Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [746]
CONSTRUCTING QUEENS
The great postwar boom roused even slumbering Queens. Here, however, no formidable state commission would undertake large-scale planning, nor would an alliance of powerful politicians and private investors direct large-scale development. It was, rather, an ill-judged action of Brooklyn’s that proved to be the crucial agent of change.
Since 1832 the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) to Jamaica and points beyond had run east along Atlantic Street (later Avenue) from Brooklyn’s South Ferry. Objections to the smoky and dangerous steam engines and to the cargoes of manure they hauled had forced the line (in 1844) to submerge its first two thousand feet of tracks in a tunnel under Atlantic. In 1859, however, responding to years of continuing complaint from area merchants and homeowners, the state legislature banned steam locomotives from Brooklyn altogether.
In 1861, accordingly, the tunnel was sealed up (and eventually forgotten, only to be rediscovered in 1980). The LIRR moved its operations to Queens. For its new depot, the company chose Hunter’s Point, an easy ferry crossing from Manhattan’s 34th Street and already, since the 1850s, western terminus of a railroad from Flushing. From Hunter’s Point, the company ran a line directly to Jamaica, where it linked up with the main road on to Greenport. By the early 1870s rival rail lines connected the Hunter’s Point hub with Rockaway and Whitestone, and a turnpike (now Jackson Avenue and Northern Boulevard) had been pushed through to Flushing.
Long Island’s commuter and commercial traffic quickly reoriented itself along the new rail and road arteries. Many of Brooklyn’s warehouses, stores, hotels, and banks closed or relocated. Kings’ loss proved Queens’ gain. Soon Hunter’s Point resembled a western boomtown. Entrepreneurs built hotels, saloons, boardinghouses, kerosene refineries, and coal and lumber yards. A massive depot with engine houses and machine shops went up. Housing, churches, and schools arrived.
Like many western towns, Hunter’s Point developed a grandiose vision of its future. In 1869 it launched a drive to incorporate itself as Long Island City, an entity with imperial ambitions. Leading businessmen lobbied Albany. So did the pastor of St. Mary’s Church, whose Catholic congregation included the town’s Irish factory and railroad workers. In 1870 the state legislature decreed a shotgun wedding between industrial Hunter’s Point, aristocratic Ravenswood, and affluent Astoria. In 1872 the county seat was transferred from Mineola to the new Long Island City, and by 1876 a grand new courthouse had been completed at Thomson and Jackson avenues.
It soon became apparent, however, that ambition had outrun reality. Vast marshes separated the new city’s component regions. These marshes, once drained by tidal flows, were now fouled with factory and slaughterhouse effluvia and had become breeders of endemic malaria. Some heroic (and lucrative) draining and filling was undertaken, but the task was beyond the fledgling city’s means. Though the Long Island Rail Road tried to knit together a transportation infrastructure by acquiring its competitors, it failed. Long Island City, moreover, was as politically fragmented as it was spatially divided, riven by endless contention between wealthy families to the north and immigrant workers to the south.
Lacking a nucleus around which to crystallize, Queens, as in the past, would be developed by discrete local initiatives—chiefly, in this era, company towns launched by big-city industrialists, and residential suburbs founded by speculators. The preeminent postwar company town was developed by William Steinway. After the Civil War, Steinway and Sons’ success at marketing its upright pianos outgrew the production capacities of its 52nd Street factory in Manhattan. Steinway was also concerned to shelter his workforce from “the machinations of the anarchists and socialists, who,” he said, “were continually breeding discontent among our workmen and inciting