WILLIAM SIDNEY MOUNT SCHOOL, REGO PARK

by Kevin Walsh

ONE of the more intriguing areas in Queens, at least from a street layout perspective, is the area known colloquially as “The Crescents” in Rego Park, in which the familiar street grid that dominates much of NYC is totally abandoned. In the 1920s, the Real Good Construction Company bought up the land and carved out a grid of crescent shaped streets. Along these they built more than 500 Tudor-style one-family attached and detached homes. In 1923, Rego Park was named as such by its developers; Rego being simply the contraction of “Real” and “Good.” The Rego Park of today fills a triangular piece of land bordered by three major Boulevards: Queens, Woodhaven and Yellowstone. All three are major commercial strips as well as homes to large apartment complexes.

Rego Park features a street layout found nowhere else in New York City. Semi-circular streets were laid out and given aristocratic-sounding alphabetized names from A through F: Asquith, Boelsen, Cromwell, Dieterle, Elwell and Fitchett. These streets, known collectively as “The Crescents,” feature detached housing of varying quality. All the Crescent streets begin and end at Alderton Street.

At Dieterle Crescent and 65th Drive (one of a couple of numbered streets to puncture the Crescents) you’ll find the impressive PS 174, the William Sidney Mount School. Mount (1807-1868) was a painter and musician from Setauket in the town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County, whose lifelike portraits of himself, friends and family, as well as everyday life in then-rural Long Island brought him much renown, with titles such as Dancing on the Barn Floor, Bar-room Scene, Bargaining for a Horse and The Power of Music. His work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, with the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook having the largest collection of his paintings.

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6/9/23

9 comments

chris June 10, 2023 - 5:00 am

Is there another person named Kevin Walsh besides the webmaster
who posts comments here?

Reply
Kevin Walsh June 10, 2023 - 9:02 am

Why?

Reply
Kevin Walsh June 10, 2023 - 9:03 am

That is me.

Reply
Zalman Lev June 10, 2023 - 8:48 am

Correction: Fitchett Street neither begins nor ends at Alderton Street.

Reply
chris June 10, 2023 - 1:47 pm

Sometimes the responses by KW seem different from each
other.You get the feeling there are 2 KWs

Reply
Kenneth Buettner June 10, 2023 - 8:52 pm

Fitchett Streete is not one of “The Crescents”.

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Zalman Lev June 11, 2023 - 9:04 am

I’d suggest that it’s debatable. Fitchett does follow the naming convention of the neighboring streets and follows the crescent contours — generally — between 63rd Drive and 66th Avenue. Interestingly, perhaps, there are a series of maps published between 1911 and 1923 by Williams that show a completely different layout and naming of streets in the area oi the “Crescents”. Presumably, proposed or designed, but never implemented.

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Brad June 11, 2023 - 3:20 am

There’s also a William Sidney Mount Elementary School in Stony Brook, the time just east of Setauket. It opened in 1968.

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Russ June 23, 2023 - 1:12 pm

I grew up in Rego Park ages 7-21, 1960-1974 (Park City Estates) and never heard of, nor ventured anywhere near The Crescents during that time. Amazing how narrow your world could be — even in the same neighborhood community — back in those days

Reply

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