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