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THE APPRAISAL
A ‘Radio Days’ House Survives the Hurricane
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Lee Quinby's house in Rockaway Park was featured in the Woody Allen movie "Radio Days." Here, Ms. Quinby in the foyerof the house.
By ELIZABETH A. HARRISPublished: November 26, 2012
On Beach 115th Street in Rockaway Park, Queens, just around the
corner from several crumpled buildings that were ripped apart by
fire, and a short walk from the silent subway station at Beach 116th
Street, which the trains cannot reach, there is a house that took on
nearly five feet of water during Hurricane Sandy.
The boiler is shot, the water heater,
too, and the chilly air inside is thick
with a musty smell. But this house is
one of the lucky ones: It will survive.
And while it is no more worthy than
its more badly damaged neighbors,
this home half a block from the ocean
has felt the touch of immortality
before — and to many New Yorkers, it
just might look familiar.
That house, said Lee Quinby, a coowner, played the role of
the family home in the Woody Allen movie “Radio Days,” a
1987 tribute to the glory days of radio and the delights of
familial bickering, as well as a love song to the Rockaways
of around the early 1940s.
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12/5/12 House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes.com
2/3www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/house-featured-in-radio-days-survives-hurricane.html
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
The exterior of the house.“The scene is Rockaway, the time is my childhood,” Mr.
Allen’s familiar voice recounts in the early minutes of the
film. “It’s my old neighborhood, and forgive me if I tend to
romanticize the past. I mean, it wasn’t always as stormy and rainswept as this, but I
remember it that way, because that was it at its most beautiful.”
(In another scene, Mia Farrow’s character asks: “Who is Pearl Harbor?”)
“I think ‘Radio Days’ is one of his best films,” Ms. Quinby said of Mr. Allen. “And I thought
that even before we bought the house.
Jennifer Callahan, the director of a documentary called “The Bungalows of Rockaway,”
said that in the early ‘40s the area was largely a summertime community, with enclaves
dominated by particular groups: the Irish section, the Jewish section and the African
American section. But one thing that made the peninsula special then, and remains true
today, she added, was that middle and workingclass people could afford a house right
by the beach.
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Woody Allen's Radio Days Clip (YouTube)
“The Boardwalk was a promenade, and you met everyone there,” said Stanley Kreinik, 83,
who started going to the Rockaways for the summer with his family in the 1930s and then
lived there for most of his adult life. Today, he added, his voice lower, “it looks like a piece
of paper that was all torn up.”
Even the houses that dodged the worst of Hurricane Sandy, like Ms. Quinby’s, which she
bought in 2005 for just over half a million dollars with her partner, Matt K. Matsuda, face
stiff challenges. Ms. Quinby and Mr. Matsuda have done what they can, like pumping out
the basement and removing its contents, even down to the flowered wallpaper, left over
from previous owners. But they need a plumber to replace their boiler and a contractor to
help them fend off mold. And these days, the waiting lists for those services are long.
Ms. Quinby’s centuryold house, now gray with white trim, looks much as the mint green
house in the movie did. The front steps where Dianne Wiest, as little boys scooted past, sat
smoking and listening to music on the radio are still far off to one side on a wide porch.
The house was also used for at least some interior shots, Ms. Quinby said, including her
wooden staircase by the front door, still rich with angular details, where Cousin Ruthie sat
eavesdropping on the party line and learned that a neighbor needed to have her ovaries
removed. Ms. Quinby and Mr. Matsuda keep some stills from the movie — shots of the
block, the stairs, the porch — mounted in a frame.
Both Ms. Quinby and Mr. Matsuda are academics, and while they are not very well
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12/5/12 House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes.com
3/3www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/house-featured-in-radio-days-survives-hurricane.html
A version of this article appeared in print on November 27, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: A‘Radio Days’ House Survives the Hurricane.
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qualified to deal with issues like mold remediation, they do have some relevant expertise.
“Catastrophe is what I study,” Ms. Quinby said. “I specialize in doomsday belief in
American culture.”
Mr. Matsuda, a history professor and dean at Rutgers, published a book this year on the
Pacific Ocean, about life on and near the sea.
“We have noted the irony,” Ms. Quinby said.
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