One Room Schoolhouse Park, Astoria Boulevard and 90th Street, sits on a .14 acre plot that was home to the schoolhouse mentioned in the park’s name, PS 10, from 1879 to its demolition in 1934. Before receiving the designation PS 10 it had been known as Frog Hollow School, and it remained a school through 1910 (by some accounts, 1925).
Before the construction of massive apartments by the Queensboro Corporation and its remaining Jackson Heights in the early 20th Century, the neighborhood was a swampy meadow home to occasional homes and traversed by only a few roads: Flushing Avenue, now Astoria Boulevard; a toll road built in the 1850s by John Jackson and named Jackson Avenue before becoming Northern Boulevard around 1920; and by Trains Meadows Road, a diagonal country road of which there are few remnants today.
After the school’s demolition in 1934 NYC Parks acquired the property, and turned it into a playground with swings and other kiddie entertainments. A renovation decades later in the 1980s removed the playground furniture and turned it into a grassy area with benches. In 1996 NYC Councilmembers John D. Sabini and Helen M. Marshall drafted a bill naming the park for the one -room schoolhouse, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed it in 1996.
Had the schoolhouse survived a few decades longer, it would have been likely disassembled and put back together as a museum piece, but, c’est la guerre.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”
9/29/17
2 comments
We have one that has been preserved in our Connecticut town, was in use well into the 20th century.
This park is in East Elmhurst, NOT Jackson Heights.