Baumwoll Archives

Bushes in front of our house near the corner of Sprayview Avenue, Straight ahead  are the original bungalows toward the elevated subway and Edgemere Ave

This is our house on Beach 38th street right off the boardwalk , Its the big brown one, I can still hear my family and all the people that would come and spend their whole summer or just a week.

I started looking on Skips’ And Carols’ wonderful FarRockaway.com site when it first began. Like many of us is this is where I got the bug. I couldn’t get enough. This led me on a journey to rediscover the three beach houses on my grandparents owned in Edgemere.

This has led me in my own way to bring Edgemere back to life. There are two ways to see many of my photos. One is thru my families photos and the other is through the streets, buildings and stores. Through all of these years, no one has ever put up anything on Beach 38th street and Sprayview Avenue. I searched and kept waiting for a picture to show up. Years went by without a photo of this street. For anyone who loves all these sites, it is all of us that are keeping it alive.

It’s now my time to relinquish my treasures of my families history in Edgemere. I hope you enjoy them.

When I was around 10, I spent the summer at the beach 38^th street house.

My grandfather often talked about his movie years being a motion picture operator in the early days of film. As new movie projector models replaced the old ones, he saved them in the basement. He would often take us down there and weave his stories and show us all the wonderful things he collected. Collecting I learned was a part of his personality. He told me that collecting is about passion.

It was one of the greatest summers of my life. In the early evening, that twilight time between day and night, in the part of the house that was my grandparents’ quarters off the right side of the main porch, my grandfather would often show me some of the things he saved. My love for books comes from this moment. He showed me these wonderful old books that were Movie Tie-in Books. It set me on a course of collecting that has not stopped to this day.

While I was going to junior high school at PS 198 my father worked in the city. He was a book binder. He would bring me home all the books he thought we would like. I would save my money and go into the city as often as I could and searched the bookstores all over Manhattan and buy myself paperback books. I would come home with shopping bags of them and I could see the look on my parents face. They were very concerned. But I was in my glory. I would fall in love hundreds of times with the graphics on the covers. I learned that they began making movie tie-in books as early as they have been making films.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I still do.

These are my great grandparents Yosef Baumwoll and Beile (Bella) Baumwoll. I am named after my great grandmother and their oldest son Samuel Baumwoll. They had four daughters and two sons. My grandfather Nathan was the second youngest of the siblings. Their youngest daughter was named Sadie. Next is Fela, then Adele and Anna is the oldest. Up until a few months ago I was never told what had happened to my grandparents or their daughters.  I didn’t even know if they had made it to America. I’m still looking for where they are. I don’t know when they died or where they are buried.  I’m looking for this side of the family.

I had been looking for the original street names of Edgemere for the longest time. So, In 1993, when the 100th anniversary collectors addition of The Wave, Rockaways newspaper since 1893, came out, of course I had to have one and inside was article about what had happened to the naming of the streets in all of Rockaway including Edgemere. Isn’t this interesting to look at the two columns and see the wonderful names of the streets that I knew by the numbers when I was young. Also just to add, if your into postcards from the early 1900’s, this would be a guide to help you find your street.

Bruce Baumwoll