SANDY’S
DEVASTATION
Nature will always win because she
plays with a stacked deck. And unless we live with nature and accept
the setbacks and all that we have
to do, we’re in trouble.”
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
A FAMILY’S CHOICE
More than a week after the storm,
Vinny Baccale and his family still
hadn’t learned the identity of the
man who they believe they saw
die outside their window on Staten Island. He was likely one of the
21 drowning victims discovered
in the storm’s wake there, a death
toll more than half as high as the
entire city’s.
Baccale’s family has weathered
floods before, but as his wife repeated in the days after the storm,
they never imagined that the
neighborhood might prove to be
a watery death trap. “Never in a
million years,” she said.
Baccale’s wife, Tracey, traces
her roots in the area back three
generations. Her grandfather, a
railroad worker from the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, spent
summers there when it was still
more a bungalow community than
a neighborhood.
Tracey’s father grew up there
year-round and eventually tore
down their bungalow and replaced
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
it with a pair of two-story homes.
By the time Tracey came along,
the neighborhood was so densely
developed that the family would
flee the city in the summer for the
Jersey Shore.
Nearly a century after her
grandfather found a respite from
the crowded West Side on that
peaceful plot of seaside property, she’s now questioning the
wisdom of rebuilding. Unlike the
bungalows that still dot the neighborhood, her two-story house is
mostly salvageable — a beacon
of relative stability amid homes
knocked off their foundations,
cars awaiting the junkyard, and
the gutted interiors of countless
rec rooms and dens.
Yet she doubts that she’ll ever
again feel invulnerable to the
ocean that lured her family there
in the first place. As she and her
husband and two kids bide their
time in her mother’s apartment
on higher ground, she says she’s
been dwelling on the shift in the
weather that brought chaos and
terror to her neighborhood.
“I’m contemplating not even
living there anymore,” she said. “I
kind of feel like this is the
start of something new.”
Joy Resmovits, Janell Ross, Lila
Shapiro and Joe Van Brussel contributed reporting.