For decades, unfinished concrete apartment towers stood near Breezy Point at the end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Planned as housing for a broader public, the project faced intense local opposition and was never completed. Adjacent Breezy Point, sometimes called the “Irish Riviera,” developed as an unusually homogeneous cooperative community within one of the world’s most diverse cities. The abandoned towers were eventually demolished and the land became parkland.

I photographed the unfinished towers near Breezy Point in 1976. Years later, their history connected for me with my own experience of going through a co-op board interview and feeling the oddness of strangers deciding whether I was a suitable person to live among them. I was being evaluated for fit, not systematically excluded, but the experience gave me a small window into the larger history embedded in this place.