GLENDALE AND FOREST HILLS

HEY, I just had to get out of the house, and Saturday, January 27, 2024 was the only day to do it. I work from home all week and my time is carefully monitored with online checkins, synopses, etc and at most, I can walk a few blocks around FNY HQ in Little Neck between 1 and 2 PM. At least until March, it’s dark after work, so I can’t get a lot of usable photos then either. Thus, I set out on what turned out to be a very dark albeit rainless day (there was a patch of blue over Little Neck in the morning that I knew wouldn’t have staying power). Actually I have a new IPhone with what Apple describes as a state of the art camera (like they do with every IPhone) and since the only usable night photos I can get are with an IPhone, I may try it when the weather warms.

NYC winters have eased the past few years with relatively short cold spells and very little snow. Whether this is a short trend or a true harbinger of climate change, global warming or what the preferred term is, is left to the climatologists. What I do know is that today’s walk, from the Metropolitan Avenue M train to Queens Boulevard, produced some very dark images and I had to brighten some of them up using Photoshop.

Why Queens Boulevard? As a rule I can then get a local train to Woodside and change for the 7 train to Woodside where I can get the LIRR home. Not this weekend:

No downtown express 2, 3
No 7 west of 74th St
No N to Manhattan, R taking up the load for both

Your transit dollars at work, with elevator installation at Queensboro Plaza the culprit for bad Queens service. Admittedly the Queens-bound track at Queensboro is three flights of steps up and quite a haul, and the station needs an elevator. Why they can’t do this work overnights and interrupt service then is a question for MTA head Janno Lieber and union reps to answer.

Today I walked in Middle Village and Glendale, two areas I haven’t been in since 2019-2020. Middle Village is so named because it is directly between Williamsburg and Jamaica as one travels on Metropolitan Avenue, which was laid out around 1815 to connect the two towns. The eastern end of Fresh Ponds, where Forest Park is today, was called “Dry Harbor” because it was said that houses there appeared to be sitting atop the crests of trees and hills, resembling a harbor without water. Today’s 80th Street was originally an extension of Dry Harbor Road, named after this part of the community. In the early 1860’s, developer George S. Schott acquired a considerable amount of land in Fresh Ponds as repayment of a debt owed him. As the Civil War drew to a close, he founded what is today known as Glendale, which he named after his hometown of Glendale, Ohio. At this time, the area’s main occupation was farming. In the late 1800’s, picnic grounds and beer gardens flourished due to an influx of German immigrants into the area.

GOOGLE MAP: ALL FAITHS-GLENDALE

On this map the walking portion was Metropolitan Avenue to Queens Boulevard; after that I got the F to Roosevelt/74th but was forced to then get a #7 east to Mets/Willets Point, then hoofed it down to the LIRR Mets/Willets Point station in Flushing Meadows (which now thankfully is open all year) and caught a LIRR home after a 20 minute wait.

When my pal Mitch Waxman moved to Pittsburgh, he purchased an auto to get him places he wishes to photograph as the city is fairly vast and very hilly. Me, I’m too poor and too fearful to drive.

This was about as busy a day on the subway as I have had in a long while. After taking the LIRR to Penn Station I got a normally express, this day local #2 train to Fulton Street, jumped on a J and took it here, to Myrtle Avenue and awaited an M. At this station you can see the superstructure of an abandoned portion of the Myrtle Avenue El that extends west to Lewis Avenue. Trains ran on this portion from 1888-1969, after which only the section east of Broadway remained in service.

As you can see, reproductions of IRT/BMT “cowled” platform lamps are on this center platform. A closeup of one reveals both LED and sodium bulbs.

If you stand on the south end of the Myrtle Avenue platform, you can see the only remaining elevated track crossing in active service. At times, eastbound M trains are held while J trains traveling north on Broadway clear the crossover.

This magnificent, though deteriorating, building is also visible from the south end of the platform. The former Prudential Savings Bank at #5 Stuyvesant Avenue and Vernon Avenue at the border of Bushwick, is a worthy sentinel at the uneasy line separating the two deep-Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and Bedfoerd-Stuyvesant. It’s a Classically-themed building with an entrance pediment, Corinthian columns and a dome originally lined on its interior by Guastavino tiling, constructed in 1908 by the German-American design firm Daus & Otto. Rudolph Daus and also designed the Church of Notre Dame on Morningside Drive, which tends to get lost in the massive shadow of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

The bank itself did not survive the ravages of the late 1970s, and it was purchased in 1994 and converted, after most of the interiors were removed, into the Urban Sports & Cultural Center, teaching martial arts.

Suzanne Spellen has more at Brownstoner.

After a 15-minute ride on the M to the last stop at Metropolitan I regarded the canopied platform and simple brick station house. There has been a surface railroad traveling to this spot on Metropolitan Avenue east of the Rentar Plaza shopping center and Lutheran/All-Faiths Cemetery since 1906, when a steam train line was founded to bring passengers from Myrtle Avenue to what was then simply Lutheran Cemetery. By 1915, the tracks were reinforced for heavier rail and electrified, with a wooden stationhouse constructed. In 1974 a fire claimed the stationhouse, as well as a few subway cars, and the current brick stationhouse opened in 1980.

