EVERY so often when I’m in Jackson Heights, I make my way over to 31st Avenue and 81st Street to see how the Crooked House of Jackson Heights is doing. It’s a tidy, well kept private dwelling on the northeast corner of the somewhat busy intersection. I have no idea who owns it. Instead of facing either 31st Avenue or 81st Street, it instead is positioned in a diagonal fashion toward the corner. Not a whole lot of private homes are positioned like this. I call it the Crooked House of Jackson Heights.
The unique positioning gives the house a rather substantial front lawn facing the corner. Usually, when a house is unusually positioned there’s a story behind it and in this case that’s no exception.
Here’s a 1909 map excerpt of Jackson Heights (ignore the blue box; a mistake I made when screen shotting it). Amazingly what is now Jackson Heights remained undeveloped well into the 20th Century and presented a somewhat wide expanse of sparsely populated meadows between the towns of Long Island City and Flushing. That all changed in the late 1910s and into the 1920s when the Queensboro Corporation built the grand apartment buildings Jackson Heights is known for today. The street grid was then filled in and houses arrived and by WWII, Jackson Heights was fully built out.
But in 1909 only a few roads and a couple of trolley lines crossed what was then called Trains Meadow (the derivation is unclear). At the bottom of the map is Jackson Avenue (Northern Boulevard) and at the top, the Astoria-Flushing Turnpike (Astoria Boulevard). The part of “Old Bowery Road” that hosted a streetcar line to North Beach survives, as Jackson Mill Road (though the mill is long gone).
But the road cutting northeast, Trains Meadow Road, has left little trace. The road itself was laid out as early as the 1670s and ran from Woodside to Flushing Bay originally, but as the overall grid was built the road ceased to be important and fell into disuse (though had it survived it would have made a good shortcut through the area).
Of the homes built along Trains Meadow Road, few survive…one being our house at 31st Avenue and 81st Street, which once had a Trains Meadow Road address but is now plain 80-19 31st Avenue.
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8/2/22
13 comments
You can also see, on Google Maps, a few other property lines follow the same angles.
Look at Google Earth satellite view of the intersection. The building across the street on the SW corner was built on the same diagonal. But no others are.
There’s several references to “Train’s Meadow” in the Long Island Star back to 1820. The possessive form suggests someone named Train owned it. Starting in 1832, newspapers sometimes called “Train Meadow.” By 1888 it’s sometimes “Trains Meadow.”
Look west a few blocks, the new row houses are at the same angle, or the property is.
Laws of the State of New York, 28th Session, has a reference to “Train’s meadow, in Newtown” (lower case “m” in original) from 1805.
The Post Office in the Jackson Hts. shopping center was (maybe still is) the Trainsmeadow Station.
Also Ehret Avenue, seen hooking north from Astoria Blvd. used to go to North Beach but no sign of it is left today (unless someone has a fascinating new find…)
Wow! Another crooked house in Queens! Great to know! I thought I found the only one which is on 33rd Street between Broadway and 34th Ave. in Astoria! I’ve been trying to find an old map of that area to see what it used to look like. Any idea where to find that map?
That is said to be on the path of the Old Ridge Road.
Thanks Kevin! I googled The Old Ridge Road and discovered the alley way remaining in LIC. (37th ave and 30th street). I’m going to go check it out, even the the description I found makes it sound pretty grimy! Thanks again!
I wonder if the crooked man from the nursey rhyme once lived there, though he probably didn’t being that he wasn’t even real.
The house is actually not in Jackson Heights. The house is on East Elmhurst.
Close enough.
Growing up in the 1950s on 30th Ave between 82nd St and 83rd St I remember that there was a road extending from the NE corner of 31st Ave & 81st St diagonally to the NE and ending where it intersected with 82nd St. On this diagonal which coincides with the orientation of the Crooked House was a gas station/auto repair. I remember that there was an accident when a car that was being repaired fell onto the propritier and killed him. I also remember a sign in front of the Crooked House that indicated it was a Guild; can’t remember any more about the sign.