New York
Snapshots of the Seasons in One of New York City’s Last Wild Places
This railroad track hasn’t carried a train across central Queens in 63 years, and it is more strange and more beautiful for it. The Long Island Rail Road’s Rockaway Beach Branch once offered a 30-minute trip from Manhattan to New York City’s ocean beaches. Along the way it traversed three and a half miles of parkland valleys, earthen embankments and concrete viaducts from Forest Hills to Ozone Park.
The line was abandoned in 1962. And so nature pursued its messy designs. Forests grew. Signal towers fell. Coyotes colonized the dark bramble. In Rego Park, a section of track came unmoored from its fastening pins, and the rock ballast eroded. The track swayed free in the wind. A seedling fell between the stones. It became a red maple tree that grew and caught the rail, folding the steel I-beam into its bulbous trunk.
On a chilly day last winter, Jason Hofmann leaned down, framed the scene with his iPhone and took a picture.
“I like the way the branches move in the wind — it creates interesting geometry with the railroad tracks,” said Jason, 17, who lives nearby and occasionally walks the abandoned tracks. “It feels like nature taking over a war zone.”
Most of the old train line is managed by New York’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services. The middle section, a mile-long stretch through Forest Park, is open to the public. The rest lies behind razor wire, wobbly fences and hillsides of poison ivy. A few neighbors improvise ways to get inside, as do a handful of people who sleep under tarps.
“It’s gorgeous,” said Travis Terry, who lives in Forest Hills, three blocks from the old line. “It’s been untouched for 60 years, so you have these great trees. You’re in a forest and then you think to yourself, ‘Wait, I’m in New York City!’”
The locals are joined by especially ardent urban explorers, some of whom take multiple buses and subway trains to get there. They enjoy the abandoned line for its decayed beauty, and because so few people know it’s there.
“It’s under the radar because it’s in Queens, and it’s hard to get to,” said Jeff Seal, a train-loving performer who filmed himself walking the entire line. The video has received 12,000 views since he posted it on YouTube six years ago, which hasn’t done much to raise the Rockaway branch’s profile. “I like that it’s hidden in plain sight,” he said.
The place may not remain hidden for long. Mr. Terry leads Friends of the QueensWay, a nonprofit that hopes to turn the abandoned train line into a linear park similar to the High Line in Manhattan. The group has received $154 million in grants from the city and the federal government, enough to complete the first mile and a half of park construction.
“It’s important for us to utilize every inch,” Mr. Terry said.
Because the Rockaway branch is in New York City, even this forgotten wasteland has become contested ground. A competing group, called QueensLink, hopes to restore train service aboveground, with a new tunnel connecting the branch to the subway system. Cost estimates start around $4 billion and balloon to $9 billion. The group has won $400,000 to study the rail idea from the U.S. Department of Transportation — the same agency that also gave $117 million to QueensWay to build its park.
“It’s a remarkable resource that has to be used,” said Neil C. Giannelli, 70, who has lived along the line for 24 years and supports QueensLink.
In the meantime, the Rockaway branch grows more beautiful for its disuse. To spend a year trespassing the old tracks is to enjoy the infinite overlapping riot of things planted and dead, built up and falling apart.
If the Rockaway Beach Branch becomes a park in Queens it will be thanks in part to the success of the High Line, another once-abandoned train line that opened as a park starting in 2009 and now attracts tourists from around the world.
Robert Hammond is a co-founder of Friends of the High Line, which led the redevelopment effort. To sell his vision, Mr. Hammond asked the photographer Joel Sternfeld if he might take a few snapshots of the abandoned train line.
Between his photo books and museum exhibitions, including a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, Mr. Sternfeld was among the most celebrated art photographers in the world. He agreed to help the High Line, but not for money. His only request was time.
“I need a year of exclusive access,” Mr. Sternfeld recalled telling the group.
