Despite well-publicized warnings that the Rockaway peninsula in Queens was under a mandatory evacuation alert, many people there, particularly public housing residents, defied the order on Saturday and insisted upon riding out the storm at home.
“I’m not taking this lightly, but a flood can only do so much,” said Laquan Bostick, 22, who lives in a ninth-floor apartment in the Beach 41st Street Houses, a New York City Housing Authority complex, with his mother.
Mr. Bostick said his mother left and urged him to come with her. But he declined, and instead bought food, batteries, ice and even vitamins, to wait out the storm.
“I feel comfortable staying here,” he said. “It’s better than being put in some school turned into a shelter.”
Mr. Bostick, a student at Nassau Community College, acknowledged that he wanted to see the storm first-hand, and that having the apartment to himself gave him a chance to invite over his girlfriend, who lives nearby.
All along the highly vulnerable peninsula, which is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay in southern Queens, residents resolved to stay put, even though public transportation was shut down at midday on Saturday, and the city might close the two bridges to the peninsula in the event of high winds.
Their determination alarmed some officials, who issued increasingly strident warnings all day long about the risks of staying. In some housing complexes on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the city sent buses to transport people, but they sat empty, even though officials had announced that elevators would be turned off in the evening.
It was still unclear by Saturday night how many residents had heeded the evacuation orders. Officials at the mayor’s office said that by a preliminary count in the evening, some 5,000 people had sought refuge in shelters.
In the Rockaways, some of the naysayers were homeowners who noted that they had made it successfully through decades of hurricanes, northeasters and other storms, and had no reason to believe that Hurricane Irenewould be any more ferocious.
And many residents of the roughly 3,000 public housing units said their biggest worry, if they remained, was living without electricity and hot water for a couple of days.
“We’re on the second floor; I don’t think we’re in danger,” said Amanda Perez, 26, who is keeping her family there. She sat in a second-floor hallway at the Ocean Bay complex with a group of other tenants, some of whom smoked cigarettes, drank liquor and generally ridiculed the notion that they should evacuate.
Jose Collazzo and his wife, Maggie, also residents of the Beach 41st Street Houses, decided against evacuation. Ms. Collazzo uses a wheelchair and is unable to climb stairs. Mr. Collazzo pushed her toward their building, rushing to get back before the elevators were shut off.
“If we lose power and gas, I’ll open the windows and barbecue inside,” Mr. Collazzo said.
Outside the projects, the streets were more deserted than usual, and there were police officers posted on foot, on many street corners. By evening, dozens of city buses idled near the Cross Bay Bridge.
Another contingent that did not heed evacuation warnings were surfers, of which there were about 50 enjoying head-high waves in the afternoon at the city’s official surfing beach near Beach 90th Street.
Although several bars remained open into the night, nearly every other business was shuttered in the Rockaways. One of the last to close was Dave’s liquor store, where remaining residents bought the last — and some said, the most important — of their provisions.
“We’ve got a lot of last-minute sales,” said the owner, Dave Khamerak, whose employees were boarding up the store at 5 p.m. when the last customer, Kareem Rogers, 34, dashed in and bought a bottle of Hennessey. Mr. Rogers said he was a Housing Authority employee and spent the day trying to coax residents out of the Ocean Bay houses.
“Of 1,300 people there, only 200 stayed,” he said, adding that he lived in the nearby Hammell’s Houses, and that he was headed back to his apartment, to weather the storm with his pit bull.
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