DAYTON BEACH PARK

The first signs were little things. Storefronts with wood instead of glass in their picture windows. Then the signs became more pronounced: trees upended, their roots exposed like some kind of garish sculpture; buildings with huge gashes in their façades; and a series of strange-looking poles on the beach that had, once upon a time, been supports for the boardwalk, now blown away by superstorm Sandy.

My co-op faced two engines of destruction in the last 10 months. One of them was manmade.

I have lived at Dayton Beach Park No. 1 — a middle-income, Mitchell-Lama Housing cooperative — for years. Supervised by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), Dayton is home to more than 1,100 families in the Rockaway Beach section of Queens, New York. Our five 12-story buildings are located perpendicular to Shore Front Parkway, with only a few hundred yards separating us from the beach and boardwalk.

Superstorm Sandy devastated Dayton in October. It caused tens of millions of dollars in damage to the buildings and grounds. The boardwalk was uprooted from the support columns in many parts and deposited by the surging waters onto our property. Traumatized during and after the storm, the shareholders and residents of Dayton are now coping with extensive and costly restoration projects.

UPDATED 5:23 P.M. — New York City contractors' boardwalk reconstruction near a Sandy-devastated co-op in Queens has created intolerable disruption, the co-op's attorney charges, including destruction of recently repaired private property. And the City ... well, the City responded to him within days and plans to make good on everything.

Wait, what? Something worked like it was supposed to? Here's how it happened.

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, Zeckendorf Towers goes smokeless, the folks at Alwyn Court and The Briarcliff go homeless, and thanks to 24-hour construction crews, a Rockaways co-op goes sleepless. Plus, three Lower East Side co-ops install fuel-efficient boilers to save money heating 2,700 apartments, Airbnb lobbies politicians to take the "illegal" out of illegal hoteling, and people debate the pros and cons of the proposed co-op admissions disclosure law.