I may do a new series in Forgotten New York pointing out the humble beginnings of major, well-known NYC streets. Today, I’m showing you the east end of the combined Greenpoint and Roosevelt Avenues, at Northern Boulevard and 155th Street, at a shopping mall opposite an IHOP. There is a library nearby as well as a former McDonald’s I frequented when I lived in the area between 1993 and 2007.
Greenpoint Avenue shows up on maps of Williamsburg (the city it was part of until it became part of Brooklyn) and Queens as far back as the 1850s, and it has been called Greenpoint Avenue on both sides of Newtown Creek going back to the mid-1860s. Unlike, say, Flushing Avenue and Bayside Lane, Greenpoint Avenue does indeed traverse the neighborhood it is named for. In Brooklyn, Greenpoint Avenue has been called L Street and Lincoln Street (it is in Greenpoint’s sequence from Ash to Quay) as well as National Avenue before Brooklyn nabobs settled on Greenpoint Avenue. And, while other lengthy NYC routes such as Broadway (Manhattan-Bronx), any of Manhattan’s lengthy north-south numbered avenues, or Brooklyn’s Fulton Street or Brooklyn-Queens’ Atlantic Avenue, Greenpoint Avenue never really does change personalities along its route. While it’s more commercial here, more residential there, more industrial there, it is resolutely gritty from the East River to where it completes its run at Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside.
And, it doesn’t end there — it merely changes its name to Roosevelt Avenue and runs to a shopping mall at Northern Boulevard and 155th Street in fab Flushing. You can walk or drive along one route from the East River to Flushing! Roosevelt Avenue was laid out in the 1910s, when the IRT Corona Elevated was built, and it was extended to its Flushing terminal in 1928. Once across the Flushing River, the elevated tunneled under what was then known as Amity Street, until the entire length of Amity Street was renamed Roosevelt avenue when the subway was completed.
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4/25/2023
9 comments
National Avenue could be a reference to the National Race Course in Corona. If you wanted to go there from Greenpoint, way to go.
There is no connection. National Race Course existed under this name from 1854-56, when it was renamed Fashion Race Track. Fashion Race Track operated from
1856-66. The “1852 Map Of The City Of Williamsburgh And The Town Of Bushwick Including Greenpoint” shows the E/W street naming sequence A-Q, with “L Street” being Greenpoint Avenue.The 1855 W. Perris ” Plan of the city of Brooklyn (15 sheets) shows Greenpoint Avenue was already renamed from L Street. It was renamed National Avenue during the Civil War for patriotic reasons since the city of Brooklyn at the time was a Republican bastion and solidly pro-Union. The name was switched back to
Greenpoint Avenue by 1868, as indicated in J.H. Higginson’s “Higginson’s insurance maps of the city of Brooklyn (1868)”.
I lived in that neighborhood from 1972- 78. The mall you referenced at the intersection of Roosevelt Avenue & Northern Blvd featured a terrific “hole in the wall” sit-down Italian restaurant (great shrimp marinara). That first cross street was a hazardous intersection. A little further west on Roosevelt Avenue was the house where former First Lady Nancy Reagan spent her early childhood years:
https://qns.com/2016/03/nancy-reagan-was-queens-native/
I enjoyed my six years in that neighborhood; I hope that it’s as vital & prosperous today as it was when I lived there at the beginning of my adult life.
That shopping center was the “temporary” location of the Kingsland home. The house was built around 1785, but was moved to the future shopping center site in 1923. When, in 1968, the Murray Hill Shopping Center was being developed, the house was moved once again, to its present location in Flushing near the Bowne House. Kingsland Homestead was one of the first buildings to be declared a landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
From what I’m hearing, Greenpoint Avenue did used to go to Flushing until that part was renamed to Roosevelt Avenue.
Greenpoint Ave. only extended as far as Betts Ave, (present 59th St.). Roosevelt Ave. came together by merging a number of existing streets from, Woodside to Flushing,
during the transition to the new naming/numbering system in the early 1920s.
Construction of Roosevelt Avenue and the IRT extension to Flushing were simultaneous. If you look at the DOT’s aerial map of NYC from the 1920’s, you can see the elevated structure making its way east through Corona. To the easternmost areas you can see the parts laying in open fields, while going back west it is in greater stages of completion. Roosevelt Avenue was built beneath the newly constructed elevated.
Roosevelt Avenue didn’t exist until after Jan. 6, 1919, when Theodore Roosevelt died. It was created by merging Skillman Ave., which itself merged with
Greenpoint Ave. at 3rd St. (present-day 55th St. in Woodside), Grand Ave. at Alburtis Ave (104th St.) in Corona and Amity and Cedar Streets in Flushing. You can check “Atlas of the borough of Queens city of New York Volume Two A. Newtown Ward 2. Based upon official plans and Maps on file in the various city offices, supplemented by careful field measurements and personal observations. By and under the supervision of Hugo Ullitz, C.E. Published by E. Belcher Hyde, 5 Beekman St., “Temple Court” Manhattan. 97 Liberty st., Brooklyn. 1915. Volume Two A”. (updated in 1919), Plates 6,7,8,9 and 12 to verify this.
Does anyone have any information on the brown apartment building in the main picture at the top of the page? Its on 155th street, it has a gated front entrance with what looks like a shield.