WOODHAVEN Boulevard is but a mere local station on the IND Queens Boulevard Line, which runs express between Rooosevelt and Continental Avenues, but were it built today instead of the 1930s, it might well be an express station as directly above it is the massive Queens Center mall, one of Queens’ premier shopping locales. In the 30s, Woodhaven Boulevard was about a decade since its expansion into a multilane auto route that roars across Jamaica Bay to the Rockaway Peninsula. Before that, it was a more modest horse and cart route called Trotting Course Lane. In the old days, “trotters” driven by jockeys in carts were considered rather more respectable, as in the Music Man song “Trouble”:
And the next thing you know your son is playing for money in a pinch-back suit
And listenin’ to some big outta town jasper, hearin’ him tell about horse race gamblin’
Not a wholesome trottin’ race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse
Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy, settin’ on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil
Well I should say
Here’s an annotated “Trouble,” explaining what Preston is singing about.
I remember the “trotters” because the harness races were televised on Channel 9 just before the Saturday night wrestling in the 1970s.
The Woodhaven Boulevard IND station is rather forbidding. It’s dimly lit with a low ceiling. However the station entablatures are classic IND, with brilliant blue coloring. While today, the Queens and Woodhaven Boulevard intersection is nameless, in the 1930s, an effort was made to call it “Slattery Plaza”:
Slattery Plaza was a small cluster of stores that occupied a traffic island on Horace Harding Boulevard in the 1930’s and 40’s, and disappeared when the Long Island Expressway was built, said Jeff Gottlieb, president of the Central Queens Historical Society.
He said the plaza was named for James Slattery of Jackson Heights, an engineer who helped map the BMT subway lines. NYTimes
However, wikipedia disagrees on the name:
The plaza and subway station were named after Colonel John R. Slattery, former New York City Board of Transportation chief engineer who died in 1932 while supervising the construction of the IND Eighth Avenue Line.
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3/11/24