JUDGE HOCKERT TRIANGLE, Jamaica Estates

Union Turnpike evolved from a short road in Glendale called Union Avenue. As it was built east and gained length in the early 20th Century, it was renamed Union Turnpike, but it was never a traditional turnpike, e.g. a toll road in which a pike, or lengthy barrier, was turned when a toll was paid to allow through traffic. It;s the newest of Queens’ non-expressway east-west roads, as Northern Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue date back to the colonial era and may have been Native American trails, and Hillside Avenue, built at the south end of the terminal moraine, dates to the 1800s.

Union Turnpike forms the divider between several Queens neighborhoods, such as Hillcrest and Jamaica Estates. Robert Moses cleaved Jamaica Estates in half when he put the Grand Central Parkway through in the early 1930s. Most of the roads through Jamaica Estates (the childhood neighborhood of President Donald Trump) were given British names when the area was developed, a conceit common to other planned neighborhoods like Forest Hills and Prospect Park South in Brooklyn. Surrey Road is one of those names, matching a London suburb where the Martians cylinders arrived in the H.G. Wells classic War of the Worlds. A traffic triangle at Union Turnpike and Surrey Road is named for a local judge who served in a war of a different sort.

Jenkin Rylander Hockert (1894-1990) arrived in Queens by way of his birthplace, Chicago, IL; Hartford, CT; Valparaiso U. in Indiana; and Campbell County, South Dakota. He enlisted at the outbreak of WWI and served in the signal corps and as a biplane pilot. At war’s end, the peripatetic Hockert joined a law firm in Brooklyn and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He became an attorney for the Central Queens Alliance Civic Council and in that capacity, worked for improvements to parks and public spaces and replacements of one-room wooden schoolhouses, which still dotted Queens by the 1930s. He won election for Queens County Clerk on a ticket with Fiorello LaGuardia, and later worked as his campaign manager and later, as a city magistrate. He was a man seemingly ahead of his time as far as environmental activism is concerned as he commuted by bicycle from his home to various courthouses.

After his term as magistrate ended in 1947 Hockert entered private practice, except for a brief stint as an acting local Supreme Court Judge in 1962. He enjoyed a lengthy retirement in Boca Raton, FL from 1964 to 1990, when he expired at age 96. NYC Parks named this triangle in his honor in 1991, marked by both a green NYC street sign and brown and gold Parks square sign.

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5/5/20