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One on Coney Island

Boardwalk Life: Peddling Ice Cream, Praying for Sun
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

IF you take the Q train on the long ride through Brooklyn, drifting past the tar roofs and skylights of three-story houses along miles of elevated track, you'll come to the next-to-the-last stop on the line, at West Eighth Street, near the Coney Island aquarium.

Down the steps from the elevated, the first sign you see is not for the aquarium but for Gregory and Paul's. Theirs is the first stand on the Boardwalk, between the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel, the one topped by a kitschy-looking aluminum rocket.

Paul Georgoulakos, the Paul in Gregory and Paul, has been selling hand-cut French fries, clams, breaded shrimp and soft ice-cream on the Boardwalk for 50 years. He is 76, dapper in a black leather jacket, tweedy hat and brown corduroy slacks. He arrived in New York as a teenager, fresh off the boat from Greece, expecting to become an apprentice typewriter mechanic.

Thank goodness he didn't stick with typewriters. Typewriters are dead. But whether Coney Island is up or down, and the subject of its health has been endlessly debated, with the recent verdict being that better times lie ahead, it has been good to Paul Georgoulakos.

Memorial Day weekend is the official opening weekend of summer. The seasonal rhythms faltered nine days ago when a single-engine plane crashed into the sand, killing four people. But within a few days, the wreckage was gone, the funerals were past, and the sand had been swept clean by the tide. Extraordinary events, like a plane crashing, may come and go, but the ocean, the sand, and Gregory and Paul's go on forever.

For Mr. Georgoulakos, life has been a series of endless summers, hard work and luck. Don't forget the part about luck. He had three lucky breaks in his life. "The first was, I came to America. The second was, I met my wife. The third was, I met my partner." His wife has Alzheimer's now, but he still considers himself lucky.

Mr. Georgoulakos was maybe 19 when he started working at a milk bar under the BMT station. The owner liked him and offered him a partnership in return for a $500 deposit. Mr. Georgoulakos's father refused to lend his son the money, saying he was too young, so the boy turned to his aunt Julia, who owned a diner with her husband. She agreed to give her nephew the loan but insisted that he pay it back in strict installments. That was his first lesson in the value of money.

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As a serviceman during the Korean War, Mr. Georgoulakos learned to cut hair. Out of the army, he went for his barber's license, and got as far as the elevator on Chambers Street. "I said to myself: 'You're going to become a barber?' I made a U-turn and went home."

Back at the milk bar, he met his future partner, Gregory Bitetzakis. And when a beautiful young woman from Greece named Alkimini delivered a box of chocolates to his house, he met his wife.

The two men have survived displacement by fire, the Rockefeller family, which once bought the land under them, and municipal cunning. Just recently, an undercover agent dressed as a Hasidic Jew was out trolling for merchants selling beer to under-age drinkers. (The police said they don't comment on undercover operations.)

A few days before Memorial Day weekend, under gray skies and drizzling rain, Mr. Georgoulakos, a cousin from the old country, whom I had heard of but never met, was the only food stand open on the Boardwalk, catching what his partner called the first dollar and the last dollar. "The business is the weather," Mr. Georgoulakos said. "It's 12 good weekends to make your money, and usually you never catch every one of them."

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Nick Serbes, the refrigerator repairman, was checking the freezers. "Is everything all right, chief?" Mr. Georgoulakos asked.

"Yeah, baby," Mr. Serbes replied. "Let me check out the clams, see if they're O.K." He squeezed lemon on a raw clam and gulped it down. "Clams are good. Want me to inspect the shrimp?"

"No!" Mr. Georgoulakos snapped, alarmed by Mr. Serbes's appetite.

The ponytailed Boardwalk supervisor, nicknamed Mr. Duke, a ringer for the Doonesbury character, sought Mr. Georgoulakos's blessing for opening day. A group of schoolchildren from East Harlem wanted ice cream. Mr. Georgoulakos vaulted over the counter with practiced smoothness so he could serve them himself. Sensing opportunity, the refrigeration man wolfed a paper plate of souvlaki. "Every year, I say this is my last," Mr. Georgoulakos said. "And here I am."

One on surfing.

Surfin' N.Y.C.? It's Not Malibu, but a Queens Beach Will Do
By JIM RUTENBERG

At first, Stacey Akerson did not know what they were - those oblong, shrouded objects that she first began spotting a couple of years ago, affixed to the tops of cars on the streets of Brooklyn. "You always wondered, what's that up there, covered up?" she said.

Now Ms. Akerson, a gas station attendant at a BP in Bedford-Stuyvesant, knows exactly what they are: surfboards. Her dentist and former art teacher have them. And, incongruous as the scene remains, she barely bats an eye these days as they whiz by her gritty corner of Atlantic and Brooklyn Avenues, on the way to the beach about 12 miles away.

"You see them on top of cars, vans, you see a lot of them," she said, "going to Rockaway Beach, driving past, stopping for gas."

