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