Project for a Trip to the Golden Venture Crash Site
Rockaway Beach. Via Wikimedia Commons. On a pre-dawn morning in June, twenty-five years ago, a rusty freighter, the Golden Venture, ran aground off the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York. More than 280 Chinese migrants in its cargo hold leapt into the churning, freezing surf below. When the news broke about the incident, I was living in the Bay Area. Now I live in Brooklyn, about fifteen miles from the shoreline where it all went down.To make contact across time, I set out to find the site where the freighter crashed.
There’s no physical marker commemorating the spot where the Golden Venture made landfall. All I had to go on were vague references from news accounts and a tip I’d gotten that the site was somewhere close to the Silver Gull Beach Club, a private cabana that has occupied a strip of public beach for more than fifty years. I’d never heard of the Silver Gull until that moment. It was the closest thing to a destination I had to work with.
On the far edge of the Rockaways, the sky was so immense it seemed to swallow sound. There were no tall buildings to block the winds blowing in from the Atlantic. Even though it was spring, the winter hadn’t entirely lifted. The air was sharp. I took the Q22 bus and got off at the end of the line at the
