At Astoria Square (Astoria Boulevard, 21st Street, 27th Avenue and Newtown Avenue) is one of Astoria’s more distinctive buildings, the former L. Gally Furniture store.
In 1889 L. Gally established a furniture store and built this handsome four-story brick building in the western “V” formed by 27th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard. The furniture store lasted just a few decades, but this distinctive building with its cupola, now overshadowed by a high rise on the opposite side of Astoria Boulevard, has “nonetheless persisted.” It has been nicely restored within the past decade. It’s called Astoria’s Flatiron Building, but the actual Flatiron Building should be called Manhattan’s L. Gally Building — it preceded it by 12 years.
The building stands at the west end of what was once the Road To Hellgate Ferry…which ran from the East River to the heart of Newtown, now Elmhurst, ands comprises parts of Astoria Boulevard, Newtown Avenue, 30th Avenue, Newtown Road, Woodside Avenue, and Broadway to its east end at Queens Boulevard, where in the colonial era roads turned west and stretched across the noxious and noisome Newtown Creek to Kings County and Williamsburg. I have it all on FNY’s Hellgate Ferry Road page.
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6/7/23