TODAY I’ll mention a street of barely any consequence that I decided to cover while I was meandering around in the neighborhood, Boyce Avenue, one of Queens’ relatively few named minor streets. Somehow, it avoided getting a number. It runs for one block only, between 208th Street and the Clearview Expressway service road south of 39th Avenue.
I have been concentrating posts in northern Queens as I slowly get back into it following surgery after months of relative inactivity. I have overlooked southern Queens throughout FNY’s existence so I intend to do a few posts highlighting South Jamaica, St. Albans, etc even if I have to rely on Street View to do so. But for the matter on hand…
As this 1949 map excerpt shows, Boyce Avenue was just one of a number of short streets mapped along the Long Island Rail Road cut. Today one block of Boyce exists. I’m not sure Bowden and McKim Avenues were ever built, as no trace of them are there today. This map also conveniently shows numbered avenues’ former names, as they were still in recent memory in 1949.
The “Boyce” the avenue is named for is lost to history; perhaps a local landowner, or maybe a surveyor. Since no one alive now would probably remember, I like to think it’s named for Tommy Boyce, one half of the songwriting/singing duo Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who rang up 1960s hits with the Monkees and on their own with “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight.” Here they are on “Bewitched”:
Sadly, Tommy Boyce, suffering from a brain aneurysm and quite understandable severe depression, was a suicide in 1994; Bobby Hart is still with us in 2024.
Around the corner on the service road is this special make of telephone pole masts installed along the Clearview and other expressways instead of the usual finned masts used elsewhere. Seems redundant to me to have special masts like this (they have carried incandescent, mercury, sodium and now LED lamp fixtures) but perhaps different agencies are responsible.
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1/15/24
8 comments
On that map the spelling appears to be “BOYIE.” A typo, I assume.
It’s only speculation — based in part on photos available at Aarts-Aarchives — but McKim and Bowden may have disappeared when the open cut was constructed for the railroad.
That open cut was accomplished in the 1920s
I see it as BOTIE but the sign IRL does have Boyce
Nearby Palace Blvd catches my eye. Wow, where was the palace?
William Boyce (1858-1929) founded the Boy Scouts in the United States in 1910, so if the dates work out the street’s name might be the doing of a former Scout turned real estate developer.
Bizarre New York connection: his great-granddaughter Diana Oughton was one of the student radicals who blew up the townhouse on West 11th Street (and herself) in 1970.
Another Boy Scout connection is nearby, in Flushing. The center mall of trees on Northern Boulevard that runs east from Main Street is the Daniel Carter Beard Mall. A Flushing resident, he founded a nationwide scouting program in 1905, and merged it into the new Boy Scouts in 1910. He was the founder of Troop 1, which is the longest continuously operating Boy Scout Troop in the US. The Mall was originally “Flushing Park” and was renamed in his honor in 1942.
As another interesting note, Flushing Park was the site of the first public Christmas tree erected in a Queens Park, in 1913.
Oughton was a member of the Weather Underground. She and others were packing dynamite into nail bombs to be used on servicemen at Fort Dix to protest the Vietnam War, when one detonated, blowing her to bits, and bringing down the Greenwich Village townhouse during “The Days of Rage”.
There was another different song from a few years before Boyce & Hart’s hit song, with the same name, done by Barry (De Vorzon) & the Tamerlanes, a studio group meant to sound like another act of his label, the Cascades (Rhythm Of The Rain) whom he was the producer for. De Vorzon is probably best known for “Nadia’s Theme,” the music Nadia Comaneci performed to at the Olympics, which is the credits music on The Young & The Restless.