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Family, friends, and faith are driving Rockaway residents, with post-hurricane reconstruction beginning in the hard-hit Queens enclave. Michael Daly on how New York’s richest neighborhood as measured by spirit is pulling together.

The reconstruction of Rockaway in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy began last week when off-duty firefighters raised the awning from the burned ruins of what had been the social center of New York’s richest neighborhood as measured by spirit.They then set the miraculously unscathed section of canvas bearing the words Harbor Light Pub upon four 4-by-4 beams they had lashed together with plastic ties to the iron railing of the brick stoop that is all that remains of a storied gathering place.

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The pint-sized star and her ‘Jersey Shore’ castmates were serious, demure even, as they pleaded for help for the Sandy-ravaged town that hosted their show. Malcolm Jones on when reality met reality TV.

Snooki worked an almost empty room.Most of the TV crews and reporters had packed up and gone by the time the MTV handlers brought her into the area where the media had been interviewing the stars assembled for the network’s “Restore the Shore” telethon Thursday night. By then, the reporters had plenty of soundbites from the other stars of Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Teen Wolf, and assorted other reality-TV vets and musicians recruited to raise money for Architecture for Humanity’s rebuilding efforts.

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Jesse Ellison reports on the ways social media, shelters, and new legislation helped pets get rescued after the storm.

Stacey Carmona lost her business in Hurricane Sandy: the Staten Island salon she’s owned for a decade was perilously close to the beach. So was her sister’s home, which flooded with 10 feet of water and is now condemned. But the worst thing that she lost in the storm was a tiny 4-month-old Yorkshire Terrier puppy named Roxy—technically her sister’s dog, but one that had already felt like part of the family.“She just disappeared into the dark,” Carmona says.

A firefighting family whose patriarch was lost on 9/11 honors his memory with a determination to do whatever is needed after Hurricane Sandy—all without power or heat.

When he raised the flag at the end of Beach 131st Street after Hurricane Sandy, 20-year-old Brendan Stackpole was truly raising the flag of his father. As anyone familiar with the FDNY knows, his father was Captain Timothy Stackpole, who was severely burned in a fire in 1998 and demonstrated superhuman determination as he shunned a disability pension and spent three grueling years getting himself into condition to return to active duty. He was a newly promoted captain when he was killed at the World Trade Center.

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The zoo had backup generators to protect its animals. But when the power went down at an emergency shelter next door, the zoo’s director welcomed refugees from the storm.

Jeremy Goodman knew he’d have to save the 700 animals that inhabit northern New Jersey’s Turtle Back Zoo from Hurricane Sandy. The zoo director knew he’d marshal his staff, round the creatures up, and get them inside storm-resistant, generator-powered buildings. What he didn’t  realize is that he’d also have more than two dozen human guests for  the night as well.As Sandy approached, Goodman and his staff stocked up on food and water, filled the Essex County, N.

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The beach community of Breezy Point, home to many city firefighters, became a scene of unimaginable destruction as it burned to the ground.

New York City firefighters helped build the beach community of Breezy Point a hundred years ago, but on Monday night they had to stand back and watch it burn, prevented from helping by the torrent of water that had flooded the neighborhoodís streets. Storm surge from Hurricane Sandy made roads impassable and covered fire hydrants while gusts whipped burning embers from house to house. With the volunteer fire department's own station flooded, radios down, and phones dead, they could do little but evacuate people by boat and try to keep the fire from spreading.

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After more than 1,000 New Yorkers made their way to a downtown shelter, a school custodian was there to take care of them.

When residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side fled their homes, Richard Gorgoglione took them in.For more than four high-adrenaline days, the 51-year-old custodian for the Department of Education served the city, keeping his hand at the helm of one of its 76 hurricane shelters. The work started at 6:45 p.m. on Friday afternoon, unloading supplies. At the height of the storm on Monday evening, a capacity crowd of 1,100 people, as well as some eights dogs, a cat, and a rabbit were in Gorgoglione’s care, spread over five floors in Seward Park High School on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan.

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She organizes softball games, teaches Bible school and gives comfort to those who lost their homes to Hurricane Sandy.

As soon as Nuris Barzey-Ramos found out how destructive Hurricane Sandy might be, she rushed back from Parents’ Weekend at her daughter’s college in Massachusetts and promptly reported for volunteer duty at a makeshift shelter at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens.Shortly after Sandy made landfall, evacuees from nearby Breezy Point began to arrive at Hillcrest. Many had lost their homes in the electrical fire that destroyed 100 houses. “I tried to calm them down,” said Barzey-Ramos.

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When the hurricane hit, the city's Orthodox Jews stepped up to care for their African-American neighbors.

New York City’s ultra-Orthodox Jews live in a world apart from the rest of the city. They have their own neighborhoods, send their kids to religious schools and wear a uniform of black hats and suits that makes them as distinct as an Amish farmer in Times Square. After the storm hit New York, hundreds of elderly and frail New Yorkers from theAfrican-American and working-class neighborhoods of Far Rockaway and Coney Island had to be evacuated when their assisted-living facilities flooded or lost power.

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A Coney Island police house is inundated with water, forcing New York’s finest to improvise a daring escape.

As Sandy rolled toward Coney Island, whipping sand and debris across the famous boardwalk, officers at the NYPD’s 60th Precinct prepared to evacuate. As NYPD steamfitters Kevin Hunter and Anthony DiMaggio hurried to a subterranean boiler room to shut down the station’s heat valves, a burst of water—a “five-foot wave,” one cop said—smashed into the station, consuming the basement and knocking down one of the boiler room’s walls. Hunter’s leg was caught in the boiler’s machinery and completely submerged under water, and he was unable to get free.