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Queens, From The Stone Age

By David Oats

Those kettle ponds and rolling hills that make up today’s landscape in Queens had a rough beginning. They were slowly scraped and pushed into the land over thousands of years by a glacier that once sat where we now live; its outermost edge followed about the same line the Grand Central Parkway runs. You can see the high ridge it cut as the glacier crept across the land—it’s bordered by Hillside and Highland Avenues.

When Native Americans first discovered the land, they were attracted to areas that offered abundant fresh water, timber for building and shelter from winter storms.
As we know, the original human residents of Queens were a peaceful group, living for centuries harvesting salt, hay, fish, wild water fowl, oysters, clams, shellfish, game and migratory birds.

Three main tribes of Native Americans inhabited the lands of Queens: a tribe after whom Jamaica was named, a tribe after whom the Rockaways were named, and the Matinecock, who inhabited Flushing and the North Shore of Queens.

Until the arrival of the European explorers and settlers in the 17th Century, they cultivated a very hospitable farmland territory.

COLUMBUS DAY
Although Columbus first entered the “New World” in 1492, it was not until the spring of 1614 that Europeans first explored Queens. The Dutch vessel The Restless explored Long Island Sound that year, first sailing through the Astoria shore as they came to the Helle-Gat narrow passage.

Later, they sailed up the river through the sound and the bay by the meadows of what is now Flushing, which they purchased from the Native Americans. The price? One axe for every 50 acres.

QUEENS’ ENGLISH
Before long, settlers arrived and established townships. While Dutch colonists settled most of the towns in Brooklyn, the English settled those in Queens.

The land was part of a territory originally called Nieuv Netherlands, and was originally governed by the Dutch, who permitted English as well as Dutch colonists to settle and form townships.

The first of Queens’ three original towns was Newtown, established in 1642. The township included an area within the limits of present-day Corona, Forest Hills, Glendale, Ridgewood, Maspeth, Middle Village, Newtown Creek, the East River and Flushing Bay.

The eastern part of Newtown was in the patent granted by the Dutch to an Englishman, Reverend Francis Doughty, on March 28, 1642. This patent covered most of the area except those Dutch farms previously settled in 1638 in Long Island City and Astoria.

In 1645, a group of Englishmen settled in Flushing, having come by way of Vlissingen on the Scheldt River. They received the patent from the Dutch Governor William Kieft, who ended the patron system of land grants in New York.

It is not known if the township of Flushing was named after the Dutch town of Vlissengen, or if the original settlers bestowed the name (which translates to “flowing water” in English) because of the meandering, snake-like course of the Flushing River. In any event, it is certain that the colonists marveled at the natural abundance of the area.

In 1657, the Quakers arrived in Flushing. Shortly thereafter, Governor Peter Stuyvesant banned all forms of worship except Dutch Reformed despite the famous charter known as the Flushing Remonstrance, which was issued by the Dutch government to assure colonists freedom of religious worship.

The charter was written on Dec. 27, 1657, by Edward Hart, town clerk of Flushing.

The remarkable document declared:

“All who come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free aggress and regress unto our Towne and houses.”

The document was signed by 28 freeholders of Flushing. This protest initiated a seven-year struggle for freedom of religious worship in the Colony of New Netherlands.
In 1661, an Englishman, John Bowne, moved to Flushing from Boston and built a home, which he opened to those Quakers who wished to practice their faith without fear of imprisonment. Bowne was arrested that year for his actions and was imprisoned and sent out of the country. He landed in Ireland, but eventually made his way to Amsterdam, Holland.

Bowne pleaded his case before the Dutch West India Company in 1664. The authorities restored freedom of religious worship. Bowne returned to Flushing and in 1672, George Fox, a Quaker and the founder of the Society of Friends, visited Bowne and preached, in his own words, “unmolested by any magistrate.”

In 1694, John Bowne was buried in the back of the Quaker Meeting House, which was erected along what is now Northern Boulevard. It stands today, the oldest house of worship in the city of New York, and a living monument to the battle in which brave citizens risked their lives for the concept of religious freedom.

Jamaica’s strategic location between Manhattan and Long Island greatly influenced its development. The area was a thriving trade center long before other sections of Queens were settled.

The earliest public record—a Native American deed from 1655—shows that Jamaica’s first settlers were fishermen and farmers from Hempstead. They came to the Jamaica lowlands in 1644 and lived without the aid of government sanction until 1656.
Daniel Denton and Roger Linas signed the deed for the settlers and chiefs of the Rockaway and Canarsie tribes. At that time the land was known as Jameco or Yemacah, a derivation of the naitve word for beaver.

Peter Stuyvesant granted the community a patent in 1656, fixing its boundary lines vaguely on the north by Flushing and Newtown, on the south by Rockaway Beach and on the west by Flatlands and New Lots. The same area today comprises Woodhaven, Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Hollis, Queens Village, Howard Beach and Springfield Gardens, as well as Jamaica.

QUEENS GETS OFFICIAL
The mostly English colonists, governed by the Dutch under Stuyvesant, found themselves under English rule again when he surrendered to the Duke of York.
On Nov. 1, 1683, Queens County was created. It comprised Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica and Far Rockaway, which had been part of Hempstead since 1644. At that time the county was three times its present size. It included all of what is now Nassau and extended to Suffolk.

Meanwhile, other settlements began to grow at Astoria, Middleburg, Bayside and Douglaston. Queens became a mecca for Manhattanites on weekend excursions to horse races that were held throughout the area.

In Flushing in 1732, William Prince established the first commercial nurseries in America. Named the Linnaen Botanic Gardens after the Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, they operated for almost two centuries. George Washington and John Adams were visitors to the nurseries to examine the rare trees and shrubs that grew there.
Lafayette of France and Prince William Henry, later King William IV of England, also made the pilgrimage to the Prince Nurseries.