Mr. Sternfeld got his year, and keys to the abandoned line. The wet spring dried. Summer weeds bloomed. Though the High Line in the 1990s was a refuge for artists and teenage thrill seekers, Mr. Sternfeld’s pictures included no people. Instead they focused on faint trails bushwhacked into thickets of invasive Ailanthus trees. His pictures, full of leaden skies and muted auburn bramble, lent the High Line the mystique it needed to land powerful backers, Mr. Hammond said, including Diane von Furstenberg and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“For me, it was the seasons,” Mr. Sternfeld said in a recent interview. “I have always been interested in the seasons, and the changing of the seasons.”
A quarter century later, the project to redevelop the Rockaway branch is in the same early phase as the High Line was when Mr. Sternfeld walked it. Yellow lichens dot the rusted steel like polka dots on a necktie. Flocks of blue jays march down the canopy like columns of soldiers, squawking and unafraid. Behind an apartment tower in Rego Park, a high-banked ridge gave way and buried the rail line beneath a slow-moving avalanche of soil.
On a warm day last summer, Alex Cotter left the sidewalk by Yellowstone Boulevard and scrambled onto the steep embankment to the Rockaway branch, using tree roots as handholds to pull himself up. He hoped to see an opossum. Instead he was trapped, dense Ailanthus blocking all northern progress, greenbrier thorns to the south.
“I always thought it would be interesting to go up there, I just never actually did it,” said Mr. Cotter, 28, who grew up near the line in Rego Park. “Maybe I’ll come back when it’s cold.”
Beneath the Yellowstone Boulevard bridge lies a triangle-shaped lot that once was a dumping ground for televisions and car batteries. A decade of free labor turned it into the Compost Collective, where trash is sorted by volunteers and chickens peck one another in a double-decker coop.
At the collective’s winter picnic this December, Anuradha Hashemi stood in the shadow of the quiet train bridge and kept watch over her son’s first bonfire.
“Mom!” said the boy, Obi, 6. “My marshmallow is on fire!”
In the early 2000s, Patrick Mohamed bought a tall, narrow house in Woodhaven. His back patio ended in a cinder-block wall. Just beyond the wall, the Rockaway branch’s embankment rose in a hillside of weeds and trash.
Now Mr. Mohamed is 63, gray at the temples but still quick with his steps. A cold day in February found him in his driveway surrounded by steel barbells, completing his daily exercises. Mr. Mohamed walked to the back of his property, hopped two steps carved into the cinder blocks and climbed into his garden, on land appropriated from the old train line.
Raised tomato beds climbed the hill like a staircase. They were topped with trellises for long beans and bitter melons and small-gauge screen to keep the rabbits out. Where the hill crests, fat terra cotta planters filled with barren soil extended Mr. Mohamed’s domain all the way across the first set of tracks.
Everywhere else in New York, land rights are adjudicated to the square inch. On the Rockaway branch, things are looser. Some homeowners keep their backyards flush with the property line laid down by the railroad. Many have edged their fences back a few feet, claiming space for a shed, a foosball table or a rope swing. Few of Mr. Mohamed’s neighbors are eager to see the line repurposed as a park, which might bring nosy strangers to their backyard retreats.
“I’m worried about people looking in, hurting our privacy,” said Lasha Revia, 46, who carved a stone-lined terrace into the embankment where he hosts family gatherings in summer.
But no one else along the entire three-and-a-half-mile line has pursued a campaign of territorial expansion as successful as Mr. Mohamed’s.
“I built this over 24 years,” he said. “I did it a little piece at a time.”
One man can impose only so much order on a place so riotous. Rather than feel discouraged by the disorder, Mr. Mohamed greets it with delight. In summer, when the garden pruning is finished, he retires to his back deck. He watches darkness descend at its own celestial pace.
“At night it gets really dark back here,” he said. “We get great stars, and the moon comes out really clear.”
When activists gathered last week outside a townhouse in Brooklyn, ready to block law enforcement officers from carrying out an eviction, they were there to fight back against something larger than just one case: the nefarious practice of deed theft, which appears to be on the rise in New York City.
The protest and the ensuing arrests of several people, including the local city councilman, underscored just how fraught the topic is, particularly in historically Black areas of the city that are now rapidly gentrifying. Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week created an office dedicated to fighting deed theft.
