House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes by Courtney Ross

12/5/12

House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes.com

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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.

www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/house-featured-in-radio-days-survives-hurricane.html

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House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes.com Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“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.” The exterior of the house.

(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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“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.

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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

www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/house-featured-in-radio-days-survives-hurricane.html

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House Featured in ‘Radio Days’ Survives Hurricane - NYTimes.com

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. 1

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. SAVE

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