How Fire Island Was Saved — For Now

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22 EXTREME WEATHER [How Fire Island Was Saved — For Now]( After a winter of brutal storms, the Feds stepped in with a pile of very expensive sand. But it’s just a Band-Aid. Photo: John Roca On Monday, February 19, trucks full of sand began to arrive on what was left of the beach at Fire Island Pines as part of the effort to reinforce the dunes that had been washed away. Earlier this month, teams contracted by the Army Corps of Engineers had pumped 20,000 cubic yards of sand from about a mile out onto the shores of another Fire Island community, Ocean Beach. Suffolk County then worked toward distributing the sand by truck to a string of imperiled beach towns heading east along the barrier island, including the one I have spent two decades going to, the Pines. The sand dump, which took some political wrangling to make happen so quickly — unsurprisingly, the Army Corps is a bureaucratic organization and hard to budge — was an emergency effort necessitated by a series of vicious and, in their frequency, unprecedented storms over the past two winters that had essentially [erased]( stretches of a $207 million beach-fortification effort that had been completed in 2019. The project had been designed to withstand a 44-year storm event but got Swiffered away in four. [Continue reading »]( Want more on city life, real estate, and design? [Subscribe now]( to save over 40% on unlimited access to Curbed and everything New York. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [Christopher Wool Turned an Empty Office Into a Gallery The artist’s team spent months ruling out too-stylish commercial spaces.]( By Adriane Quinlan [A West Village Two-Bedroom and a Sprawling Windsor Terrace Co-op Plus, an Upper West Side prewar with custom built-ins.]( By Kim Velsey [How to Build a House for Leonard Bernstein Maestro production designer Kevin Thompson on filming in the conductor’s actual Connecticut home (and going through his junk drawers).]( By Nora DeLigter [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( [Sign up to get The Listings Edit](, a weekly digest of the most worth-it apartments in New York. [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2024, All rights reserved