After Sandy destroyed Fazio Dance Center, owner Juliana Fazio did everything she could to reopen it – which she managed to do just a month after the storm. Kate Bubacz/The Forum Newsgroup
“Like a phantom, it just came in, wild, and left,” Juliana Fazio says of the water that re-arranged Fazio Dance Center during Superstorm Sandy. She, like so many others in the area, had been caught off guard by the amount of water that surged up from the bay and crossed Cross Bay Boulevard during the storm that devastated much of South Queens. The windows to Fazio Dance Center had blown out from the force of the water; the front desk was gone; the mirrors had to be taken out. The floorboards were a jumbled mess of pieces among the slick of mud covering the ground.
No preparations had been made for the small studio.
“No one said to do anything as far as being prepared for a catastrophe in Howard Beach,” Fazio says.
Fazio grew up in Howard Beach, and her mother still lives in the area. It was in her childhood home that she spent the storm, thinking that it would be at most a three-day stay. That plan was shattered when the damage assessment was done the next morning.
“I went from plan A to plan B to plan C,” she says.
Not only was the studio wiped out, Fazio’s home on Long Island had also been hit by the powerful storm. Undeterred, Fazio set about rebuilding her life from the floor up.
She re-opened the studio a month after the storm with only a dance floor and music so that the children who had been displaced by Sandy could have some sense of routine restored to their lives.
Not only that, she challenged her instructors to start teaching their young pupils the standard two dances that they typically performed in June, despite missing a month of rehearsal.
It was a tall order, requiring costumes to be fit and fliers to be ordered while working on the slow process of rebuilding. Nonetheless, on the first weekend in June the girls took to the stage in Broad Channel, itself a community that was rebuilding, to perform “Dancing Through the Year”.
“Honestly, it was one of our best shows,” Fazio says proudly.
“I was not going to let Sandy wipe out 43 years of dedication,” she says of the dance center that was first opened by her mother in 1970. Even now, some things are not where they used to be. The office still needs to be re-done, and the electronics damaged by the salt water have not been fully replaced. When asked if things are back to normal, Fazio points to a clothesline hanging on her office wall, ready to dry out any photographs or papers that might get wet.
In a moment of reflection, she notes that one of the positive things of the storm was that it gave a reason to improve.
“Like it or not, it’s going to be new,” she says. “Everything is new.”
Even now, if another storm came across the bay and flooded the new floors, it wouldn’t be a question of rebuilding – the roots to the area are too deep.
“I would never leave this neighborhood,” Fazio says, shaking her head to emphasize the point.
“All the local businesses, we worked so hard to keep the businesses going. The people that support the businesses, they were under duress too. Everyone understands. It humbled us.”
By Kate Bubacz
