Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
ON THE JOB Ed Shevlin, a sanitation worker from the Rockaways, said: “I’ll be wearing this uniform every day for months.”
ED SHEVLIN looked out over a mountain range of soggy trash in the parking lot of Jacob Riis Park in Queens and proclaimed it “an tubaiste mor” — a big disaster.
The words were in Irish, the language that survives in parts of Ireland. Few people in New York City are as immersed in the language as Mr. Shevlin, 52, a New York City sanitation worker who picked up phrases growing up in a heavily Irish-American neighborhood the Rockaways. He began to study it and banter with Irish immigrants on his trash route through familiar blocks.
And now few people are as deeply immersed in the damage wreaked upon the neighborhood as Mr. Shevlin, who for the foreseeable future is assigned to the immense cleanup: clearing battered sections of the boardwalk where he played as a child, and carting away contents of friends’ houses.
It is all hauled to the parking lot: a temporary dump with the remnants of people’s lives piled several stories high in two wide dunes stretching for a quarter mile.
“If these piles could talk, they’d be screaming,” said Mr. Shevlin, whose own apartment on Beach 103rd Street stayed dry, if without power as of Thursday. His parents’ apartment, and his brother’s house, were both flooded and severely damaged.
“I like to think I’m a strong guy, but this devastation has really gotten to me,” said Mr. Shevlin, who wears his green Department of Sanitation uniform proudly.
“I’ll be wearing this uniform every day for months,” he said. “We were the first boots on the ground and we’ll be the last to leave.”
Mr. Shevlin was profiled a year ago in this space, as the subject of the inaugural Character Study column. Hurricane Sandy’s effects seem to have permeated New York City so deeply that nearly every one of the 50 or so New Yorkers who followed Mr. Shevlin in the column has had a telling hurricane experience.
There was good fortune for A. J. Gogia, who runs a school for taxi drivers in Queens and kept gas in his tank because students who work at gas stations brought him cans of it, like apples for the teacher.
There was the wistful resiliency of Otto Mond, the 80-year-old Manhattan man who planned on running his 19th New York City Marathon. With the race canceled, he went for a casual four-mile jog and vowed to “get ’em next year.”
There was worry, as in the case of Helen Hays, who monitors the tern populations on Gull Island, off the tip of Long Island, where the battering waves destroyed part of the dock (she remained on the comparatively safer island of Manhattan).
There was the sly resourcefulness practiced by Pete Caldera, the sportswriter and Sinatra singer. His apartment in Murray Hill lost power, so he had to write his articles at a local bar, something Ol’ Blue Eyes would have endorsed.
In Queens, Mike Greenstein, the old-time strongman known as the Mighty Atom Jr., who at 91 can still pull his car with his teeth, lived two blocks from Mr. Shevlin. After the storm, he and his girlfriend hopped in that car and drove to Florida to escape the misery, his neighbors said.
To the west, Breezy Point was reduced to a surreal wasteland by fire and floodwaters. Billy Mackay lived there and worked summers as a cabana boy at the Silver Gull Beach Club, which first opened in 1963 and was used for the filming of the movie “The Flamingo Kid.” The club was devastated by the storm, though the owners plan to rebuild. As for Mr. Mackay, a phone call to his home number yielded only an automated message saying, perhaps appropriately, “All international circuits to the country you are calling are busy right now.”
To the east, in the Rosedale neighborhood on Jamaica Bay, Kim Zatto, 46, a fifth-generation bait seller in the Seaman clan, the city’s last eeling family, watched floodwaters envelop her house, and her father’s and her uncle’s on either side.
The family’s curbside bait store, out front, was nearly submerged in water that also ruined the family’s packing sheds and freezers. The frozen bait had to be discarded. Of the live bait, only the eels survived, in an underwater pen in the creek out back.
Doris V. Amen, a flamboyant funeral director in Brooklyn, stayed busy during the storm, which left her condominium in Brighton Beach without electricity. She spent more than a week in a room above her business, the Jurek-Park Slope Funeral Home near Green-Wood Cemetery, and several days cleaning up from her annual Halloween party in the funeral home’s basement, held, as usual, on Saturday night. She had used one coffin for a buffet table and another to hold the beer. She had dressed as Lady Gaga and belted out rock ’n’ roll songs with her band.
