Happy Nice Mall

But this is not entirely true. Best known these days for the bird walks and shoreline cleanups he leads, Mr. Riepe expects sea level rise in 25-30 years to render his home and many others like him uninhabitable. He’s 82 and doesn’t expect to be around then. But for the sake of things to come, he and his neighbors are working on a plan to restore wetlands and build islands in the bay, which they hope will soften the blow of future storms. It will also bring back some of the natural beauty for which the bay was once famous.

The Bay of Jamaica is an estuary Almost the size of Manhattan, encompassing Brooklyn and Queens boroughs, and the largest natural area in New York City. For Native American tribes such as the Lenape, the bay was “a very important hunting and fishing area,” according to Eric W. Sanderson, best known for its sea. Mannahatta ProjectReconstructing Manhattan’s ecological past. It is now conducting a similar study in other districts.

Mr. Sanderson and a group of city officials recently made an inspection visit to a restored swamp on the Rockaway Peninsula, an area filled with rubble, concrete blocks and building rubble. A great blue heron glided silently past the group, almost on the mark, barely creating a ripple in the mirror-like waters. A small fenced plot of land on the waterfront is filled with stalks of newly seeded marshgrass planted by the New York City Department of Parks.

Mr. Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, pointed to a tidal channel where a four-story apartment complex with a “now for rent” sign appeared.

“If we had been here with Lenape a few hundred years ago, they would have been in their bunker canoes down the canal,” he said. “But they would never build their tents by the beach because it is dangerous. It’s flooding, it’s exposed to the winds.”

The restoration site and the canal adjacent to it sit incongruously between a busy street and a neighborhood of mostly new low-rise apartments and high-rise homes, much of which was flooded during the Sandy. Strange architectural mix and wild natural features make Rockaway unique. They also present unique challenges to city planners.

The city has today lost most of its protective sand dunes and close to 80 percent of the coastal marshes it historically had. Without these natural barriers, residents in the Jamaica Bay area are much more vulnerable to rising waters.