But while the episode, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, reflected concerns about a very real problem, the specifics of the case involving the townhouse are anything but clear.
The office of the attorney general, Letitia James, said the case was not an example of deed theft. (When asked about that determination, Ms. James herself said, “It emanated from deed theft”; a spokesman later clarified that she had been referring to the protest and not the case.)
The fact that a woman, Carmella Charrington, was living in the home, which her father had partly owned for decades, is not in dispute. Neither are the facts that an eviction case against Ms. Charrington began nearly two years ago and that she was recently jailed in connection with a separate civil case related to custody of her father, who is 84 and a ward of the State of Georgia.
Still, comments from a number of high-profile city leaders have been confusing and contradictory. The councilman who was arrested, Chi Ossé, has said deed theft took place. So have State Senator Jabari Brisport; Brad Lander, the congressional candidate and former comptroller; and a host of others.
What is the truth? Public records reveal a sad and complicated saga involving several court cases and law enforcement agencies, and spanning generations and at least two states.
What Is Deed Theft?
The term “deed theft” is used to describe fraudulent behavior that can result in longtime homeowners’ losing the rights to their homes. The New York State attorney general’s office received more than 500 complaints of deed theft in New York City last year, more than in the previous two years combined.
The practice can involve thieves misrepresenting themselves as brokers or lenders and tricking someone into signing documents that transfer ownership. Many thieves target older people, sowing confusion over complicated property records or exploiting their trust.
After taking control of the home, the new owner could look to sell it for a profit, rent it out at a high rate, or take out a loan against the property to buy something else.
A Jointly Owned Townhouse
The home at the center of the current debate, at 212 Jefferson Avenue, is a three-story brownstone that was built in 1909, according to Landmarks Preservation Commission records.
At some point in the 1980s, it was owned by two people, property records show: Allman Charrington, Ms. Charrington’s father, and Gertrude Keene, Ms. Charrington’s great-aunt.
Ms. Keene later transferred her share of the property to Clinton Morrison, her son, who in turn passed it to his children when he died.
As recently as 2024, the property was owned jointly by several Morrison children and Mr. Charrington, according to the records.
A Court-Appointed Guardian
In 2020, with Mr. Charrington’s health declining, two of his daughters, including Carmella, filed a petition in probate court in Fulton County, Ga., asking for a court-appointed guardian and conservator to manage his affairs “by reason of mental disability,” according to court records. (Mr. Charrington traveled frequently between New York City and Georgia, where some of his relatives lived.)
Ms. Charrington asserted in the filings that she wanted to be the conservator, saying that her father’s wife, Karen Charrington, was not looking after his best interests. Court records indicate that Mr. Charrington’s wife had signed his property into her name and transferred thousands of dollars out of his bank account. His wife insisted that she had not acted nefariously, but she agreed to return the money and restore the deed, the records show.
Ultimately, the court appointed a lawyer, Luanne Bonnie, in 2021 to be Mr. Charrington’s conservator and to help him manage his property. The court records say that the parties agreed to Ms. Bonnie’s appointment.
Conflict Brews Between Owners
Court records filed in Brooklyn show that in 2019, the Morrison family wanted to sell the Bedford-Stuyvesant home, putting them at odds with Mr. Charrington. Mr. Charrington fired back in court papers that he wanted to be reimbursed for money he had spent over the years on property taxes and maintenance. Both parties failed to show up at court dates and the case was never resolved.
But several years later, with Mr. Charrington under a conservatorship, the probate court in Georgia gave Ms. Bonnie permission to sell the property. In an October 2022 order, Judge Barbara J. Koll said that at least a dozen possible buyers had shied away in previous years because of “the legal difficulties surrounding the existing tenants of the property.” The property had been for sale since 2018, the judge said; it is unclear who listed it, given Mr. Charrington’s opposition.
Property records show that the home was sold in January 2024 to a limited liability company called 227 Group, about which not much is publicly known.
