber’s Fascination and other places devoted to such carnival-midway fare as The Greyhound Race, where competitors using a stick controller made metal dogs in slots race toward a finish line, and shuffle bowling, where patrons slid a hockey-puck-like “ball” down a long table toward pins. There also was Faber’s Poker, where you rolled balls into slots representing playing cards — and which ran afoul of the law in 1948 when a court considered it gambling.

Games galore

Julius Seidel ran similar amusement concessions at 105 and 113 W. Boardwalk. At 59 W. Boardwalk, the Sportsmen’s Shooting Gallery advertised “real bullets with real guns” and “special rifles for ladies.”

The Nassau Arcade was a penny arcade at 145 W. Boardwalk, between National Boulevard and Magnolia Boulevard. Pet photographer Richie Schwartz, 73, who grew up in Long Beach and now lives in New Cassel, worked there as a teen. “They gave me one of those aprons with big pockets for change, so that was my job,” he says, “to make change and hand out tickets to people when they won a game.”

There and at other such spots, those tickets could net you “a transistor radio for the household or the kind of things banks gave away for opening an account, like a toaster,” Oshinsky says. “I didn't particularly want that stuff. Give me a Frisbee. A hula hoop.”

Emmy- and Tony Award-winning actor-comedian Billy Crystal, who grew up in Long Beach, remembers this as well, telling Newsday in 1998: “I was really good at Skee-Ball. I still have the tickets [from] Faber’s and Seidel’s. I always wanted to win my mother a set of dishes ... and never did.”

The boardwalk games also were a draw for musician Heshy Rosenwasser, 59, who spent his first 13 years in Long Beach and now lives in Englewood, New Jersey.

“It's funny,” he says. “My father was an immigrant from Europe. He didn't grow up playing arcade games. But in Long Beach, he taught me Skee-Ball. I remember how he showed me how to pop the ball out so it goes into the hole. It took some practice, but I eventually got it. I'll be honest with you,” he adds, “ I didn't have the greatest relationship with my father. If I can zero in on a number of things that were actually nice memories of me and him, that was one of them.”

Parents also would take their offspring to Playland, run by Max and Rae Gruberg. “It was a kiddie park” on the boardwalk at Edwards Boulevard, “and had those little rides, like a little boat ride going around in circles and miniature train rides,” recalls Dennis Carey, 77, of Huntington, who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn but had an aunt with a summer home in Long Beach.

Long Beach native Joe Behar, 82, a retired sociology professor who now lives in Sayville, recalls “working summers at Playland around 1955, ’56, ’57. I and other guys, mostly teenage boys, would run the little carousel and other rides. Rae Gruberg was this very interesting, very feisty woman. She had flaming red hair and she used to be very motherly to us, but she pushed us around a little bit too. It was basically very, very fun.”

Knishes, frozen custard and more

Food places abounded. By the mid-1950s, you could eat at Arnold Gutin’s Hebrew National restaurant and deli at 65 W. Boardwalk, or at Bob’s Pizza at 79 W. Boardwalk. For frozen custard and ices, there was Kalin’s, run by perennial Boardwalk Association president George Kalin, with outposts at 15 and 75 W. Boardwalk. And everyone remembers Izzy's Knishes, aka Izzy’s Kosher Knishes, at 83 W. Boardwalk, at the corner of National Boulevard, and one particular delight: the cherry-cheese knish.

Fun after dark

People also went to the beach, of course. “Jones Beach was for swimming, but Long Beach was for the night,” says retired computer programmer and perinatal-mortality activist Katie Peterson, 72, who grew up in Uniondale and now lives in upstate Cortland.

In the late 1960s, “Once or twice a week, 10 or 20 of us would have a bonfire. The guys would collect driftwood and bring beer, and the girls would bring snacks or sandwiches. Everybody brought their transistor radios, and we would use one at a time until the battery went dead. We would dance and,” she adds with a hint of naughtiness, “sometimes couples would go off under the boardwalk.”

The fire

Unfortunately, on June 10, 1965, a fire destroyed the Tower Baths building that housed or was adjacent to 11 businesses including Izzy’s Knishes, Faber’s Skee-Ball and the Hebrew National restaurant; the baths themselves had been condemned as unsanitary in 1963. It was the fourth major Long Beach fire that year that officials believed were arson.

The boardwalk’s fortunes were floundering by the 1970s, a victim of factors including changing tastes, a city ordinance instituting beachgoing fees and faded hotels that could only survive as housing for poor and infirm seniors and for psychiatric patients from nearby closed institutions. Julius Seidel died in 1970. The Fabers in 1965 moved to Miami Beach, where Isidore died in 1974. Max Gruberg died in 1979 at a hospital near his retirement home in Matlacha, Florida. His Playland, under a different owner and by then called Funland, lasted through at least 1982.

Comeback kid

But Long Beach came back, and even the boardwalk’s destruction by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 couldn’t break “the City by the Sea.” Long Beach rebuilt it, and today along with oceanfront condominiums it’s the site of regular festivals, fireworks and farmers markets, a biathlon and, eternally, the boardwalk and the beach.

“The younger people who go there, I watch them on the beach and they're having a great time,” Behar says. “They're playing volleyball, they're enjoying the boardwalk. It's a different culture and a different time, obviously. But there still is this idea that it's a kind of playground and it's a place for fun.”