“Getting up in the morning, I’d rush downstairs before work—and step into a foot or so of icy-cold Jamaica says Patrick Clark, who rescued this 1880s shingled cottage set close to the shore. “I hadn’t seen the water myself until after I bought the house and lived here.” His vernacular house, surrounded by wild sea grasses, sits in the lowest elevation in Rockaway, which is the far-flung, seaside corner of Queens, a borough of New York City.
