Somewhere among the chutes and spider-web rigging and pivoting water guns was the younger faction of Chaya Genack's six children.
Just as Ms. Genack was itemizing the playground's importance in her life — "It's so gorgeous, we could be here all day" — the city parks commissioner, Veronica M. White, stopped by.
The happy mother did not hold back.
"I just want to say, 'God bless you!' " Ms. Genack said.
"Awww," Ms. White said.
The salutation did, however, come with a small "however."
"But one thing would make it perfect," Ms. Genack said. "We need some shade."
"We're trying to figure it out," Ms. White said, glancing at the spindly, leafless trees that rose from what were otherwise lush plantings.
Shade is not an idle concern to Ms. White, who is fair in complexion. She took over as the commissioner of parks and recreation on Aug. 30 last year, prepared to oversee the 30,000 acres of city parkland for the last year of the Bloomberg administration.
Two months later, the wind and tidal rampage of Hurricane Sandy tore up thousands of trees and erased vast stretches of city beaches.
"I've braved the beach more in a year than I did in my whole life, 54 years, before then," Ms. White said.
Like the playground at Beach 30th Street, the transformation of the Rockaways turned an epic corner this month. A powerful dredge ship arrived and docked in a federal water channel. Behind it were tugboats that had sailed up the East Coast from New Orleans, pulling 20 sections of pipe, each 800 feet long. Once in New York, they were assembled into a giant straw, three miles long, and sand and water were sucked from a silted-up channel and blown onto the beaches. (Besides the civil engineering, the dredging is an event of great excitement for sea gulls: they feast on an all-they-can-eat buffet of clams and fish suddenly hurled onto beaches.)
The storm swept away 1.5 million cubic yards of sand from the beach, the equivalent of about 50,000 big construction trash-hauling bins, said Daniel T. Falt, the project manager overseeing the dredging for the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
Even before the hurricane, erosion had taken two million cubic feet of sand from the peninsula.
Between now and next Memorial Day, the federal project will put 3.5 million cubic yards of sand on the beaches, at a cost of $37 million. This will effectively double them to about 200 feet wide, and they will be raised to a height of 14 feet.
It is as if the storm and its destructive forces are now being rewound, not in a few moments of devastation, but over a span of two years. The sand — much of which washed away from the beaches between 1975 and last year — will help to protect the communities behind it. But won't it just run back out to sea?
"We are designing it to absorb as much wave energy as we can, but it's an active system," Mr. Falt said. "As the winter progresses, the sand is going to move around and create a beach berm."
Before that is finished, the city is building up protection with a kind of artificial dune assembled with about 10,000 giant sand bags, each holding 5,500 pounds. It will stretch 4.7 miles, from Beach 149th Street to Beach 55th Street. The goal, Commissioner White said, is to absorb serious storm surges.
Hurricane Sandy opened a seam in history, and with it, possibilities that are now being realized. The concession stands along what had been the beach Boardwalk are now open, landscaped plazas. Concrete walkways, with blue glass embedded, have replaced parts of the old Boardwalk. The old planks have been salvaged and arrayed as steps that serve as a kind of amphitheater entry to the beach.
Most of the Boardwalk has not been rebuilt, but will be before Memorial Day, Ms. White said. It is sorely missed, as Kathleen Morris, a resident, told Ms. White.
"We're getting sand before we get a Boardwalk?" Ms. Morris said.
"It's coming back," Ms. White said. "We want to build it for the long term."
In the playground, Rechel Pollack, a grandmother, spoke about losing the bottom floor of her home. The rebirth of the playground had spiritual power.
"You come here, and life is going on," Ms. Pollack said. "It's normal. It's beautiful. Because it's normal."
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt
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