Long-vacant MTA storefronts on Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park are about to get a new life as a community hub that shape-shifts from a youth skate and art workshop by day into a bar with a stage and DJ booth by night. The 3,000-square-foot space is the next project from St. James founder Jimmy Dowd, whose board-sports apparel brand has chronicled Rockaway's surf and skate culture since he started it in 1999.
From Vacant Storefronts to a Year-Round Hub
According to The Rockaway Times, St. James plans to fill the long-vacant storefronts with youth workshops, a skate ramp, an event venue, a bar and a boutique, with gallery nights where students can show off their own artwork and merchandise. Dowd described the planned venue as a community hub meant for multiple generations and age groups, and said work on the project is already underway. He's been scouting potential locations for St. James for roughly a decade before landing on the Beach 116th Street storefronts, which sit on the same block as Bagel and Barista.
The daytime-to-nighttime pivot is central to the plan. Once youth programming wraps each day, the same space is set to shift into adult programming featuring a full bar, a stage and a DJ booth, per the same account. St. James also intends to host special events like live bands and poetry nights, and the venue will be available for private bookings as well.
A Howard Beach Native's Decades in Rockaway
Dowd, a Howard Beach native, has spent decades contributing to Rockaway's surfing and skating community. He co-founded Rockstock & Barrels, the oceanfront surf, skate, art and music festival that drew thousands of attendees to the Rockaway Beach boardwalk when it marked its 20th anniversary in June, according to The Rockaway Times. The festival gives young athletes and musicians a chance to show off their skills alongside local vendors and volleyball.
Dowd's track record with youth infrastructure goes back further. After Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012, he and local skaters built and maintained a wooden DIY skate park for seven years, raising money to keep it running while advocating for something permanent. That advocacy paid off in August 2020, when the NYC Parks Department opened a $3.537 million, 16,000-square-foot concrete skate park beside the boardwalk at Beach 92nd Street, as The Wave reported at the time. Dowd's civic involvement dates back even further to 2005, when the NYC Parks Department approved requests from him and Rockstock co-founder Steve Stathis to establish Beach 90th Street as New York City's first official legal surfing beach, according to Rockstock NYC. Beyond St. James, Dowd is also co-owner of Boarders Surf Shop in Rockaway Beach alongside the Stathis family, having relocated to Rockaway after working in Manhattan skateboard retail during the 1990s, per the shop's own team page.
Building a Pipeline From Workshop to Boutique
The planned programming reads like a pipeline rather than a grab-bag of classes. St. James intends to offer skateboarding camps and lessons, music instruction, art classes, graphic design, video editing, photography and screen printing, with the classes designed to build on one another through creation, digitization, design and printing of student artwork. Dowd said the goal is to teach students how to brand their own merchandise and potentially create pop-up shops, framing it as mentorship: a 13-year-old, he said, could learn in the program a process that took him 20 years to master.
St. James hopes to eventually hold student art exhibitions open to the whole community and provide a performance space for young musicians and bands. The brand's existing website already sells apparel, merchandise, surfboards and skateboards alongside custom orders, and the company has produced graphics, films and videos documenting Rockaway's board-sports community over the years.
A Neighbor's Legacy and a Winter Target
Dowd credited Rob Pisani, who runs Bagel and Barista next door, for his contributions to the neighborhood, noting Pisani helped launch 116th Street's Fall Festival and Spring Fling. No opening date has been set, but Dowd said the team hopes to open during the winter so local residents can experience the space before summer crowds arrive. Certain parts of the project still can't move forward until MTA inspections are passed, and the plan is to give the local community the first opportunity to enjoy the space while the team works out any remaining problems.
Part of a Wider Beach 116th Street Push
The St. James buildout lands amid a broader wave of investment on the corridor. Hoodline has reported on a new Carvel-Cinnabon-Auntie Anne's lease nearby, part of a trend toward multi-brand destination retail on the strip, and on MTA upgrades to the Rockaway Park Shuttle's train cars at the Beach 116th Street terminal. Beach 116th Street already anchors Rockaway Park's commercial life, with mixed-use developments like the 130,000-square-foot One Sixteen complex offering ground-floor retail beneath residential condos just steps from the subway terminal and NYC Ferry access. That density traces back to a 2008 New York City Planning Commission rezoning that up-zoned transit-adjacent blocks to encourage multi-story mixed-use development along the corridor. The block is also home to the landmark FDNY Engine 268 / Ladder 137 firehouse, built in 1912-1913 and designated an official city landmark in 2013. Queens Community Board 14 coordinates seasonal public safety coverage with NYPD Transit District 23, placing dedicated transit officers at the Beach 116th Street terminal during peak summer beach months, giving Dowd's planned evening programming a built-in layer of transit-adjacent oversight once the venue opens.
