WOODHAVEN, Queens

by Kevin Walsh

The boundaries of Woodhaven are a little hard to define–especially the eastern end. It’s south of Forest Park, east of the Brooklyn borough line (Eldert Lane and a number of other streets), and north of Liberty Avenue; but in the east, where does Woodhaven end and Richmond Hill begin? Woodhaven Boulevard seems a bit too far west, and Lefferts Boulevard is too far east.

Dutch families migrated east from New Lots in the mid-1700s and small towns, Woodville and Unionville, were in place by the 1800s along the Brooklyn and Jamaica Plank Road (today’s Jamaica Avenue). By the early 1800s the Union Course and Centreville race tracks had arrived, the precursors to today’s Aqudeuct. The Long Island Rail Road, orginally pulled by horses, then steam engines, arrived in 1836 and ran down Atlantic Avenue for over 100 years until it was finally electrified then enclosed in a tunnel. Woodhaven became a manufacturing center in the 1800s (a former place name is Shoe and Leather Street).

To avoid confusion by the Post Office with an upstate New York State town in the days before zip codes, Woodville residents voted to change Woodville’s name to Woodhaven in 1853.

WAYFARING: WOODHAVEN

Dexter Park

Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society sign, Jamaica Avenue and Dexter Court; Dexter Park, 1930s East Side, West Side, Lawrence S. Ritter

Even if your city has a major league team, they’re on the road half the season, and beginning as far back as the 1910s, semi-pro teams featuring up-and- comers, minor-league caliber players, and never would-be’s played parks ranging from sandlots all the way to minor-league stadiums. They took up the slack if the Yanks, Giants or Dodgers were out of town and you wanted to get a baseball fix. The most famous, perhaps, of the NYC area’s semi-pro clubs was the Brooklyn Bushwicks, founded by Max Rosner. The Bushwicks, of course, neither played in Bushwick nor in Brooklyn. Their home was just over the borough line from Franklin K. Lane High School.

Dexter Park began as a small sandlot-type field surrounded by playgrounds, bowling alleys, a carousel and a dance hall. Rosner founded the Bushwicks in 1913 and moved to Dexter Park in 1918, and it soon expanded to a 15,000-seat park with a steel and concrete grandstand. Rosner installed lights in 1930– a full five years before they arrived at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, and 8 years before Ebbets. Players from the AL, NL and the old Negro Leagues, some of which are named on the historic marker, played exhibition games against the Bushwicks after their regular seasons had ended, and Rosner signed Dazzy Vance and Waite Hoyt after their MLB careers ended.

After the 1940s, though, the arrival of television and the slow integration of the major leagues (decimating the Negro Leagues) took a toll on the Bushwicks’ attendance, and Rosner disbanded the team. After a few desultory years as a stock car venue, Dexter Park was razed in 1955, with two-family homes now occupying the site. The name “Dexter Court,” the sign, and the memories of players who are fewer in number as the years go by are all that’s left. Brooklyn regained pro baseball in 2000 with the arrival of the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ A affiliate, in Coney Island.

 Quite close to Dexter Court we find another historic sign commemorating a business founded by Fred Trump, who made a lot of money building affordable middle class housing in NYC, much of it in Coney Island, where Trump Village still carries his name. His son Donald, of course, needs no introduction.

Fred Trump was a builder who loved his work. You can still see his achievement throughout Brooklyn today: hundreds of houses and apartment buildings, all of them dapper but not fancy — like him — and made of solid materials. Trump’s properties were maintained to a fare-thee-well. Brick was repointed; ironwork repainted. Signs over perfect lawns speak in Fred’s stentorian tone: ”Positively No Ball Playing Allowed.” New York Times

Yes, Fred Trump’s middle name was Christ.

 

Forest Park

Bridge over LIRR, Forest Park

Though Queens has hundreds of acres of parkland, Forest, Kissena and Cunningham Parks usually take a backseat to Flushing Meadows Park, with its collection of corroding, deteriorating remnants of two World’s Fairs. Forest Park is up there among NYC’s biggest parks, with over 500 acres stretching between the cemetery belt, Kew Gardens, Union Turnpike and Glendale and Park Lane South in Woodhaven and Richmond Hill. It forms a natural boundary between communities in northern Queens (Glendale and Forest Hills) and their southern cousins. I confess to not having extensively explored Forest Park as much as I have, say, Central and Prospect Parks, and Forest Park makes no pretense of matching the cultural aspects of those two Olmsted and Vaux creations, though it has its moments.

Forest Park was actually created by the city of Brooklyn in 1895, with the city’s Parks Department buying up acres of forested, pretty much unused property, hence the name. It’s among the more ‘natural’ of our big parks, with about 165 acres left as woodland, interspersed with marked trails.