New York is not yet Surf Town U.S.A., but like other spots along the East Coast, it is the scene of a boom in surfing - not Web surfing, not subway surfing, but the kind you do on waves, in the ocean, in Queens.

The city's formal arrival as a recognized surfing destination came last month, when the Parks Department designated a four-block stretch of Rockaway Beach for surfing only.

But that was only testament to what an intrepid few have known for decades, and an explosion of new surfers have come to understand in the last few years, to the growing alarm of the old-timers: a real surf break is just a subway ride away - and closer by car to downtown Manhattan than Malibu is to downtown Los Angeles.

Nobody would confuse the Rockaways with the southern coast of California; rather than cliffs and hills, surfers facing inland see a lonely boardwalk set against battered high-rises, weathered bungalows and a promising sprinkling of new homes. At low tide it is not rocky beach they see at the water's edge, but a menacing row of pylons that nature has whittled into sharp spikes.

But most surfers go there for the waves, and those can be as good as any in more distant spots of Long Island and New Jersey - and, on a very good day during the late hurricane season, almost as good as anywhere else.

Vincent Szarek, 31, said the scenery can be so dreary that he tends to face the much more serene horizon, not the beach, whenever possible. "When I'm out here, I try not to turn around unless I'm on the wave," he said.

The water seems surprisingly clean, though some surfers say they keep their mouths shut when they go under during a wipeout, if only out of paranoia.

Mr. Szarek was among about 10 people out for a dawn session, undeterred by overcast skies and water and air temperatures in the 50's. They were drawn by conditions for which many surfers are willing to risk trouble with the boss: offshore winds with a chest-high swell, making for some well-formed peaks and clean walls of water.

Joel Banslaben, chairman of the local branch of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group for board-riding enthusiasts, estimates that there are now up to 2,500 regular surfers in the summer at Rockaway Beach. When the breakers are at their best, and the weather is warm, the four-block surfing stretch can draw crowds of 50 people, a number that astounds some of the beach's longtime surfers.

"You can paddle out, and you don't see any locals anymore," said Buddy Sammis, a retired firefighter who said he had been riding waves in the Rockaways for 40 years. "There's people from all over the place, you know: Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan." He said the crowd had grown tenfold in the last decade, and several other surfers estimated that the number of regular surfers at any given time during the summer had grown 50 to 100 percent in the last few years.

This is not welcome news to some. A number of visitors to the Web site newyorksurf.com have voiced alarm. In one sample, a surfer complained: "It's over, it's blown up, we're doomed. This summer is gonna be a madhouse."

The anxiety has only gotten worse after the announcement last month of surfing-only status in the Rockaways spot. The news meant an end to the ticketing of surfers when lifeguards are not on duty, but also a new round of attention in the news media.

One solid indication of the sport's growth here is the number of local members of the Surfrider Foundation: 750, up 50 percent from 500, just last year, according to Mr. Banslaben, the group's chairman.

Signs of the sport's growth in New York are apparent: the thinning stock of boards at places like Quiksilver, a surf shop on Spring Street in SoHo, where boards were once more likely to collect dust than be sold (five sold in one week, an employee said); the placement of two Web cameras in the Rockaways last year by Surfline.com, an international surf monitoring service; the opening of the Hurricane Hopeful restaurant and bar as a surf hangout in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

With vintage boards and surfing photographs, the restaurant was first taken as a sort of joke by some when it opened a few years ago, some 15 miles from the nearest beach; now it is a regular stop for homegrown and visiting surfers alike.

Spots throughout the East Coast are reporting similar increases in surfers, from East Hampton, N.Y., to Folly Beach, S.C., to West Palm Beach, Fla. The new popularity of surfing has followed a media fascination that was reignited by the movie "Blue Crush" in 2002 and has continued through countless commercials.

Yet other surfing booms have not included New York City to this extent. Mr. Banslaben of Surfrider said the trend may be related to new technologies that have made wet suits warmer, and in turn made the area's often frigid waters more inviting.

But a number of newer New York surfers here said they picked the sport up for a simple reason: they realized that they could.

James Graham, 52, said he had always dreamed of surfing and decided to try it when he was laid off from his Wall Street job four years ago. "I got a settlement and bought a board and a wetsuit for my first purchase," said Mr. Graham, who lives in the East Village and now spends his days surfing or painting. "With no traffic, it takes, like, 35 minutes."

Harry Lee, 32, a designer from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said he decided to try the sport a few years ago when friends told him how accessible the Rockaways were. Now he is hooked, often going before work. "It's like you're in a different world," he said, lounging in his wet suit on the beach on a recent Saturday. "You can be here and then several hours later riding the subway in Manhattan. It's kind of a good feeling; it gives you something to go off of."

This is not to say that being a New York City surfer is easy. It often means lugging a cumbersome board down five flights of stairs to the car, or, for those who do not drive, to the subway platform.

Preparing for a Thursday morning surf session, Mark Switzer, 45, pointed to a repair he made to his nine-foot fiberglass board after it fell on a staircase. But he added: "If I couldn't do it here I would move somewhere else where I could. It's really important to me."