WOODHAVEN TO FOREST HILLS 2022

NOW it can be told. Between November 2022 and October 2023 I was unable to do much Forgottening at all, as in walking around and pointing the camera at whatever attracted, which I began doing in earnest in 1998. I began to experience some discomfort and pain “down there” below the navel as early as July 2022, but persevered on and was getting some walks in as late as September; however, I was unable to walk more than a few blocks by November without aggravating, long-lasting pain. It baffled my GP and urologist (after a couple of painful tests) but a kidney specialist looking at a different matter almost casually mentioned that repairing a hernia found on a CAT scan might do the trick. After some delay, some of which was no fault of my own, I finally had the repair done in Sept. 2023 and it seems to have fixed things as some long walks since then have been free of incident. The symptoms were rather atypical, which threw the docs off. In any case, onward…

For the past year I have depended on a backlog of material and since this website has been going on for about a quarter century now, that hasn’t been an issue as my photo collection can now be numbered in the 6 figures, in my estimation. I’ll have to continue in that vein until I can amass enough photos to begin posting fresh ones again. FNY associate Sergey Kadinsky has also done yeoman’s work as his job takes him around town quite a bit.

Today, I’ll discuss a walk from Woodhaven to Forest Hills from early September 2022, in which my route went along the south end of Forest Park, into Forest Hills Gardens and then to the Queens Boulevard line back to Woodside.

(Incidentally, avoid both Woodside and Queensboro Plaza as much as possible in the fall and winter 2023 on weekends both are construction-palooza and there’s no service on the 7 train between Manhattan and Queensboro. Yesterday, to get home, I took the LIRR out of the new Grand Central Madison and I will have a FNY photo essay on that location sometime soon.)

After getting off the Q53 bus at Jamaica Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard I lit off east and noticed this sign for a South American restaurant. From my college days and early career in typesetting I recognized the font right away as Peignot (pronounced, for English-speaking ears, as PEN-yoh; indeed, some knockoff fonts spell it Penyoe). The font was designed in 1937 and originally distributed by the French type foundry,  Deberny & Peignot. There are no lowercase letters; instead, smaller uppercase letters substitute for lowercase. If you’re a fan of 1970s TV, the font was used for the credits on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I also believe the “NY” in the original New York Islanders’ logo is rendered in the font.

At Jamaica Avenue and 96th Street is the catering hall Woodhaven Manor. I wonder what this building was in the past…

Answer: one of its incarnations was the Loew’s Willard. I forgot to check the reliable Cinematreasures.

The website 1940s NYC leaves it out, and this map from 1915 shows it as an empty lot. Notice, though, the cemetery marked further north on 96th Street…I will get to that.

The Bronx is known as the Borough of Apartments, but Woodhaven has some handsome specimens including this one at 96th Street and 86th Road.

I have always had a problem with how street signage is handled in NYC. The Department of Transportation is supposed to be handling them but the agency seems more interested in promoting “Open Streets” and bicycling than nuts and bolts work. Many street signs are sun-bleached into illegibility and in this case, the print is peeling off.

The Queens Tabernacle, 86-03 96th Street is a nondenominational church located in what is evidently a former Masonic temple. A book open to the 133^rd Psalm is sculpted above the entrance. The psalm begins: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” It’s one of the shorter psalms in the Bible book.

A much larger church is further north, St. Matthews Anglican Church, 85-36 96^th Street, constructed in its current form in 1927, is a beautiful ashlar stone building that traces its roots back to a congregation first organized in 1900.

Wyckoff-Snediker Cemetery

Behind the church is the Wyckoff-Snediker Family Cemetery, the final resting place of some of Richmond Hill and Woodhaven’s earliest settlers. It is closed off to the public at most times.

Eldert, Ditmars, Wyckoff, Van Wicklen, and Lott are the names of some of those buried in the cemetery, whose gravestones go back to the late 18th Century. If you recognize them, it’s because New York City locations have been named after them to honor their importance to NYC’s history.

A buzz on the doorbell and a polite inquiry at the parish house may gain you admittance: at least it worked for me.

A sampler of attached and porched houses on 96th Street, which ends a block away at Park Lane South…

… the north end of which mostly borders Forest Park. For reasons I haven’t researched, though, a short stretch between Woodhaven Boulevard and 98th Street is filled by private dwellings on a hill that require a lot of steps to access.

This rusted iron trestle carries the former Long Island Rail Road Rockaway Branch over Park Lane South, between 98th and 101st Streets. In 2000, I walked the old rail cut with fellow enthusiasts. There are various proposals to turn it into a linear park, or restore rail service, or both. It’s not a pressing need as there are already several substantial parks in the area, not least Forest Park. Nothing will be done anytime soon, if at all.