The park was surveyed by Olmsted, and much like the parks and natural reserves of Staten Island, Forest Park contains several nature trails ‘blazed’ or marked for the ease of hikers, and also boasts a bridle path.

Your webmaster’s use of Forest Park has primarily been a handy dandy short cut when cycling from Kew Gardens to Woodhaven or Glendale, since the park roads are mostly closed on weekends, though I do have to battle the carbureted beasts at the roads servicing the Jackie Robinson Parkway. And, going west, it’s all downhill. On the way back to fab Flushing, I’ll go through Richmond Hill and go up mountainous Lafferts Boulevard, where the hill is steep but concentrated in a short area.

Painted Ponies (and other critters)

Every year, it seems, sees the closing of more of New York’s classic carousels, but Forest Park’s, just off Woodhaven Boulevard south of Myrtle, is still delighting kids big and small as it has since it was moved here from Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1971. This Daniel Muller carousel, built in 1903 and containing 54 wood horses and other animals, is one of just two remaining in the country. It replaced an earlier carousel that burnt down in 1966. The carousel contains 49 horses, a lion, a tiger, a deer, and two chariots arranged in three concentric circles. The carousel also contains an original carousel band organ. It’s a buck a ride for all ages. Five other New York City parks operate carousels: Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Central Park and Bryant Park in Manhattan, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, and Willowbrook Park in Staten Island. The B&B Carousell in Coney Island, shuttered since 2003, has been saved and should reopen soon.

The Seuffert Bandshell, named for George Seuffert, Sr., a popular musician and band leader, stands near the spot where he and his band first began offering Sunday afternoon concerts to the public in 1898. In 1928, Seuffert’s son, Dr. George Seuffert, took over and led hundreds of concerts featuring music by Wagner, John Philip Sousa, Cole Porter and many others. When he died in 1995 the Queens Symphony Orchestra took over the tradition of offering summer concerts there. Other nights have been added in recent years: kids events’ on Monday nights, rock on Thursdays and Fridays, and classical on Sundays. The bandshell was built in 1920 and renovated 80 years later.

Victory Field, at Woodhaven Boulevard and Myrtle Avenue, features a Works Progress Adminstration-era athletic track.

A relic of the days when fire alarms were relayed by telegraph (a practice instituted in 1851) can be found at this austere building, dating to the 1920s, at Woodhaven Boulevard and Park Lane South. Fire alarms from Queens, from street fire alarms, phone calls, radio from units in the field, and private alarm services, go through this building. The alarm is assigned a response of fire units and the firehouses are notified from this office. Once on the scene, if the units need more help they call this office by radio and more units are assigned and sent.

I was intrigued by this handsome brick building on Myrtle just east of Woodhaven, with its neat front door staircase, interesting window lintels, and extraordinarily fugly cell phone towers.

Trotting Haven

Woodhaven Boulevard used to be known as Trotting Course Lane, probably because it led to the race tracks and trotting ovals of the nascent Woodhaven. By the 1930s it had been straightened and renamed Woodhaven Boulevard, and attained its present ten lanes of roaring traffic. Here and there, though, there’s a tidbit of its more rural past, or small town past. There are a couple of pieces of the old unstraightened Trotting Course Lane left, for example.

A brick building on Woodhaven just south of the Jackie Robinson Parkway overpass angles away from the road and probably faced the original Trotting Course Lane. At right, follow Trotting Course Lane just north of the parkway off Woodhaven and you will find a set of rusted railroad tracks belonging to the LIRR’s abandoned route to the Rockaway Peninsula.

Those same abandoned tracks cross Park Lane South just east of 98th Street, and a slight indent in Forest Park allows the presence of private homes on the north side of the street here.

The Unattainable

Your webmaster is mulling a co-op purchase as I write this (Feb. 2007) and, unfortunately, it won’t be here…

The former red brick tobacco pipe factory on Park Lane South and 101st Street has intrigued me for the 14 years (as of 2007) I have lived in Queens and I always entertained moving in, but it’s a long way from the LIRR Port Washington Branch, which your auto-free webmaster has always used as a lifeline. So, about once or twice a year, I bike or walk by and look at it the way a cat looks through the glass at the fishmonger’s. How can I resist a complex that comes complete with a watchtower.

The Hidden Cemetery

Turning south from Park Lane South along 96th Street we find St. Matthew’s Episcopal-Anglican Church, handsomely constructed of ashlar, from most accounts in 1901, though a cornerstone says otherwise. I’ve always thought the Roman Catholics and Episcopalians build the best-looking and most distinctive churches.

