Where did Richard Feynman grow up and live?

📍792 Cornaga Avenue, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York 11691, USA

1918 – 1935

“I grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens — a working-class beachside neighbourhood at the outer edge of New York City — in a Jewish family where my father Melville was a uniform salesman who read science magazines and talked to me about ideas from the time I was very small. Far Rockaway was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where you fixed your own bicycle, where the ocean was ten minutes away and the city was an hour, and that combination of physical toughness and intellectual curiosity shaped me completely. I was solving algebra problems before I started high school. I was fascinated by radios and locks and the way things worked. The neighbourhood gave me a democratic relationship with knowledge — the idea that anyone could understand anything if they thought about it carefully enough — that stayed with me through Los Alamos and Caltech and the Nobel Prize.”

👍 LovedThe democratic intellectual culture of Far Rockaway — the sense that curiosity was available to everyone regardless of class or credentials. My father's conversations about science and ideas that made thinking feel like play. The ocean and the physical world of the neighbourhood that grounded the abstract.

👎 DislikedThe anti-Semitism that limited Jewish students' access to elite universities. The sense of being always slightly outside — too smart for the neighbourhood, too rough for the academy. The loss of my first wife Arline to tuberculosis, which shadowed my years at Los Alamos.

Map showing where Richard Feynman lived — 792 Cornaga Avenue, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York 11691, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Richard Feynman's home at 792 Cornaga Avenue, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York 11691, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Feynman, R. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), W.W. Norton; Gleick, J. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), Pantheon Books; Feynman, R. What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), W.W. Norton