Forest Park, which borders Park Lane South most of its length, was actually created by the city of Brooklyn in 1895, with the city’s Parks Department buying up acres of forested, pretty much unused property, hence the name. It’s among the more ‘natural’ of our big parks, with about 165 acres left as woodland, interspersed with marked trails.

The park was surveyed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-developer of Central and Prospect Parks and much like the parks and natural reserves of Staten Island, Forest Park contains several nature trails ‘blazed’ or marked for the ease of hikers, and also boasts a bridle path.

Pipe Factory Apartments

The William Demuth Smoking Pipe Factory, 101st Street south of Park Lane South (the border of Forest Park) was a factory where briar was turned and polished to manufacture Frank Medico smoking pipes. It was built at a time when smoking pipes was quite popular and conversations centered on which shape burned coolest to the taste. The brickwork is embellished with stepped corbels under the cornice and basketweave on the tower. It was converted to condos in the 1990s; I had always admired it on bike trips from Flushing to Richmond Hill in the 1990s, and harbored a desire to buy an apartment here, but it would have been difficult travel to work. I wound up at Westmoreland Gardens in Little Neck, which has similar brick construction I like.

Marco Giovannelli Playground, Park Lane South and Freedom Drive/102nd Street, is named for State Commander of the Catholic War Veterans and WWII vet Giovallei, who according to Parks, ” “devoted his time to veterans’ issues on the state and federal level. He also organized baseball and basketball leagues for St. Mary’s Gate of Heaven in nearby Ozone Park, as well as other community organizations. Marco Giovanelli died in 1980.”

When I saw the name “Giovannelli,” though, I thought of this guy:

As a rule I don’t recognize the people honored with secondary street signs but I did recognize this one; Jack Maple (1952-2001) served under NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton as Deputy Commissioner for Crime Control Strategies in the 1990s. Together they devised COMPSTAT, which employed “statistical data to track, identify and pinpoint priorities for the deployment of law-enforcement resources” Gil Tauber. This was instrumental in bringing crime down to livable levels during the years beginning in the mid-1990s. Maple grew up on this block of 108th Street. He was known for his sharp suits and died young from cancer.

I didn’t recognize the name Jayne Carlson, but the triangle named for her is marked by a brown Parks sign with gilt lettering and undefinagle leaf, which are gradually being replaced. According to NYC Parks, Jayne Carlson was

Vice President of the Richmond Hill Block Association for two decades and helped grow their annual park fair among other fundraising efforts for the park.

In addition to her park advocacy, Carlson donated her time and support to many organizations. She was on the executive board of the PTA at her childrens’ school, P.S. 66, and a member of the Parents Association at Archbishop Molloy High School. She founded the Coalition to Save Engine 294 in 1975, and again in 1990 when the local firehouse was closed. Carlson also volunteered with several organizations associated with the New York City Fire Department, where her husband Howard Carlson, Chief of Battalion 51 in Richmond Hill, worked for 32 years. Carlson died in 2000, after a 10-year illness, and is survived by her husband and two children. Today the triangle serves as a lasting tribute to her memory.

Park Lane South here intersects Myrtle Avenue, one of Brooklyn and Queens’ lengthiest routes, which began as a plank road in the mid-1800s. It runs from downtown Brooklyn to Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill. I walked its length in stages in 2010.

The north side of Myrtle Avenue and Park Lane South features Myrtle Avenues’s sixth and easternmost war memorial, The Doughboy, popularly called the My Buddy memorial. It was installed in 1926 and was sculpted by Joseph Pollia, who later designed the General Philip Sheridan memorial in Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square at 7th Avenue South and Christopher Street. It depicts a World War I soldier pausing by the grave of a fallen colleague. 71 names of fallen Richmond Hill residents are on the nameplate.

The crossroads is known as Sergeant Schaefer Oval.

Joseph E. Schaefer (1918-1987) was a resident of Richmond Hill who distinguished himself in World War II for having repelled, almost single-handedly, a Nazi attack on American troops positioned near Stolberg, Germany. Schaefer, who served as Staff Sergeant to Company I, 18th Infantry, United States Army, received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1945 for his defensive actions. The commendation by President Harry S. Truman inscribed on one side of the monument is taken from Schaefer’s Medal of Honor citation.

