Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [747]
In 1870 Steinway began buying up farms and estates in northeastern Astoria overlooking Bowery Bay. He acquired four hundred acres of the most lightly taxed land in the city, including woodland, salt meadows, and open fields in virtually primeval condition, plus half a mile of waterfront property. At water’s edge he constructed a pianoforte production complex, which included an iron and brass foundry, a steam sawmill, boiler and engine houses, and a large building for making iron frames. On the waterfront, an enclosed dock and basin could hold millions of square feet of lumber—the logs floated in and kept moist while awaiting processing—and receive barge deliveries of foundry sand and pig iron.
Steinway set up summer quarters in the old Pike mansion overlooking the bay (the family wintered at Gramercy Park). His German laborers camped out in Long Island City hotels or commuted from Yorkville via the 92nd Street ferry (soon known as the Piano Ferry), where they were picked up by stage and brought to the factory. In 1873 Steinway began building a town—grading, leveling, and macadamizing the roads at his expense. Private money also built the waterworks, installed the sewer system, constructed a railroad spur, and installed a telegraph line connecting the new facilities with the Fourth Avenue factory and the 14th Street showrooms. Finally, Steinway’s Astoria Homestead Company erected frame houses for sale to workingmen and more substantial homes for “well-to-do refined people.”
Steinway’s efforts were matched by Florian Grosjean. After outgrowing his Manhattan factory, which churned out tin cooking utensils, Grosjean settled on Woodhaven Village (bounded by today’s 95th and 97th avenues, Woodhaven Boulevard, and 85th Street, in what is now Ozone Park). Here Grosjean built a new factory, over a hundred workers’ cottages (half he sold, half he rented), a hotel, shops, churches, a market, and a school. By 1873 Woodhaven—which was accessible by rail (along Atlantic Avenue) and wagon (along the Jamaica highroad)—had become a going concern.
Corona, on the other hand, was a residential development, not a factory town. In 1867 music publisher Benjamin W. Hitchcock had successfully launched the village of Woodside. Now the peripatetic developer moved east (along today’s Roosevelt Avenue) to West Flushing, home since the 1850s of the Fashion racetrack. Hitchcock bought twelve hundred lots, christened the area Corona, prevailed on the Flushing Rail Road to open a station at National Avenue, and, after a brisk sales campaign in 1870, sold off hundreds of lots (P. T. Barnum bought two).
Next, in 1871, Hitchcock organized the New York Suburban Building Society, offering loans to the land buyers (repayable in easy ten-dollar monthly installments) to help them build on their plots. (Adding a western touch, he called this the “homestead system.”) So many “homesteaders” erected homes that professional builders and masons from nearby Flushing flocked in, and Hitchcock had to install a sawmill to keep up with demand. The paraphernalia of social life followed: a firehouse, stores, saloons, meeting halls. A Catholic church went up on the former racetrack’s property in 1872, and a Sunday school was opened by the president of the Bank of New York, who owned a mansion nearby. In 1873 the well-established village, having met the requirement of six hundred people within one mile, was crowned with a post office. In 1875 the restless Hitchcock floated farther east to begin yet another project.
HIGH FINANCE
In the wide-open spaces of Queens, Brooklyn, and uptown Manhattan, planned developmental initiatives were the norm. Lower Manhattan, by contrast, evolved out of countless calculations and decisions by an astounding number of participants, none of whom was capable of exercising a decisive influence. Businesses jockeyed for position, with the real estate market serving as the principal sorting mechanism; the soaring costs of land, assessments, and rents reserved the most valuable space for the most prosperous users. Through a ceaseless