Living In | Broad Channel, Queens: Close to Nature, and the Airport

TAKE the A train to its less famous, unhurried end. Pay attention after it rises above ground and starts cutting through water. One stop before you hit Rockaway Peninsula and the Atlantic Ocean, get out.

You’re in Broad Channel, an island in the middle of Jamaica Bay, tethered to Queens by bridges. Squadrons of Brandt geese touch down on one side, planes lift off at Kennedy Airport at the other, and Midtown Manhattan is an hour and a world away.

Walk north on the bike path, rubbing shoulders with thickets of reed grass. Cut across the main drag to enter the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and follow signs to West Pond.

A wildlife refuge — near a subway stop? That isn’t the only surprise out this way. Never mind ospreys jury-rigging homes on the tops of poles. Out here some people nest on poles too, vintage inhabiting houses built on stilts.

Stand on the main drag and you can almost touch water on both sides. Egrets pick their way meticulously through the mud flats, acting as if they owned the place. Let them distract you and you’ll miss the Manhattan skyline, way off to the west.

One skinny mile long, Broad Channel has a bridge to Howard Beach at one end, and to Far Rockaway at the other. Nondescript houses hunker down on Cross Bay Boulevard, the main street; the post office is tucked inside the pharmacy, and fliers for V.F.W. fund-raisers are stuck in store windows. “You can’t imagine it’s in New York City,” said one newcomer, Xavier Amirault, who migrated to Broad Channel by way of the Upper West Side.

Yet Mr. Amirault, a Frenchman who grew up in the Loire Valley, says that he and his wife, Agn?s, and their young children feel right at home. They sail their boat right up to the house. He jumps on the subway when he has to be downtown and onto a plane at Kennedy Airport when he must travel for work. Meanwhile, along with low housing costs, he said, “we are enjoying hundreds of birds.”

“For somebody in love with nature, it’s a strong point,” he added.

Or, to paraphrase, sometimes the best way to experience Manhattan is from a distance.

Audrey Irwin and her husband, Dean, first visited Broad Channel last winter, arriving on a day “so icy the steps of the house we looked at were covered with a mound of white and you had to hang onto the banister to get up the steps,” she said. But they signed a lease on a weekend retreat. Offering a pleasantly sharp contrast with their Manhattan home base, it sits on a canal, a parking lot for birds “who let us know they’re out there,” Ms. Irwin said.

“Someone said it’s an acquired taste, and I believe that’s true — it can be pretty funky,” she said. “But it can also be picturesque, and I’m kind of charmed by it.”

Amid thickly strung telephone poles, and chain-link fences guarding worn plaster statues, there is only a hint of a downtown: a deli, a pizza joint, a Century 21 office and Wharton’s Apothecary, recently built in a canned-quaint style.

Poke around on East 12th Road and you’ll find a listing T-shape boardwalk linking vintage pole houses erected to escape the moon tide. It’s “like stepping back 50 years ago,” said Delores D’Ambrosio, the proprietor of Smitty’s Fishing Station, itself nearly 70 years old.

What You’ll Find

The main attraction is the Wildlife Refuge, 9,000 acres of bird-rich marsh and sand at the northern end of the island. In winter, snow geese land at West Pond, a Robert Moses legacy that ought to be called Duck Soup: at this time of year look for ruddies, greater scaups, Northern pintails, American widgeons and gadwalls. All around, goldenrod, Virginia creeper and Pennsylvania smartweed. Nowhere to be seen: beaches, grocery stores or Duane Reades.

On one recent autumn day, a group of birders traipsed past West Pond as Don Riepe, the former manager of the refuge, led the way. Lime-green cloudless sulphur butterflies dancing above the grass were far from their usual southern territory and “pushing the limits,” he said, adding, “There are always individuals that don’t follow the rules.”

He might as well have been talking about Broad Channel’s original settlers, borne out of Brooklyn in boats, or over a trestle and tracks built around 1880 (becoming the subway line in 1956).

Although entrepreneurs built hotels and etched a hardened shoreline with canals, the city was Broad Channel’s landlord, leasing but not selling land to people who built bungalows and pole houses. According to Margaret Wagner, an associate with Century 21, the houses changed hands within families and among friends.

Her brother Charles W. Howard, a longtime resident who made a fortune in portable toilets, built the new apothecary in town and is at work on a medical center there.

