EVEN after Greater New York was founded in 1905, southern Brooklyn and much of Queens, Bronx and Staten Island was farmland if not open country, dotted here and there with small towns. It wasn’t till the 1910s that an overall street grid was mapped in Queens and southern Brooklyn, and not till the 1950s that the grid was built out with residential and business districts. Even in the Super 70s, when I visited southern Staten Island and places in Brooklyn such as Bergen Beach there were large swaths of unbuilt-on territory. By now, that’s all changed.
Sometimes it’s frustrating to look at older NYC street maps because they often reflected developers’ plans instead of what was actually in existence. This 1905 map Gravesend historian Joseph Ditta referred me to is different as it shows only the roads that were actually there. I have excerpted the portion that shows much of Greenpoint as well as western Queens.
What strikes me right off the bat are names of small towns since absorbed into larger neighborhoods, such as Berlin, once a haven for German immigrants, along 56th Road and Rust Street and the Long Island Rail Road. Today most dwellings have been excised and the area is mostly warehousing and light manufacturing.
Linden Hill was once the west end of Maspeth, located where the Montauk and Bushwick LIRR branches had a junction. Older maps that this show the area as “Malvina.” Meanwhile, Laurel Hill was north of 56th Road and east of today’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; its legacy is Linden Hill Boulevard, the BQE service road. A separate Linden Hill was a small subsection of Ridgewood and is remembered by Linden Hill Cemetery.
While today Woodside is fairly vast, it had subdivisions in 1905 such as Lawrenceville, Locust Grove and Winfield, possibly named for General Winfield Scott (but I remain unsure).
Midway between Woodside and Maspeth along Fisk Avenue (named for a casketmaker and now called 69th Street) was Mount Pleasant. Now known as Ridgewood Heights after a later real estate development, it’s indeed a hilly area. Further east, where Maspeth blends into Middle Village, was Columbusville and Nassau Heights. Long before the Jackson Heights area was developed into a premier residential area, it was called Charlottesville (and earlier, Trains Meadow).
Newtown, of course, is the best known of these lost towns; it didn’t disappear, but was renamed by developer Cord Meyer as Elmhurst. Early British colonists in Maspeth were chased out by angry Native Americans, and eventually moved further east, where Queens Boulevard meets Broadway today. Eventually, the name Newtown was applied to the, er, new town. By the mid-1800s, horse cars and eventually streetcars began to bring in people from all over, and when Meyer developed the area in the 1890s, he lobbied for a “higher class” name…Elmhurst. Strangely, the IND subway, which arrived in 1936, keeps the Newtown name at a station, and Newtown High School retains the old moniker, as do a pair of roads in Astoria that were formerly main thoroughfares leading to the town.
More lost neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens
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11/25/24
6 comments
Two items:
First, I think you mean Laurel Hill, not Linden Hill.
Second, Winfield Junction is where the LIRR Port Washinton Branch swings away from the LIRR Main Line, about a mile east of the current Woodside Station. At one time, a signal tower known as WIN controlled the junction of the two LIRR branches, but a fire destroyed it in 1974 and it was not rebuilt.
The Port Washington Branch is the remainder of the original Flushing and North Side Railroad (and a few other name changes in between bankruptcies and takeovers). While it now joins the Main Line of the LIRR at Winfield Junction, it once continued west to Long Island City. Most of the right-of-way has been lost to late development, one short part still remains. On the west side of the Main Line you can see where Garfield Avenue continues along what was once the long-forgotten tracks towards the East River.
Now for a quick look at another really obscure street, you can follow a straight line on the map (using a ruler). Place the ruler on the map with Garfield Avenue on the top. Follow a straight line to the east, crossing over the LIRR Main Line you will see 73rd Place (which will bend to the south), but if you continue straight you will be on South Railroad Avenue. It is one of those barely known throughfares in Queens, but once likely ran along the south of the railroad and continued as what is now Garfield Avenue.
A bit of SRR Avenue is behind a gate at 73rd Place.
My father grew up in Mill Basin in the 1930s and there were still
a few farms around there back then.
A lot of big cities have neighborhoods that were once towns or even separate cities of their own, so this isn’t just NYC that is like that. Just like Brooklyn, some of those other cities have a neighborhood that was notable by themselves before being absorbed into them. Some of them include Beacon Hill in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, Buckhead in Atlanta, and probably many others.
Garfield Avenue, agreed. Some places were named Garfield following the president’s assassination in 1881 after serving less than one year. Maybe this is one of them.
When I look at Mount Zion Cemetery in Google’s so-called satellite view, I can make out a general Northeast-Southwest line of grave plots that seems to locate more of the r-o-w. continuing down to the point where 54th Ave meets the expressway. The cemetery’s first interment was 1893, its web page says, so the railroad DID NOT go through it!– it was long gone by then. The ground, already disturbed for the railroad grade, may have been easier to dig, or maybe the first cemetery lane simply followed the existing grade. Who knows.