Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Elmhurst will be losing one of its historic buildings in the near future, as its 105-year old library on Broadway, funded, like many of its brother libraries in the 5 boroughs, by steel industrialist/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, will soone be torn down to make way for a larger structure. The $27.8 million, 30,000-square-foot facility will span [...]
On April 18th, 2010 the first ForgottenTour of the season (39th in the series that began June 1st, 1999 and second in association with the Newtown Historical Society), embarked under partly cloudy and 60-degree conditions, as once again over 40 ForgottenFans and local history enthusiasts converged at the Grand Avenue-Newtown subway station. It turned out to be a 3-hour [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Elmhurst Newtown Queens
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor The Borough of Queens was once a patchwork collection of villages divided among the major towns of Flushing, Jamaica, Newtown, Far Rockaway, and Long Island City. In 1898, Newtown merged into Greater New York, and was renamed Elmhurst. Its outlying neighborhoods, Winfield and Nassau Heights were absorbed into Elmhurst. In 1915, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Middle Village Queens Rego Park
The Newtown Historical Society, in conjunction with The Newtown Pippin Project, identified 3 locations at which to plant historic Newtown Pippin apple trees, bringing the fruit back to its place of origin. The fruit trees were planted today at Maspeth Federal Savings, the Middle Village 75th Street Block Association’s community garden and at Ridgewood’sOnderdonk House. The [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
If you ride the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington line as I have every day for the past 17 years, no doubt you have noticed the four-story brick factory on the south side of the tracks the train roars past on 94th Street, about midway between the Woodside and Shea Stadium (now Mets Willets Point) [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Past and present fast food The Orange Hut at Broadway and 54th Street still carries the outlines and contours of its former life as a White Tower hamburger chain restaurant. The last White Tower closed in Toledo, OH in June 2008; the chain originated in 1926, its origins detailed in a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
Continuing my fascination with NYC’s non-Manhattan Broadways, which begain in June 1999 with my very first ForgottenTour on Brooklyn’s Broadway, continued on several Forgotten NY pages there, and then continued further on the Bronx’ Broadway in late 2008, I hiked Queens’ very own Broadway in December 2008 and Jaunary 2009. The route begins in Ravenswood [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
It’s widely known – at least to Queens history buffs, at any rate — that beginning in 1915 and continuing gradually over the next 15 years or so, Queens jettisoned its old street names (with a couple of historic districts, such as downtown Flushing, being allowed to keep their names) and repalced them all with numbers, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
I had gone past Claremont Terrace thousands of times — literally –without giving it a second thought about what it was. It’s an alley that is hidden along another dead end in the heart of Elmhurst, one of Queens’ busiest, most populated and diverse neighborhoods — it’s buzzing with energy day and evening. I would [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
BY SERGEY KADINSKY With the exception of Forest Hills Gardens, the Rego Park Crescents, and Corona Park, most of ?Rego Park, Forest Hills, and ?Corona are divided into a rectangular street grid, imposed in the 1920s. Prior to the grid, the future Rego Park and Forest Hills were separated from Elmhurst and Corona by Horse [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Corona Elmhurst Queens rivers
WHETHER it wants to admit it or not, the Department of Transportation’s main function is the movement of motor vehicles; to enable them to move as quickly as possible. That means synchronized stoplights that are calibrated to provide uninterrupted passage for a lengthy distance. Such traffic lights often provide two minutes of green for the vehicles [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Forest Hills Queens Rego Park Sunnyside
NEW YORK CITY is not a railroading town, certainly not in the league of Chicago or Denver, for example. Goods get in and out of New York City mainly by truck, even though there are dreams of a rail freight tunnel crossing Upper New York Bay that would help to alleviate NYC’s crushing truck traffic. [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Elmhurst Glendale Queens Woodside
Early British colonists in Maspeth were chased out by angry Native Americans, and found themselves where Queens Boulevard meets Broadway today. There they met a possibly more implacable foe…the Dutch, who had this thing about naming places in Dutch, and the Brits were forced to call their new settlement Middelburgh (or Middletown). That name persists as [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens Queens Boulevard
The Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Railroad, your webmaster’s home railroad line, is a line capable of the finest the LIRR can offer and its very worst, with brand spanking new and restored station houses with all the amenities, and the highest railroad bridge on the Island. In 2002, I surveyed the line and [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Corona Elmhurst Flushing Woodside
Continued from Part 1 This time, our survey of little-noticed Queens alleyways takes us from gritty, concrete-enveloped Long Island City all the way east to bucolic, rural Little Neck–which could pass for an upstate village or a small North Shore town, which, of course, it is! So let’s start in Long Island City and work [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Boker Briarwood Charlotte College Point Cornell Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Hawtree Linneaus Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
Queens, in many ways, is the youngest of the five boroughs. It became a part of the city when its widely separated towns joined with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan in 1898 to become the five boroughs. Part of Queens, though, wanted nothing to do with New York City and so the Queens [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Astoria Briarwood College Point Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