Christ the King Regional High School, just to the east of the station, was instituted by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn (which also included Queens) in 1962. Classes were held at Mater Christi High School in Astoria until the new building seen here in Middle Village was opened in April 1964. The school is best known for its basketball program, which has produced NBA and WNBA stars such as Lamar Odom, Jayson Williams, Chamique Holdsclaw, Sue Bird and Tina Charles.

A law was passed in 1847 that banned future cemeteries from being opened in Manhattan. As a result, Lutheran Cemetery was founded in Middle Village in 1852 by German churches located in Kleindeutschland, Manhattan. Many of the victims of the General Slocum tragedy were laid to rest here.

Many Slocum victims are buried in Lutheran/All-Faiths Cemetery Most of them were from the Lower East Side, a neighborhood then known as Kleindeutschland: Little Germany. In the years after the tragedy, most of the traumatized German-Americans in the neighborhood would move away. Only a few German inscriptions on buildings, such as Freie Bilbliothek u. Leshalle (free library and reading room) on the Ottendorfer Library at 2nd Avenue and East 9th Street) are reminders of Kleindeutschland.

The Lutheran Cemetery Slocum monument was unveiled in 1905, exactly one year after the fire, by the youngest survivor, two-year old Adella Liebenow, who lived until January 2004 when she was 100. The inscription on the front of the stone is repeated in German on the back.

Though All-Faith’s “star power” can’t match Green-Wood, Woodlawn or Evergreens, here is interred actor Carrie Nye (Dick Cavett’s wife) and numerous members of Donald Trump’s family including his father and grandfather (both Frederick Trumps) as well as his grandmother Elizabeth, mother Mary and brother Fred Jr. (A plaque marking Fred Trump’s first supermarket in Woodhaven was removed a few years ago owing to the president’s unpopularity in NYC.)

The cemetery’s office building is located north of Metroplitan Avenue; however, I entered through the cemetery’s oldest section, a couple of acres south of Met Ave. Some of the roads are paved with uneven cobblestones, making them difficult to walk or bicycle on, and are even hard on auto shock absorbers. I imagine the Dobbins who brought coffins within in the early days didn’t mind, or at least, not complaining.

Though most of the names on stones and tombs are German in the old sections, I did find pockets of Asian names on stones and this pagoda-like structure, reflecting Queens’ newest influx of immigrants.

When I go past All-Faiths, I visit the Martians: Felix, Carrie and Salome, who are interred near the gate. As far as I have gathered. “Martian,” likely pronouned ‘mar-tee-yan,” is a Romanian or eastern European name.

Metropolitan Avenue east of the entrance gate and west of 69th Street. This short section of the avenue is currently mired in controversy as an MTA project, the Interborough Express, a project personally championed by NYS Governor Kathy Hochul, is supposed to be a crosstown light rail route connecting Bay Ridge and Jackson Heights. Though few regularly commute interborough, the proposed line connects to many existing subway and rail lines.

While the majority of the line is supposed to run along the existing NY Atlantic Bay Ridge Line and the Connecting Railroad, a short section was originally going to use the short tunnel under All-Faiths Cemetery; however, that tunnel is too narrow for light rail and the MTA prefers to run the light rail on sections of Metropolitan Avenue and 69th Street, which already are busy auto and bus routes. Local residents and representatives oppose the plan.

I walked through All-Faiths’ southern section from one gate to the other. I don’t have a map of the cemetery, but noticed the older, all German section at the north end of the section and the newer section, with names of all nationalities, on the south end.

Why walk all the way through the cemetery? I had never done it before and I can make it a direct route between Metropolitan Avenue/Middle Village into Glendale. But I can only do it on weekends as this south gate on 73rd Street only opens on weekends and holidays.* Where you find cemeteries, you find monument dealers.

*I am hearing it’s open all week. Comments are open

The quiet neighborhood of Glendale contains a number of anachronisms, including the passage of the Long Island Rail Road Montauk spur from west to east. This sleepy line now carries freight only, but it’s only been a decade or so since at least one daily passenger train plied the tracks here. And, until March 1998 Glendale had its very own LIRR station, which in its final years consisted of a bare spot in the weeds alongside the tracks.

The Montauk spur, which was apparently named because it once served trains bound for Montauk, splits from the main branch in Jamaica west of the large Jamaica station complex and runs west to Long Island City on elevated, at-grade, and open cut portions. It once contained station stops in Richmond Hill, Glendale, Fresh Pond, Haberman (in western Maspeth, named for a local firm), Penny Bridge (named for the span the Kosciuszko Bridge replaced) and LIC. By the mid-1990s, patronage on the line had dropped to less than a dozen daily riders and, since new double-decked cars were being phased in that required high level platforms, the decision was made to close the stations rather than rebuild them.