Ms. Charrington, 54, who grew up on the block — in the townhouse and another relative’s home across the street — called the sale fraudulent and unlawful.
She asserts that her father was taken advantage of, and says she brought him to New York in November 2023, without the permission of the state of Georgia, and put him into hiding. She also says that Ms. Bonnie was “unlawfully appointed” and had not followed the proper procedures before agreeing to the sale.
“I think that everything will be able to be peeled back and things will become more concrete,” Ms. Charrington said in an interview. “We want to expose them. I’ve been screaming out for two years that this is deed theft.”
But a lawyer for the Georgia Department of Human Services said in a March 2025 court filing that Ms. Charrington and other relatives had “essentially kidnapped” her father, and were “detaining him against his will.”
Ms. Charrington is still living in the townhouse. It remains unclear where Mr. Charrington is, but his daughter said he was staying with friends and relatives in the New York City area.
She recently posted a video of her father on social media, in which he says he is safe and wants to be left alone.
A Mysterious L.L.C.
According to records filed with the New York Secretary of State, 227 Group is associated with the investors Simon Blitz and Daniel Gazal. Property records list one of its leaders as Andrew Kastein, who is also associated with the investment group P11 Management.
One point of intrigue is that the property records appear to show that 227 Group shares an address with another limited liability company, Brooklyn Gates. That company is linked to a group of investors known to target properties in gentrifying, historically Black and Latino neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant.
An investigation by the news website The City found that while Brooklyn Gates’s practices were largely legal, the company had ended up displacing “dozens of longtime city residents.”
Property records indicate that Brooklyn Gates had moved to buy the townhouse at 212 Jefferson Avenue from the Morrison children in 2021. Video and photographs that Ms. Charrington provided to The New York Times show a man, who Ms. Charrington said is one of the owners of Brooklyn Gates, trying to gain entrance to the property, and then leaving when Ms. Charrington threatens to call the police. The contract was later canceled, and the sale did not go through.
Through a spokesman, 227 Group denied any association with Brooklyn Gates, saying it had been made aware that the property was for sale by a lawyer for the Morrisons and Ms. Bonnie.
The company said in a statement that it had never interacted directly with the Morrison family or with Ms. Bonnie. It also said it does not share an address with Brooklyn Gates, and that the fact that the property records show the same address for both entities stemmed from a filing error.
“We are weighing our legal options against those who are spreading the false and malicious ‘deed theft’ narrative,” the statement reads.
The company said Ms. Charrington had continued “to illegally occupy the property rent-free for over two years” and had prevented representatives of the company from gaining access to it.
A Neighborhood Watch, and a Protest
Before the protest, neighbors and activists had been keeping watch outside the home for months in case officers showed up to evict Ms. Charrington. But the conflict last week involving Mr. Ossé, who said he sustained a concussion after officers wrestled him to the ground for blocking the gate, put a public spotlight on her story.
The announcement of the city’s new office to fight deed theft — though it was already planned when the protest took place — also fueled interest in the case.
And Mr. Ossé has continued to publicly push Gov. Kathy Hochul to issue a moratorium on evictions in cases where deed theft is suspected.
“The community has come together in a way that shows that they are scared,” said William McFadden, Ms. Charrington’s son, who also lives at the Bedford-Stuyvesant house. “How did so much deed theft happen under our noses?”
Thousands of students across New York State this week were unable to finish annual standardized tests after a technological issue disrupted the computer-based exams for the second consecutive year.
Students in grades three through eight from Buffalo to New York City encountered error messages on Wednesday when they tried to log in to their math or English language arts exams, which do not affect students’ ability to advance to the next grade. While some could sign in and complete the tests, others were kicked offline, frustrating students, teachers and parents.
For the past three years, New York State has been transitioning to digital exams, with this spring marking the first time that every student in those grades had to take them on a computer. So when students encountered issues on Wednesday, there were no paper exams available as a backup.
The developer of the state test, NWEA, an educational testing and research group, said it had worked overnight to identify the source of the disruption, which was identified as a problem with a server, and repaired it before school started on Thursday.