The real find here, though, is a colonial-era cemetery I’ve never seen, since it’s in back of the church, on their property. One of these days, I’ll present the sexton with a Forgottencard and be admitted onto the grounds. Or not.

Woodhaven’s Clock Tower

Just as piano manufacturer William Steinway built a small community to house his factory workers in northern Astoria, so did Lalance & Grosjean, the nationally renowned manufacturer that was among the first to make porcelain enamelware, a cheaper, lighter alternative to heavy cast-iron cookware under their brand name, “Agate Ware.” L&G set up business in 1863, and by 1876 had built a large kitchenware factory on Atlantic Avenue between today’s 89th to 92nd Streets, and workers’ housing on 95th and 97th Avenues between 85th and 86th Streets.

In the 1980s, most of the Lalance & Grosjean red-brick factory buuildings were razed in favor of a large Pathmark supermarket. In a similar situation to the Tower Square trolley barn, the clock tower, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and 92nd Street, has somehow made it through the years, and is one of Queens’ best representatives of the form.

The factory now houses a variety of businesses.

The Lalance and Grosjean wood-framed row house factory workers’ buildings are still there, though the ones on 95th Avenue are less modernized than the ones on 97th Avenue, so they appear closer to the condition they were in when the workers occupied them.

Though we’re on the outer edge of Woodhaven (more like southern Richmond Hill) I couldn’t resist shooting this (probably) 1960s bank façade at Lefferts and 101st Avenue. Though your webmaster often rails about modern styles (most are executed cheaply and carelessly) I really dig smooth tiled exteriors featuring primary colors. Shot from the Q-10 bus window, hence the reflections.

I liked this classic old school jeweler sign on Jamaica Avenue. Especially since it’s now a liquor store.

I always have a look out for colorful terra cotta, and I found some to satisfy at St. Thomas the Apostle R.C. Church at 88th Avenue and 87th Street.

The Wyckoff

They don’t build ’em like this anymore, kidz! There are plenty of other buildings with ornate cupolas and towers in New York City, but this one on 95th Avenue and 93rd Street seems all the more impressive because it is unique in Woodhaven…there’s no other building like it in the area. Its former Moorish-style conical dome made it a veritable skyscraper. The dome may have been removed, but there’s still enough detail on this 110-year old building to make it one of Woodhaven’s treasures; its cornices and eaves have not been lost to development. It was originally the home office for the Woodhaven Bank. Old Queens in Early Photographs, Seyfried and Asedorian

An ever-watchful mesh screen looks over Woodhaven Boulevard from Jamaica Avenue at the el station. It’s part of a five-station installation called “Five Points of Observation” by artist Kathleen McCarthy on the Jamaica el stations.

Photographed mostly December 2004-June 2005. Page completed February 25, 2007.

erpietri@earthlink.net

©2007

21 comments

LJ November 10, 2011 - 7:26 am

Your site is wonderful… I grew up in Woodhaven and the east boundary of the neighborhood was considered 102nd street by the public school system at the time (’50s n ’60s).

Do you know the name of what was the pipe factory on 101st Street that is now residences? I had a memory flashback recently and have just started to look into it. If you can at least get the address of the residences, the city’s records could be searched for what was at that address in prior years.

I’ll have to pass this site along to all my family and old friends!
LJ

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Maria October 12, 2017 - 10:18 pm

The name of the smoke factory was Medico my parents worked there

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Melissa May 26, 2019 - 10:27 pm

What was the name of the tavern on 77th Street and 88th Avenue a block from Neirs Tavern?

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Angel Morales December 16, 2011 - 12:33 am

Thanks for posting this amazing chronicle of the history of Woodhaven. I am a Franklin K Lane graduate and don’t remember seeing such amazing architecture. -A

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Linda December 17, 2011 - 10:51 am

I believe the name was Medico Pipe Factory

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Bill Fullerton December 27, 2011 - 5:01 pm

I believe the full name was frank medico pipe factory. I lived around the corner on 85th road off 102nd street. There was a pharmaceutical co. Next to medico. Endo was the name as I remember. Enjoyed you talking about dexter park. Saw many a double header there.when the stock car races took over the field we would watch from the cemetery over looking the track. We would sit on the tombstones and had the best seats in the house. Bill

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Joan Keith November 6, 2013 - 6:36 pm

I have been searching for a Kamen Hall for which my great grandfather was a hotel keeper. I would appreciate any information,

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Heather May 22, 2014 - 9:25 pm

Hey, the pipe factory is in Richmond Hill, on the right side of the tracks. 😉

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Tatiana May 30, 2014 - 10:23 pm

Hello, anyone remembers or knows where I can find a list of businesses on Woodhaven Blvd. in about 1955, especially I am looking for history about Max Posner’s toy train store. Thank you.