If you think you’re seeing the same pair of houses on these two photos from about 1910 and 2024, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Both the buildings shown here on Edsall Avenue were at one time hotels serving travellers exiting at Glendale: The former Woods Inn, or Kirschmann’s saloon (1906), on the left and the even older George Gundolff’s Hotel (1830s) on the right. Now they are private homes and the residents may have no idea of the buildings’ former use. Both have been resurfaced and no longer look very much as they were when built.

This clearing by the side of the tracks is pretty much all there was to the Glendale LIRR station, though I would really like to see how it looked, say, in the 1940s or 1950s. If the estimable Art Hunecke has it in his online archives, I haven’t seen it there. As I recall when I rode the line in March 1998 when I got wind that the stations would be closing, it was one of the few “Montauk” stations to have an actual ID sign other than Richmond Hill and long Island City.

That building tucked away behind the tracks is actually a law office. A nameplate in front gives the address as 72-37 71st Avenue, while it’s otherwise identified as Edsall Avenue. Perhaps that dead end in front of the building is regarded as 71st Avenue.

Edsall Avenue, meanwhile runs along the south side of the tracks for a few blocks; it never got a number when most Queens streets were changed from names to numbers during the 1920s. If I didn’t tell you this was Queens, it could be a rail siding anywhere in the country.

At grade crossings you can get a closer look at railroad signals, which unfortunately I am not savvy enough to read. This metallic sign, installation date unknown, warns against crossing the tracks, but there is a monument dealer there these days, and you won’t be arrested for crossing. The sign was a lot less rusty a couple of years ago, but its age seems to be catching up.

About 20 years ago I walked the Montauk tracks from Glendale to Fresh Pond station. It was on a Saturday but still unwise, as freights traveling at even a slow speed can come upon you in a hurry. I risked injury or arrest, so I advise against walking the tracks (for most of the length of the Montauk there is no electrified third rail).

What I like about the housing stock in Glendale is what I like about it in Astoria: it’s eclectic and varied. Still, you can see the signs of a developer here on 73rd Street, as the brick houses with peaked cornices all likely had the same builder. Some of the original roof treatments are still in place, but they are getting fewer.

Like Grand Street and Grand Avenue, which run from Williamsburg to Maspeth, Cooper is called a “Street” in Brooklyn, but once reaching the (undefended) Brooklyn-Queens borough line at Irving Avenue, it becomes an Avenue. It widens gradually and runs in a northeast route through Ridgewood and Glendale and eventually knocks on the door of Forest Hills as it ends at Woodhaven Boulevard. It is a very old road…it takes exactly the same route as the road from Bushwick to Newtown as shown on this 1852 Dripps map of Brooklyn and Queens.

The origin of the name isn’t mentioned in any of my sources, but my guess is industrialist/philanthropist Peter Cooper, whose name loomed large in 19th-Century Brooklyn and Manhattan. He had a glue factory on Newtown Creek.

When I stumbled across The Assembly Bar at Cooper Avenue and 73rd Street I noted that the exterior doesn’t look like a bar; to me, it looks more like a beauty parlor than a bar. I didn’t stop in (I never drink alone) and even yelp.com doesn’t list it. In fact it has appeared in two feature films: “Trees Lounge, “with Steve Buscemi, and “Chuck” with Liev Schreiber as Chuck Wepner, boxing’s “Bayonne Bleeder” who (nearly) went the distance with Ali.

As I have said Cooper Avenue takes many twists and turns. One brings it actually northward along 73rd Place, where it turns east again and assumes Central Avenue’s eastern path. There, you will find monuments to Sgt. Edward Miller (d. 1944) and other local residents who perished in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. We’ve been in a number of wars since, so Glendale may have to add to the monument.

The Montauk branch passes busy Cooper Avenue just east of the Glendale station, but long ago Cooper Avenue, like Flushing Avenue was depressed under the tracks, and becomes something of a speedway here. The road and underpass were treated to a reconstruction early in the 2010s. According to Art Huneke, this underpass was built in 1935. There’s a staircase to the dead end section of Cooper on the surface, and another staircase that currently leads nowhere.

I had been unaware of this short passage over Cooper Avenue beside the tracks that connects it to the eastbound 71st Avenue.

Those who have read FNY for awhile know about my attraction to alleys and dead ends. Valentine Place is off Cooper Avenue just west of 80th Street in Glendale, near the Atlas Mall. It appears on maps as early as 1915. In fact, buildings along Cooper Avenue, then called Central, and Valentine Place were there long before the rest of the area was developed.

As part of FNY’s Alleys Reclamation Project, which has already named Bayside’s Boyce Avenue for rocker Tommy Boyce, I have decided that Valentine Place should officially be named for Karen Valentine, who was the reason I watched Room 222, set in Walt Whitman High School in LA from 1969-1974. While hospital shows are a dime a dozen, school shows are rarer with Abbott Elementary the latest example.

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I’m going to call an audible, stop right here, and enjoy the rest of my weekend. Will conclude this trip in next Sunday’s page.

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1/28/24