CREEDMOOR Psychiatric Center is located on the old grounds of the Creedmoor rifle range, deeded to New York State for that use by the National Guard in 1872. International matches were held between American and European teams; the grounds encompassed a clubhouse, railroad station (along the long-abandoned Central Railroad of Long Island) and a local hotel. Bowing to complaints of locals of drunken visitors and stray bullets zinging by, the rifle range closed in 1908 and became a state mental hospital in 1910, and still operates today.
The only vestige of Creedmoor’s shooting days are the names of some of its streets: Winchester, Sabre, Musket, Range, and formerly, Pistol. You might suspect Springfield Boulevard should be included among them, for the Springfield Rifle (first produced in Springfield, Massachusetts), but the road is named for Spring Field, an old southern Queens settlement now a part of Cambria Heights, and persists in the neighborhood name Springfield Gardens.
The road begins as a modest two-lane road at Northern Boulevard and 219th Street in Bayside, but gains lanes south of Jamaica Avenue and roars south all the way to beyond the Belt Parkway, ending at Springfield Park in Brookville.
Like most of Queens’ main routes Springfield Boulevard goes back to the colonial era, or perhaps earlier as a Native American path. In this 1852 map excerpt I have marked what was then called Springfield Road in red. It intersects roads that are on today’s maps as Jamaica Avenue, Hempstead Avenue/Turnpike, Hollis Avenue and Linden Boulevard.
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9/13/23