She was a once-in-a-century storm, but in terms of lost memories and destroyed treasures, Sandy was forever.
It obliterated New Jersey’s historic boardwalks and wrecked Long Island’s power lines. Its floodwaters inundated downtown Manhattan and filled subway and traffic tunnels. Its 13-foot surge unleashed the ocean on thousands of homes in the Rockaways and Staten Island.
The Oct. 28-29 superstorm claimed 43 lives in New York City and wreaked some of the worst human suffering and property damage ever witnessed here.
From Gerritsen Beach to Pelham Bay, the hurricane uprooted as many as 40,000 people. Sandy devoured more than 8,000 street trees alone. Hundreds of homes burned down or were swept away, and tens of thousands need emergency repairs.
But most of the subways and tunnels are back, power is flowing, and tough-as-nails New Yorkers are rebuilding their homes and lives.
Yet full recovery may never be possible for these New York City icons:
The site of Old Orchard Shoal Lighthouse after Hurricane Sandy (Doug Kuntz)
Green-Wood Cemetery’s Angel after the storm (J.C. Rice)
Damaged Torah scrolls at a Brighton Beach synagogue (Angel Chevrestt)
The damaged Shore Theater sign (ZUMAPRESS.com)
Old Orchard Shoal Lighthouse
The beacon three miles off Staten Island in Raritan Bay had withstood countless nor’easters and hurricanes in its 119-year history but washed away in Sandy’s monstrous surge.
The 35-foot-wide, 51-foot-high cast-iron tower was built in the “spark plug” style by the federal Lighthouse Board with $60,000 in congressional funds in 1893. It was a trusty navigational aid for mariners, who moved 15,000 tons of shipping through the narrow, shallow Gedway Channel.
The lighthouse was manned until 1955, when its beacon and bell were automated.
Now the only sign it ever existed is the rocky outcropping that had served as its foundation.
“It was one of the key lighthouses on our tour,” said Linda Dianto, executive director of the Staten Island-based National Lighthouse Museum.
“When we arrived, the cormorant birds were there waiting for us.”
Green-Wood Cemetery’s Angel
“The Lloyd Angel” — a 150-year-old marble statue in front of 19th-century painter William Holbrook Beard’s burial plot — lost its head, an arm and part of a wing in the 90-mph gusts.
About 150 trees were uprooted, and at least 100 monuments were maimed in Brooklyn’s 174-year-old cemetery, the resting place of Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Horace Greeley.
“It’s the worst we’ve seen in 40 years,” said cemetery President Richard Moylan.
Sacred scrolls, Brighton Beach
A rare Babylonian Talmud printed in the 1800s — along with two sacred 50-year-old Torahs — were destroyed when floodwaters breached a safe in the basement of a synagogue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
The damaged holy book, printed in Lithuania in the Babylonian form, has now been buried in accordance with Jewish law.
It was one of 115 prayer books and other texts that rabbis at the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe Synagogue and Community Center could not salvage in the wreckage. A Crown Heights scribe is surveying the damaged torahs, and it could cost the congregation thousands of dollars to save them.’
The Shore Theater sign, Coney Island
The red and yellow sign that adorned the abandoned Shore Theater on Surf Avenue since 1925 was mangled. The theater once hosted Al Jolson and Jerry Lewis, but it had fallen into disrepair since the ’70s, when it was an X-rated movie house.
Nearby, another icon, the Spook-A-Rama ride, was flooded — with its Dracula and other attractions meeting a ghastly end.
“They’ve survived terrorist attacks and world wars, but not Sandy,” co-owner Dennis Vourderis said.