WHENEVER a road deviates from the street grid, parcels too small to be developed often become parks, some fortunate to have benches or monuments, with most of them hosting shrubs and flowers. As these triangles, ovals and circles represent the meeting of major roads, veteran organizations maintain flagpoles and memorials on them. But what happens where the number of veterans dwindles?
At Ocean Crest Boulevard, Dickens Street and Beach Channel Drive, an unnamed median hosts a flagpole without an inscription or a plaque. The site is managed as a Greenstreet median but it does not appear on the NYC Parks map of monuments. That’s what makes it worthy of Forgotten-NY. Perhaps a knowledgeable Rockaway resident can comment on its history.
Ocean Crest Boulevard doesn’t live up to its name. It is one of nearly a dozen little boulevards and Kevin knows about the rest of them. As for Beach Channel Drive, it was created in 1927 to offer an easy route from the Nassau County border at Inwood to Riis Park along the bay side of the peninsula.
This road parallels the elevated Rockaway Line and the Rockaway Freeway that runs beneath the tracks.
This border of Bayswater and Wavecrest offers little in regards to architecture or history but knowing Kevin’s penchant for font names, across the elevated tracks from the flagpole is a substation constructed in the 1950s. Perhaps Kevin knows this font.
Sergey Kadinsky is the author of Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs (2016, Countryman Press), adjunct history professor at Touro University and the webmaster of Hidden Waters Blog.
Check out the ForgottenBook (HarperCollins, 2006), as well as Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013). I also have a chapter in the anthology “New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg” (Reaktion, 2007). As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site.
10/22/26