The Schaefer Oval was dedicated on March 24, 1987, shortly after Sgt. Schaefer passed away. Landscape Architect Signe Neilsen designed the octagonal granite outcropping that features inscriptions commemorating Schaefer’s service and a representation of the Medal of Honor, as well as the plantings in the oval. [NYC Parks]

We re entering an area featuring some excellent multifamily architecture. Here are a couple of the apartment buildings that face off at Park Lane South and Myrtle Avenue.

The Korean War (1950-1953) known chiefly to casual people in the street as the setting for the longrunning TV show M*A*S*H*, is the third war commemorated at this intercetion.

Another grouping of handsome apartment buildings that include Hampton Court at another major intersection, Parl Lane South and Metropolitan Avenue (which I have also covered from the East River to the Van Wyck Expressway).

A small sitting area on the south side of Met Ave. and Park Lane South is called Wallenberg Square.

The square is named for Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat (1912-1947) credited with saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from extermination by the Nazis in the World War II years by designing counterfeit passports and distributing them to Jews bound for the concentration camps. He also purchased as many houses, villas, and buildings as possible and adorned them with the blue and yellow of Sweden’s flag, thereby making them neutral diplomatic property and safe havens for Jews.

His whereabouts became unknown in 1945. In 1957, documents were released stating he had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Russian prison. Suspicions remain that he was  killed by the KGB.

Other monuments to Wallenberg in NYC include Hope, a Monument to Raoul Wallenberg by Hungarian artists Gustav Kraitz and Ulla Kraitz and architects Abel, Bainson and Butz was dedicated on November 9, 1988 on a traffic island at 1st Avenue and East 47th Street in Turtle Bay along Raoul Wallenberg Walk. The monument, a gift of the family of Hilel Storch of Stockholm, features five black diabase columns, mined from Swedish bed-rock, each with two sides rough-hewn and two sides smooth and a blue ceramic sphere–the traditional collar of hope–atop column 1 over cubical paving blocks taken from the former Jewish Ghetto in Budapest. Off to the side is a bronze replica of Raoul Wallenberg’s attaché case, left behind and filled with documents pertaining to his mission.

In addition, Wallenberg Forest can be found in Riverdale on Palisade Avenue across from River Road.

I can’t name these makes, but I liked seeing a red car and a blue car together. Why do most cars come in black, white or gray these days? Comments, as always, are open.

At the east end of Forest Park, Park Lane South ends at Onslow Place and a very short, yet busy, road called just plain Park Lane heads north to Union Turnpike and the entrance to Forest Hills Gardens. Just north of Onslow Place is a statue of an individual in mourning.

This five-foot bronze statue of the biblical character Job (pronounced Johb), mounted on a two foot schist and concrete base, is one of two casts of a sculpture created by Natan J. Rapoport (1911-1987) for the 1968 celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. Both casts were acquired by Dr. Murray and Sylvia Fuhrman, former residents of Kew Gardens, who then donated one to Yad Vashem, Israel’s National Holocaust Museum, in Jerusalem. The other stood in the Fuhrmans’ garden until 1986, when they donated it to the City of New York. Job was installed the following year just south of the Overlook, Parks’ borough headquarters, in Forest Park.

Rapoport chose to depict the figure of Job, the biblical character whose story is told in the Old Testament, to convey the universal suffering and ultimate test of faith that was endured by victims of the Holocaust. According to the story, Job, the “perfect and upright man”, is bereft of his family, his possessions, and even his health when the devil challenges the depth of his piety. Wrapped in a torn prayer shawl, with his head tilted heavenward and his hands clasped together, Job questions God’s justice in rewarding his faith with despair. He eventually comes to believe that life’s mysteries are beyond him, and as he resumes his life, misfortune turns to fortune and his suffering is answered with blessings.  –NYC Parks

Directly north of Job is The Overlook, the Forest Park administration building. The park was undergoing restorations and this was as close as I could come in September 2022. Once again from Parks:

It was not until 1911 that an independent Queens Parks Department was established for the borough, and a new building was designed to house the administration. The result was the Overlook, so named for its sweeping view of Forest Park. The firm of Birchman & Fox designed the Spanish Mission-style structure. The design was approved on August 30, 1911, and construction was completed on December 17, 1912. Soon after the first Queens Parks Commissioner, Walter G. Eliot, moved his office from the Arsenal in Central Park to the Overlook, the one-room building proved to be too small, and Parks added six rooms in 1915, designed by Erdmann and Hahn. Today, the Overlook has eight rooms on the ground level and six rooms on the basement level.

I did indeed press into Forest Hills Gardens, but as I write this on Sunday night I want to prepare dinner and rest for the work week, so I’ll get to those another time.

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10/29/23