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Thor October 7, 2014 - 1:31 pm

I could add, that the first “King Kullen” was located at Jamacia Ave.& 78 th.St Woodhaven. Also on 78th St. The scene in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas”, where members of the Mafia showed up after robbing the airport showing off mink coats and pink Cadillacs, took place at Neir’s Tavern located on 78th Street. Also the start of May West’s career. Which I believe is still there.

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Bob C May 23, 2017 - 11:32 am

Mae West, Cindy Lauper, and Brian Hyland. I lived on 91 ave and 87 street. Saw Brian often.

The “Goodfellas” didn’t go to Neir’s. The REAL bar was on Liberty Ave just a couple of blocks from one of John Gotti’s clubs and a couple of blocks from the local 106th precinct. About 108 street approx. I can’t recall the name of the bar but I went there occasionally. When they filmed Goodfellas this bar was long gone. Looking for a place to film those scenes they chose Neir’s. So you are correct in this matter. The scene was filmed in Neir’s although the actual bar was on Liberty Ave. Interesting Neir’s fact. The owner didn’t allow bar stools. He said if you’re man enough to drink, you’re man enough to stand. It wasn’t until he died that they brought in bar stools. My friends and I drank beer at Neir’s because when beer went to 15 cents everywhere Neir’s held the line at 10 cents for as long as they could. Hope you enjoyed these memories.

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Susan Mathews August 21, 2018 - 5:37 pm

Hi Bob, Just found this site today & so excited to see my old neighborhood. Lived on 75th St & Rockaway Blvd. My Uncle Larry Kelly was a long time patron of Neir’s. Maybe you know him Larry Kelly. He was the coach of the Lynvettes football team?

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Bob Bauman November 23, 2018 - 4:48 pm

Bob C
I passed many a pleasant hour at Neil’s in the mid 50s, at the time the legal drinking age was 18. Also happened to be there the last night of the 10 cent beer – the bartenders all wore black armbands. Bowled there a couple of times, a unique experience. My later “watering hole” was the Shamrock on Jamaica avenue; many years after I moved from Woodhaven, it was the scene of a tragic murder.
If anyone knows anything about my old drinking buddy Jack Grimes please let me know.
Thanks
Bob B

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joe t. October 13, 2014 - 7:40 pm

there was a king kullen supermarket on fulton st. and elderts lane. it took the place of a bohack supermarket. on the next block was an A&P supermarket. across the street was “THE HOME OF POLLY-O RICOTTA” factory… i remember that back in 1962 there was still a farm on fulton st. between 75st and elderts lane one block before these supermarkets . the next half mile of fulton street was an assortment of mom and pop stores. does anyone remember the name of the movie theatre on fulton st. near hale ave. ? was it called the EMBASSY THEATRE ???

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Yvonne Temann April 13, 2015 - 6:25 pm

Yes, it was the Embassy Threatre with the Embassy Restaurant next door. Great burges and ice cream sodas. All gone now. For many years the Cypress-Fulton Senior Center stood on the spot.

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Marion May 19, 2018 - 9:56 pm

That was the Embassy theater. A beautiful movie house. I grew up on Chestnut St. bet Fulton &Ridgewood
went to P S. 65 on Richmond St then to Jr high 171 on Ridgewood Ave. In Queens then Franklin K. Lane. I remember most of these places. Something I hope I will never forget.

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Heather OMara October 13, 2017 - 7:30 am

Richmond Hill begins once you cross under the abandoned trestle, roughly 100th Street. On Jamaica Avenue the street numbers jump from 98th to 101st, but the old postal building, now a storage facility, and the firehouse just east of the abandoned tracks are certified 11418 real estate.

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Bill Tannler August 19, 2018 - 2:29 pm

Woodhaven and Richmond Hill was Woodhaven Blvd at least for High School purposes. I had to attend Franklin K Lane HS. Had I lived on the other side of Woodhaven Blvd I would have attended Richmond Hill HS. That may have changed but I’m sure it was that way at least until 1960.

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oldtimer March 29, 2020 - 4:13 pm

the pipe factory was spelled Medeco.If you watch the movie American Grafitti,theres a scene where one of their displays is in a store window

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Janice Kane May 5, 2021 - 8:27 am

loved this site. Grew up there in the 40ties and fifties. What about Cross Bay Blvd. {path to the Rockaways)The Cross Bay Movie and Touties Bar on Liberty Ave. The Lynvets used to hang out there after a game.

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Valeria Proano January 28, 2022 - 12:20 am

Great piece! Thanks so much for this 🙂

Reply

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