For some time I have been bemused by one of the street names in southern Bayside, along Cloverdale Boulevard south of Oakland Lake in the Queens Community College area. The neighborhood south of Oakland Lake, from 46th to 73rd Aves. and from 210th to 233rd Streets, Oakland Gardens, was named for the lake. What is today QCC and the neighboring Benjamin Cardozo High School are built atop what used to be the Oakland Country Club. See an aerial view here.
If you look at a modern map, a small suburban neighborhood has been carved out of the former Oakland Country Club. Unusually for Queens, we have a circular area similar to “Knots Landing” houses, though not a cul de sac per se. The area’s original British sounding names have been kept: Birmington (not Birmingham); Garland, Enfield; Kenilworth.
Thecircle is defined by Horatio Parkway and Hoxie Drive, which don’t sound especially British to me, except that Hoxie is true-blue British and the family has a coat of arms. The name is a respelling or contraction of the more British-sounding name Hawkshaw.
The 1922 map of this area featured the original street layout developers had for this area. Most likely in 1922, this was an open field and Hagstrom was working with renderings from developers and engineers of the time. It’s probably because of the broad pen stroke but on this map “Hoxie” looks like “Moxie” to me. The word is a synonym for “forthrightness” or “gumption” and was the name of a popular soft drink during that time. I’ve never had it: it’s well-distributed in New England and the brand is now owned by Coca-Cola. It would be unusual if a street in Bayside were named for a brand of soda pop.
Hoxie is also the name of two small towns in Arkansas and Kansas. The first of these was a flashpoint in the desegregation struggle as its public schools were among the first to receive desegregation in that state in 1955. Both Hoxies were named for a railroad executive, H.M. Hoxie of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railroad. Could one of the developers in the area have been from either one of these small towns?
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6/22/26
3 comments
The last name of a teacher in my high school was the identically pronounced Haxhi but she was Albanian. It’s both a first and last name in Albanian and means a person who has completed the Hajj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha
I was always perplexed about the etymology of East Hampton Blvd in the same general area.