Tuesday, September 7, 2021 – A trip to Queens was a quick commute and now the newest suburb

By admin

TUESDAY,  SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

The

461st Edition

From the Archives

Steel Rail Suburbs:

Rising Queens

Stephen Blank

Steel Rail Suburbs: Rising Queens

Stephen Blank

I have breakfast on my balcony most mornings, looking across at Queens (I’m in the Rivercross 03 line). I’ve watched, fascinated by the growth of Long Island City, and I’ve tentatively put my toe in, writing about LGA, Ravenswood and William Steinway. But it’s time to take a deeper dive into Queens.

Let’s begin with infrastructure, how the railroad and then, the subway transformed Queens (what I call the growth of “Steel Rail Suburbs”) and then a second essay looking at Garden Cities, an interesting subcategory of the growth of Queens.

In 1900, Queens was mainly rural, the largest of the City’s five boroughs by area, but with only about 4% of its population (a bit more than 150,000 people). Clifton Hood writes that “Queens was so far removed from the hectic pace of city life that contemporary guidebooks encouraged Manhattanites to take day trips there” to see close up country life. 

The sudden expansion of rapid transit changed Queens forever. When the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the Long Island Rail Road in 1900, then electrified it through Queens in 1905-1908, and opened the Penn Tunnels under the East River in 1910, it brought virtually the whole of Queens within the suburban commuting zone of Manhattan. The Queensboro Bridge in 1909 would soon bring autos to Queens and, finally, the long delayed opening of the Steinway tunnel led the IRT into the borough.

Of course, exceptions. 

Some parts of Queens were already developing. Beginning in the early 19th century, affluent New Yorkers constructed large residences in what became known as Astoria Village (now Old Astoria). Hallet’s Cove, incorporated in 1839 was a noted recreational destination and resort for Manhattan’s wealthy. The area was renamed for John Jacob Astor to persuade him to invest in the neighborhood. He only invested $500 and never visited, but the name stayed. Astoria was connected on the Sylvan ferries that ran from downtown to Harlem, then another community of wealthy New Yorkers. And industrial developments also grew along the East River where supplies came by boat – think of Steinway, his factory and the community he developed.

The suburban movement

By the mid-19th century, commuter railways using steam locomotives (essentially short-haul passenger rail) connected affluent residents living in small suburban areas to places of work and entertainment in large cities. Some purchased summer homes, away from the heat and smell of the City. Year round upper-middle-class towns, such as New Rochelle and Scarsdale, grew with commuter rail service to New York City. Railroad companies and real estate developers encouraged New Yorkers to move away from the city, boasting less noise and congestion, lower costs, quick and comfortable train rides, more light, fresh air, and healthfulness, and even more births than deaths.

Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1893

The suburban movement intensified in the early 20^th century. New York City was one of the most crowded places in the world (with a population density of 161 per acre, compared with 32.5 in Brooklyn and 3.8 in Queens). A rising middle class confronting massive building projects and huge numbers of immigrants looked to move further out of town. (In an earlier essay, I wrote about how the Williamsburg Bridge (1903) was an escape route for many people packed into the lower east side.)  Queens would be a rising target. Forest Hills (1906,) South Ozone Park (1907), Howard Beach (1911), and Kew Gardens (1912) were some of early Queens towns.

The expanding subway system, especially the opening of Queens to five-cent fare service, soon brought much of northern and southwestern Queens within reach.  In June 1915 the Interborough service opened to Long Island City and later Queensboro Plaza (1916,) and Astoria (1917). Another branch extended along Queens Boulevard and the newly laid out Roosevelt Avenue, reaching Corona in 1917 and Flushing in 1928. In southern Queens, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company built an elevated line along Liberty Avenue through Ozone Park and Woodhaven to Richmond Hill in 1915 and along Jamaica Avenue from the Brooklyn border through Woodhaven and Richmond Hill to Jamaica during 1917-1918. Now, instead of the hour-and-a-half streetcar and ferry ride just to get to Manhattan’s shore, in 22 minutes, commuters could be in the center of the city.

Promoting the possibilities of an idealistic country lifestyle, many suburb guides and advertisements offered would-be commuters practical information for relocating such as details on new real estate developments, communities along train lines, and descriptions of towns and their amenities. Social reformers in New York joined a wider movement emerging from England to create new healthy “garden cities”. I’ll write on this movement next.

Most of these weren’t one-off home developments. Rather than a rush of small transactions and construction shortly before and after the lines opened, big developers such as the Queensboro Corporation bought great blocks of land, then built and marketed the homes themselves. The companies aggressively advertised their offerings, stressing their public transit connections.

Queens was no longer a sanctuary for wealthier New Yorkers. Cheap, rapid and reliable transportation and the construction of many smaller single family homes and larger apartment buildings drew a much wider array of middle class New Yorkers. Indeed, the agreement among the city and subway lines called the Dual Contracts forced the IRT and BMT to invest in lines in areas where there would be no riders at first to win lucrative routes through the core areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan – what became a “build it and they will come” strategy. The vast expanses tapped by those lines kept land prices low enough that developers could make a profit putting up single- and two-family homes and apartment buildings in these neighborhoods.

The Queensboro Corporation’s 350-acre Jackson Heights development was a model. After the Flushing line reached the area in 1917, the company began building cooperative apartment blocks that formed walls around large, private gardens for residents. In ads, the company played up the 22-minute commute to Grand Central.

The target customers for the Queensboro Corporation were middle class residents of New York who could afford to live in the suburbs. In contrast to traditional suburbs of single-family houses, the Queensboro Corporation decided to build upscale apartment buildings distinguished by shared garden spaces. The apartments were of high quality with ornate exteriors and features such as fireplaces, parquet floors, sun rooms and built-in bathtubs with showers. The apartments, or “homes”, were sold rather than rented under what was first called a “collective ownership plan”. This was later changed to “cooperative ownership”, probably because the first name had connotations of socialism.

During the years that followed, the interests of the Jackson Heights community and the Queensboro Corporation were closely intertwined. The local newspaper sometimes sounded like the voice of the corporation. The corporation encouraged development of the commercial area that surrounded the 82nd Street subway station, and assisted in setting up a community board to ensure the growth of civic institutions and churches.  In the early years, the community was organized around a policy of “reasonable restriction in accepting tenants thus bringing together tenants having ideals and living standards in common.” In plain English, this meant that Jews, Blacks, and perhaps Greeks and Italians were excluded from the community. Only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were welcome.

During the 1920s, Queens’ population reached 1,079,129. By the time the main IND lines were completed in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn in 1940, the subway had succeeded in mitigating the worst of the overcrowding in Manhattan. The city’s total population rose 56 percent from 1910 to 1940, but Manhattan’s fell 19 percent, and the most crowded neighborhoods, such as the Lower East Side and East Harlem, saw bigger drops.

No sooner had this outward movement begun than commuters’ tales of woe commenced. And soon, Manhattan’s population would be doubled each day as commuters flooded into the city.  

Thanks for reading.

Stephen Blank
RIHS
September .. 2021

TUESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY SEND TO ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
NEW SEATING ON WESTERN SIDE OF THE SOUTHPOINT PARK

VICKI FEINMEL AND GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT RIGHT!

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff

Sources

https://www.thirteen.org/queens/history3.html

https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-subway-john-morris-black-dog-leventhal-163021093.html

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.28

https://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/about/2593-how-the-subway-shaped-new-york

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/05/10/history-nyc-commuter

Clifton Hood, 720 Miles; The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (1993)

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