Breezy Point isn’t next to the beach—it more or less is the beach. It’s a community built on sand. Occupying the Rockaway Peninsula that juts out of Queens, NY and into the Atlantic Ocean, residents are never more than a few minutes’ walk to the brackish bays that surround the thin strip of land. The flat landscape and many of the alleys and parking lots swim in loose drifts of sand. It’s not hard to see why this area was so badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy five years ago.