After problems emerged a year ago, the company pledged that it would not happen again. The New York State Education Department has awarded $116 million in contracts to NWEA to develop the untimed, federally required assessments.
The repairs this week came too late for many New York City students who were taking the math portion of the state assessment. Education officials in the city had advised principals on Wednesday not to reschedule the math test for the next day out of concern that the system could remain offline.
But some schools resumed the math exams on Thursday after the outage had been resolved, said Dominique Ellison, spokeswoman for the Department of Education. The remaining schools will administer the test in the coming days.
“I know this issue has been challenging and frustrating for schools, students and families who have been working hard in preparation for these exams,” Kamar Samuels, the schools chancellor, said on Wednesday night at a meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, an oversight group.
It was unclear how many students in New York State had to scrap the exams, but the disruption appeared to be widespread. JP O’Hare, a spokesman for the New York State Education Department, said that 116,000 students had taken the tests on Wednesday without problems.
It was also unclear how many students were scheduled to take the exams on Wednesday because school districts have a window of several weeks in April and May in which they can administer the tests. There are about a million third-through-eighth-grade students in the state.
On Wednesday, Buffalo Public Schools stopped all math exams for students, while more than 1,600 students at Zeta Charter Schools in New York City had to give up on their English language arts assessments.
“The current system is failing, creating unnecessary challenges for students, teachers and administrators,” Emily Kim, the chief executive of the charter school network, said. “Our students deserve a testing experience reflecting the same level of preparation, care and accountability we ask of them.”
Bronx | 305 East 140th Street, No. 5A
Mott Haven Loft
$1.35 million
A two-bedroom, one-bath, 1,981-square-foot condo with an open floor plan, bamboo and granite countertops, a den/home office, original hardwood floors and a basement storage cage. The unit is on the top floor of a five-story former factory from 1901 that has a virtual intercom, a super, shared laundry and a bike room. Tano Holmes and Victor Banks, Century 21; century21.com
Costs
Common charges: $1,456 a month
Taxes: $9,240 a year
Pro
In-unit washer/dryers are permitted and an area near the kitchen can accommodate a laundry room or second bathroom. The ceilings reach 12 feet. The building is eco-friendly and has solar panels to reduce electricity costs.
Cons
It’s a big space to cool with window unit air-conditioning.
Manhattan | 467 Central Park West, No. 12F
Manhattan Valley Condo
$1.75 million
A two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,152-square-foot apartment that has a windowed kitchen with a pass-through to a breakfast bar, an open floor plan, a primary suite, a second bedroom with a walk-in closet, a windowed bath, built-ins, a decorative fireplace and wide-plank oak floors. It’s on the 12th floor of a 17-story prewar doorman building that has a live-in superintendent, a bike room, shared laundry and a waiting list for extra storage. Jed Lewin, The Agency; theagencyre.com
Costs
Common charges: $1,350 a month
Taxes: $1,098 a month
Assessment: $374 a month through January 2028, for updates to the building’s exterior
Pros
The kitchen has two windows, a six-burner range and ample counter space. The view includes Central Park and Billionaire’s Row.
Cons
In-unit washer/dryers are not permitted.
Manhattan | 146 E 49th Street, No. 2B
Turtle Bay Co-op
$715,000
A two-bedroom, one-bath, roughly 940-square-foot apartment that has a windowed eat-in kitchen, an open living/dining area, a windowed bathroom and original hardwood floors. It’s on the second floor of a 10-story building by Emory Roth with a live-in super and shared laundry. Laura Cook and Adam Wolfe, Keller Williams NYC; kwnyc.com
Costs
Maintenance: $2,583 a month
Pros
Use as a pied-à-terre, subletting after two years of residency and an in-unit washer/dryer are permitted with board approval.
Cons
The view consists of only nearby buildings. The second bedroom does not have a closet. The building lacks a bike room and there’s a waiting list for basement storage cages.
Given the fast pace of the current market, some properties may no longer be available at the time of publication.
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