OFTEN, developers give names to apartment buildings that can be seen above the entrances. Family members, wives, husbands, children are often used; presidents or local politicians; but occasionally, developers will bestow the name of the street on which the building was built. What happens when the street is renamed? The apartment house becomes a signpost to the past, reminding passersby who choose to research this kind of thing (you are reading a piece by one) that the street was called something else at one time.
Even newer buildings continue the practice. Here’s a building on the southeast corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Driggs avenue in Greenpoint called The Oakland. Oakland is a fairly common place name across the English-speaking world; Queens had the Oakland Country Club and probably the most prominent Oakland is across the bay from San Francisco.
Greenpoint had an Oakland Street, as shown in this 1898 Kings County map. In Greenpoint there are numerous north-south streets south of Greenpoint Avenue, but fewer north of it; Oakland was one of them, running from Newtown Creek south to Meeker and Humboldt Streets.
Oakland Street was extended south and widened when the Pulaski Bridge was opened in 1954. It was renamed and given Boulevard status in 1964 for former local Democratic alderman Peter McGuinness, who was the first to call Greenpoint the “Garden Spot of the Universe.” He was likely the most colorful politician of his era, outflanked only by a predecessor, “Battle-Ax” Gleason of Long Island City fame.
Peter J. McGuinness: My Hero [Miss Heather in The Gowanus Lounge]
McGuinness Boulevard, designed as a pedal-to-the-metal auto and truck route connecting the Pulaski Bridge and Brooklyn Queens Expressway on-ramps, has been dangerous to pedestrians and bicyclists, with numerous injuries and fatalities from speeding traffic. Bicycle lanes have been installed in recent years, but advocates continue to push for more traffic-calming measures.
The Oakland, Driggs and McGuinness, harks to an era when Oakland Street was sleepy and quiet.
Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)
5/27/24
2 comments
They are near impossible to see now because the brickwork’s been painted over, but on the building at the southwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Nassau Avenue are building-embedded markers for Oakland and Nassau.
And there I was, thinking that that thoroughfare had been named after a certain Ethelbert “Muggs” McGuinness….