Ms. Wagner says her great-grandfather, a fireman, came from Brooklyn during the summers and decided to stay year-round, “traveling over to Rockaway by boat in the summer and by train in the winter.”

After more than a bit of lobbying, the city agreed in 1982 to start selling the land, and the real estate market “broke loose,” said Dan Mundy, a retired fire department captain and president of the Broad Channel Civic Association. “Now people can get home equity loans and mortgages. Most of the old one-story buildings have been renovated and now we’re going into a new era, where people are knocking them down and building McMansions.”

Today Broad Channel has about 900 homes and 2,700 residents living with the tides along a half-mile-wide strip. It has been described as insular, particularly in view of two racially charged incidents: in 1998 two firefighters and a police officer appeared in blackface at the parade, and during Halloween last year three white men threw eggs at a police car and two of them attacked the driver, a black detective.

Residents say these images fail to represent a neighborhood with virtually no crime this year and an impressive esprit de corps. There are boat clubs and a theater group, and the environmental groups are so tough they twisted arms at the Army Corps of Engineers to restore some protective marshes. “It’s gained a reputation as feisty,” said Barbara Toborg, who is active in the Broad Channel Historical Society. “We’ve gotten good at petitioning and cajoling politicians to our point of view.”

Geography dictates a “strong sense of place,” Ms. Toborg said. “We’re a very discrete town — we know where we start and end.”

What You’ll Pay

With many three-generation homeowners, the area does not see a lot of turnover. There are about a dozen properties on the market. One- and two-bedroom bungalows on Cross Bay Boulevard go for $300,000 to $450,000, while larger houses on the water start at $350,000 and sometimes top $850,000.

Prices have inched up not only because of the general boom but because the city is gradually adding services and amenities, from sewer lines to a small library and a neighborhood park. Mr. Riepe says the house he bought 25 years ago for $10,000 is now assessed at $470,000. In 2003, the Amiraults paid $360,000 for their three-bedroom.

Francine Hamill, a real estate agent in Broad Channel, says it is “a diamond in the rough” because property taxes are so low. She pointed to one house on the water with taxes, she said, at $650 a year; Mr. Amirault pays about $1,000.

Two footnotes: Flooding can be an issue, especially on lower-numbered roads. And any construction on the water has to be cleared by an assortment of city and state agencies.

What to Do

Bike, bird, boat, fish.

A bicycle path trails up Cross Bay Boulevard, and it’s an easy walk from the subway to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Take a gravel trail on a 1.5-mile loop around the 45-acre expanse of duck and goose runways called West Pond. Smitty’s (301 East Ninth Road) rents small boats for $85 a day. It is open on weekends until the middle of November, reopening on April 1. People fish, but the bay can be dicey for swimming.

The Schools

Broad Channel has only one school — Chris Galas School, Public School 47 — and it covers prekindergarten through Grade 8. With about 270 students and just one class per grade, “it’s very unique,” said the principal, Patricia Tubridy, explaining that the school deploys its graduates to high schools “all over the city” — meaning not just Queens. Last academic year, 75 percent of students in Grades 3 through 8 tested at their grade level or higher in English language arts, and 91 percent achieved grade level or higher in math, compared with 56 and 65 percent citywide.

The Commute

The subway station is within walking distance of just about everywhere, and once you board the A train, which can involve a wait, it’s roughly 50 minutes to Midtown. Driving takes at least an hour.

Coming back, the A train bifurcates before Broad Channel. Take the one to Rockaway, not Lefferts Boulevard. By the time it reaches Broad Channel, you may have the car to yourself.

The History

In the 1880s the island was mainly a getaway for day-trippers lured by bay breezes, enterprising hotelkeepers and a Long Island Rail Road spur. One early account describes mob scenes at the station on Sunday nights, when errant city dwellers would fight for seats by climbing through the windows.

Stragglers imported houses on barges or built rough bungalows on sandy “streets,” often making a living off the bay’s shrimp and fish. According to the Historical Society, the first contemporary baby born on the island arrived in 1912. A private concern leased land from the city from around 1915 to 1939, aiming to build a “little Venice.”

Pollution shut down shell-fishing in the 1920s, and with runoff from the airport and occasional sewage overflows, keeping the bay clean has been a struggle ever since. The first households were mainly German and Irish, followed by Italians. Hispanic and black families are now a small part of the mix.