RETURN TO QUEENS VILLAGE PART 2

QUEENS Village, centered at Springfield Blvd. and Jamaica Avenue, was known originally as Little Plains, then Brushville, after a local landowner, until about 1920. The present elevated station was constructed in 1924. Interestingly you can still see the remnants of a layup track here. In 1856, residents voted to change the name of the town to simply “Queens” and that name persisted until at least the 1920s, when the Long Island Rail Road added the word “Village” to the station name. Before the 1898 consolidation the village of Queens was located in the county of Queens, which may have led to some confusion. However, people have seemingly adjusted to saying “New York, New York” for over two centuries.

In Part 1 I explored the region near the Queens Village LIRR stop, so today I will show what I discovered in the Bellaire and Hollis areas to its immediate west.

It’s easy to mix up two Queens Village-adjacent areas. Bellerose is the area to Queens Village’s northeast, on either side of the Cross Island Parkway and north of Jamaica Avenue/Jericho Turnpike, while the similarly-named Bellaire comprises the blocks west of Springfield Boulevard, south of the LIRR, north of Hollis Avenue and east of Francis Lewis Boulevard. Most of the blocks are lined with single-family homes that remained in the middle-class affordable range for awhile after their counterparts in ritzier neighborhoods. The streets conform to a grid except for the odd Bellaire Place, which cuts through for two blocks at an angle; perhaps developers were getting around a swampy area when the street was built. Old maps call it “Suydam Street.”

Before Bellaire was developed there was on, er, offshoot of the Creedmoor Rifle Range located there in which there was located a casino and grandstand associated with the National Pigeon Shooting Association. The area was developed after that pastime was made illegal in 1902.

At 99th Avenue and Suydam Street you find a handsome mosque, Masjid al-Rahman.

According to the New York Times, the name “Hollis” comes via Frederick W. Dunton, the first developer of the area, which was once known as East Jamaica. He was a native of Hollis, New Hampshire. Originally, Hollis, a parallelogram defined by 180th Street, Francis Lewis Boulevard, Hillside Avenue and 104th Avenue and bisected by Jamaica Avenue, was settled by the Dutch and centered around the present intersection of Jamaica Avenue and Hollis Avenue, which was once called Old Country Road.

During the Revolutionary War, General Nathan Woodhull was captured by the British at the Increase Carpenter tavern in 1776; according to legend, when the Brits ordered him to proclaim “God Save the King” he instead said, “God save us all” and earned a sword bludgeoning, for which his arm was later amputated. He was sent to a prison ship in Gravesend Bay, but a more sympathetic British official had him transferred to onshore house arrest, but he died later in the year.

The cannon at Nathaniel Woodhull School (PS 35), 90th Avenue and 192nd Street in Hollis is the only marker of death of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Woodhull. It was apparently built in 1905, but I do not know where the cannon was obtained.

Meanwhile, there had been a New York State historical marker on Jamaica Avenue and 196th Street across the street from St. Gabriel’s Church nearer the location of Increase Carpenter’s tavern. It read:

Gen. Nathaniel Woodhull was captured and fatally wounded by the British in Increase Carpenter’s house 200 feet north of this spot.

That marker is now in the possession of the Queens Historical Society.

Dunton developed several neighborhoods surrounding Hollis, many of which carry “Hollis” in their names, including hilly, exclusive Holliswood, now south of the Grand Central Parkway, and more middle-class Hollis Hills, to the GCP’s north. General Colin Powell, activist Al Sharpton, humorist Art Buchwald and Atlanta mayor, later UN ambassador Andrew Young lived in Hollis, as did hip hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons and old-school rappers  Run-DMC.

On the Hagstrom excerpt shown above, The neighborhood name “Hollis” is misplaced as the real Hollis is located south of the railroad; this error wasn’t corrected until the old-timey font in black was substituted by Helvetica Bold in blue in the 1980s. It could be that in 1922, Hollis included areas north of the railroad, though.

On the map, note the curved streets south of Jamaica Avenue…bearing the names Hiawatha, Sagamore, Carpenter and Woodhull. Two have Native American associated names and two honor Carpenter and Woodhull from the Revolutionary War incident.

Scenes along Hiawatha Avenue with single plot, well-maintained houses.

The years haven’t been kind, esthetically speaking, for this house at Hiawatha Avenue and 197th Street, as most of its external ornamentation was removed to be replaced by aluminum siding. Its old outline is still visible.

As we will see the Hollis LIRR station contains a number of its original design elements. The railing and concrete escutcheons are likely originals from when grade crossings were eliminated and the railroad placed on embankments and bridges across major routes in the 1910s, as seen here at 99th Avenue and 195th Street.

The Ketcham House, Hollis Avenue between 99th and 100th Avenues south of the railroad, is a remodeled farmhouse constructed in the mid-1800s. David Ketcham purchased a farm, including the farmhouse, from Henry Henderson (remembered in a nearby street name) in 1849, and this remodeled building is its descendant. The house is currently used for film shoots and is rented for temporary lodging.

(Caution: the Ketcham House website is rather annoying as it is constantly moving, not settling on particular images)

Though I wasn’t catching a train, I lingered at the Hollis LIRR station, which has unprepossessing, almost hidden, entrances at 193rd Street north and south of the tracks. I was fascinated with the railings, made of pebbly concrete; old photos show iron lamps affixed to them at intervals. Only one other station in the system used a similar design: my home station in Murray Hill for 14 years, Broadway (named for the neighborhood subdivision and the former name of Northern Boulevard). To my delight, an old school LIRR M3 unit stopped by; trains stop here about once per hour.

Hollis is the only public wood-planked platform in existence with the LIRR I have encountered, though there may be more out east. LIRR personnel-only Boland’s Landing station also has a wood plank platform.

A modern dual-powered LIRR diesel happened by the station , as well, on an eastbound track south of the platform.

Old-design platform weather shelter. Similar such were replaced with newer designs in Little Neck (my home station) several years ago.

Staircase entrances, which go to the tunnel connecting each side of 193rd Street, are reminiscent of subway stairs.

My feeling is that Hollis was once a more important station. I say this because of all the large apartment buildings arrayed along Woodhull Avenue, one of which also fronts on Sagamore. Even in eastern Queens you find apartment buildings in the immediate vicinity of train stations.

At Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street are a pair of markers for a former semi-exclusive development called Hollis Park Gardens, and the concrete has been fashioned into an “HPG” trigram. In the period from 1880-1920, buildings often had these elaborate digrams or trigrams with interlocking letters that sometimes made them very hard to make out, but this one is pretty legible.

Actually this one is a rarity as it marks two streets that no longer exist. In Jamaica, much of Jamaica avenue was called Fulton Street (and Jeericho Turnpike further east); the entire stretch became Jamaica Avenue around 1920. Meanwhile, Hollis Park Boulevard was simply given a number, 293rd Street. More on Hollis Park Gardens and Jamaica Estates here.

I continued up 193rd Street, the spine of Hollis Park Gardens and marveled at the spacious plots and mostly Tudor houses with an occasional apartment building spotted in. Finally, I picked up the Q36 back to Little Neck on Hillside Avenue back home to my place, of which I am still proud 16 years in.

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7/2/23