I am stumped more often than I’d like to be. There was a real estate development on the east side of Auburndale Lane opposite Flushing Cemetery south of 46th Avenue constituting a series of streets in alphabetical order that continue with those names today: Ashby, Bagley, Courtney, Effington, Fairchild, Gladwin, with 47th Avenue filling in for the “D” avenue. At one time, they must have all had these brick gateposts, with only Bagley and Courtney’s surviving today. Some have lost their triangular “caps” and others have had their street names cemented over. The gateposts are very well made with alternating brick colors.
On this 1922 Hagstrom these streets are already in place, with Delmar Avenue instead of 47th, and an extra avenue, Hilbert; that became the eastern end of PIdgeon Meadow Road.
As I’ve explained before in Forgotten NY, street maps often do not represent what is actually there. Sometimes they depict what developers have in mind. Illustrative of that is a later map of the area by Belcher Hyde in 1926. It shows a fascinating transition period when our avenues from Ashby to Gladwin were under construction. In some cases, previous homesteads had rto be moved so that these one-block streets, and their attached homes, could be built. Already, Delmar has been replaced by 47th Avenue.
My question is: who commissioned the development? Did it have a name? We now see that it was constructed from the mid-1920s and was likely completed by 1930.
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9/29/21
1 comment
I’m guessing it was called Utopia Estates. A “Map of Broadway, Flushing East” was filed in 1926 was filed with Topo Bureau might be info there. Only thing is Hagstrom had it on their maps in 1922. Then Nov 10 1929 in the Brooklyn Daily Times : Mr Voeller a broker sold Max Wieser of Utopia Estates 46 1/2 acres at Utopia Parkway and Black Stump Road. He might have been zapped by the stock crash later that year because there seems to be no mention until May 1940 when a series of display ads appear selling houses at Utopia Estates with directions to 47th Avenue and Utopia. Nothing of Max or Utopia Estates after