Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
This thick-shafted, guy wired traffic light at Fresh Pond Road and 59th Drive in Maspeth is just like thousands of others around town. But when these large stoplights first appeared in NYC in the 1950s, they carried a pair of WALK/DONT WALK signals, if that much. This one has a lamp to illuminate the park [...]
The Clinton Diner, at 58th Street and Maspeth Avenue in an otherwise godforsaken section of western Queens, is one of a vanishing breed of roadside diners, catering to workers in an industrial area and motorists who are passing through. It stands next to freight tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The now dismantled Richard [...]
Grand Street and its eastern extension, Grand Avenue, is a major thoroughfare in Brooklyn and Queens, running from the East River in Williamsburg northeast to Queens Boulevard and Broadway in Elmhurst. It runs over two major bridges: a bridge over English Kills, which also serves Metropolitan Avenue traffic, built in 1931 but improved since to [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Maspeth Queens Wiliasmburg
“A stollen is a fruit cake containing dried fruit and often marzipan and covered with sugar, powdered sugar or icing sugar. The cake is usually made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts and spices. Stollen is a traditional German cake, usually eaten during theChristmas season, when called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen.” Neiderstein’s was a German restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue near 69th Street that began as a roadhouse on the Williamsburgh & Jamaica [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Maspeth Middle Village Queens
The Newtown Historical Society toured Maspeth, Queens on July 31, 2011, a day featuring uncommonly good weather for any tour led by Your Webmaster. The Newtown Historical Society was founded to educate the public about the history of the villages that comprised Newtown Township in Queens County, NY. Newtown Township stretched from the East River to the [...]
May 2011: Having been forced out of my job by mechanization and the fanatical desire of business to maximize profits (the cry of business is that “we are not running a charity here” and my answer is, why don’t you?) I had gravitated, as I often do, toward the fetid and miserable waterways of western Queens, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: diners Maspeth restaurants
Unlike other boroughs, trends or leanings cannot be ascribed to Queens’ numbered streets. Unlike, say, Manhattan’s 57th Street, which is a self-contained unit on which you will find icons such as Carnegie Hall, the Art Students League Building, Rodin Studios, and for many years the Russian Tea Room, 57th Street in Queens, like its brother numbered streets, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Railroads
Many years ago, when Queens was a collection of small towns divided by acres of farms and fields, every town and city had its own street naming and numbering system. This was a fine and dandy situation when Queens (then also comprising what is now Nassau County) was a separate and self-governing county. Once Queens consolidated [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Bank windows at Maspeth Federal Savings Bank at Grand Avenue and 69th Street are featuring the very first Newtown Historical Society exhibit, A Walk Down Flushing Avenue in 1929. The exhibit runs December 21, 2009 through February 27, 2010. New York in the 1920s and 1930s is surprisingly well-documented and archived — the City photographed [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
I worked on a Maspeth neighborhood page relatively early on, in about 2000 — for me it’s a typical Forgotten NY type of neighborhood — unserved by a subway line, ringed by cemeteries, expressways and parks that serve to somewhat separate it from its neighbors, Elmhurst and Ridgewood, from which it seems to have a distinct identity. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
“Cadet,” according to The Word Detective, is derived from the Latin ”capitellum,” a diminutive of Latin “caput,” meaning “head.” It was later applied to young men entering the military and interstingly, was also condensed to “cad,” a young man who doesn’t dance with the woman he brought to the party. For decades the word also delineated a [...]
Categorized in: Ads Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Things took a turn for the bizarre in Maspeth when, after a July 1st, 2007 rally calling for the city takeover of St. Saviour’s Church to create a public park that would preserve the structure and add much-needed green space to the neighborhood…the property’s developer, Maspeth Development LLC, sent in the chainsaws and cut down [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Maspeth Queens st. Saviour's Church
Maurice and 54th Avenues, Mt. Zion Cemetery with a waste disposal plant overlooking it. In the 1850s, NYC decided it didn’t want its dead anymore. Rising real estate costs and an ever-expanding urban frontier led NYC to pass a law prohibiting any more burials in Manhattan in 1852. Churches and synagogues, which had begun to [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
The Long Island Rail Road, celebrating its 170th anniversary in 2004, crosses Flushing Avenue in style at 56th Street in Maspeth The first thing to remember about Flushing Avenue is that it doesn’t go to Flushing; in fact, it doesn’t approach within five miles of it. Flushing Avenue takes its unusual name because of the relative isolation of [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Fort Greene Maspeth Queens Ridgewood
Before poured concrete became the de rigueur material for New York City sidewalks, they boasted unique slate bluestone plates that made a distinct hollow noise when trod upon. Older parts of town can still be recognized, in part, by the presence of such distinct and handsome bluestone slate sidewalks, as we’ll see on this page… [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Astoria Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Carroll Gardens Flushing Maspeth Queens
Maspeth, in a western corner of Queens east of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn and west of Middle Village, seems stuck between the grit of Brooklyn and the airy, almost suburban feel that its eastern and southern neighbors, Middle Village and Glendale have. Maspeth was first settled by Native Americans for centuries before the middle 1600s and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Appearing to be a hybrid of the bishop’s crooks and long-armed poles, these distinctive lamps originally found a home on Seventh Avenue, though today they’re generally used for decorative effect in bridges and parks. In the castiron lamppost era, Seventh Avenue boasted its own design, a sort of intermediate one between the Bishops Crook and Long-armed designs. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 7th Avenue 8th Street Bath Beach Brooklyn Manhattan Maspeth Queens