Samuel Parsons later established the Parsons Nurseries in Flushing, and the offshoots of a giant Weeping Beech Tree still stand as a monument to the birthplace of horticulture in America: a place of such beauty that it inspired poet Joyce Kilmer to write Trees.

BATTLE FOR THE BOROUGH
The people of Queens were divided during the Revolutionary War.

When the English captured the island in 1776, many patriots were forced to flee from the island in order to avoid capture. Jamaica Avenue, originally a Native American trail, became a highway that the British used during the war. The British burned a steeple off old St. James Church in Newtown and captured the Quaker Meeting House in Flushing for use as a hospital for wounded soldiers.

After the Battle of Long Island, the British Army moved into Hell Gate and erected artillery batteries on the site of what are now the Astoria Houses.

INDUSTRY AND INCORPORATION
After the war, Queens resumed peaceful activities. Waterborne commerce with New York developed early and landing ports were established at Jamaica Bay, Hunters Point, Hallets Cove and Little Neck Bay.

Queens came to life during the Industrial Revolution. Steam-powered ferries spurred the growth of Astoria in 1815 and steam-powered locomotives brought new commercial activity to Flushing and Jamaica, which, by 1880, had become the key rail centers in the area.

Factories were built near the East River in Hunters Point, Blissville, Dutch Kills and Middletown. These towns were incorporated as Long Island City in 1870. In 1850 there were just 20,000 people in Queens, but by the turn of the century, the population had reached 153,000. Many were attracted by the company towns, such as the 400-acre development in Astoria built by William Steinway around his piano factory and a similar community built by Conrad Poppenhusen around his ironworks in College Point.

In 1898, the four chartered towns of Newtown, Jamaica, Flushing and Hempstead, along with Long Island City, agreed to consolidate into the Borough of Queens, joining the other four boroughs to form the Greater City of New York.

QUEENS GROWS UP

Queens entered the 20th century as a rural outpost, a garden in the city. By 1920, however, the population had grown to nearly half a million.

The opening of the Queensborough Bridge linked the borough to mid-Manhattan and before long, the farms and estates were sub-divided and real estate developers created new towns and housing for immigrants and settlers.

As a by-product of the city’s progress, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company purchased tracts of the 1,200-acre meadow and used it as a dumping ground for most of the refuse from the Borough of Brooklyn.

The Meadow stood in the very heart of New York, at its geographic and population center. To travel from Manhattan to Long Island one had to cross through the old dirt roads that went through the Corona Dumps.

The Queens garden had become a desert, a mosquito-ridden swamp capped by a burning 90-foot high mountain of ashes, known as Mount Corona. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, used this ash cap as the symbolic dividing line between the rich of Long Island and the urban masses of New York City.

“They were a Valley of Ashes,” Fitzgerald writes. “A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.”

However, a determined builder named Robert Moses had different ideas.

In 1936, Moses completed the construction of the Triborough Bridge, which linked Astoria with the Bronx and Manhattan. Moses cut through the dump in order to build his road to Long Island, connecting the bridge with the Island. Moses also saw the opportunity to transform this eyesore into a great city park.

In 1939, a World’s Fair was held at the site to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Washington’s first inauguration as president in New York City.

The Fair was built on the remains of the Corona Dumps and thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to transform the wasted area into a garden with shaded walks, colorful fountains and fantastic displays.

The 1939-1940 World’s Fair, the completion of the Belt Parkway system, the opening of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and the completion and expansion of Idlewild and LaGuardia Airports provided increased access and mobility, which encouraged additional construction.

The great amusement park at North Beach was removed to make way for LaGuardia Airport, but an amusement area survived along the Rockaway beachfront.

Hollywood came to Queens when Paramount Pictures opened a studio in Astoria. Most of the major stars of the era, including Mae West, W.C. Fields and Gloria Swanson, set up residences in the plush new community of Bayside. Entertainers such as Louis Armstrong would return from long road engagements to their homes in Queens. Forest Hills and tennis became synonymous as the United States Open drew the elite of sports each year to the Tudor-style town.

The new communities that developed after World War II on large vacant tracts adopted the names and many of the values and traditions of the original rural villages.
In 1946, the United Nations chose Queens as its home and World Capital. For five years, the U.N. General Assembly met in the New York City Building, now the home of the Queens Museum of Art.

Despite this tremendous growth, Queens residents preferred to keep their village identification. They retained town names on addresses, and were more likely to refer to their homes by the township, rather that by the borough’s name.

In 1964-65, Queens once again played host to the world at a giant international exposition at Flushing Meadows. The second New York World’s Fair drew over 55 million visitors from throughout the world and showed the marvels of the Space Age. The fair also spurred the completion of the Long Island Expressway, the Throgs Neck Bridge and Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets.

The great fair left many very tangible benefits to the borough, the most obvious being the completed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. But in the nearly 40-years since the fair, the most pervasive and wide-ranging effect has been the tremendous influx of new nationalities into the borough and a development that forever changed the borough’s once-rural nature.

WE’RE ALL IMMIGRANTS

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Queens County witnessed unparalleled growth. As the 1939 Fair opened up Queens to development and the United Nations spurred new housing, the 1964 Fair opened up a new area of New York City—urban, but suburban—to a whole new group of immigrants who would change the face of the borough.

As noted historian Vincent Seyfried has pointed out in his book Old Queens, N.Y., this is a transition that will endure for years to come.

He writes, “On July 1, 1968, Congress enacted a major restructuring of the immigration statutes that for the first time relaxed restrictions on immigration from third world countries. New York as the major point of entry for the country, immediately felt the change in policy. The last 20 years have witnessed a flood of newcomers from Central and South America and Caribbean and Asian countries, principally China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and India.”

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