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Until a few years ago, an unassuming two-story brick building with a porch painted red in West Maspeth held a key to Queens’ past, before the cartographers decided to number all the streets in the 1920s to make things less (?) confusing.

Until the 1920s, Queens street names trended toward the tried and true, with plenty of presidents, governors, spruces and elms, but further east, in what would be the Juniper Park area, 78th Street was Grieffenberg Street, 81st was Thew Street, and 84th was Gwydir Street. Even further east, proposed streets east of Queens Boulevard in the Forest Hills area that now are a thicket of 60th drives and 62nd roads were mapped in alphabetical order, carrying odd, otherworldly names like Meteor, Nome, Occident, Thupman, Uriu, Yalu and Zuni. The only remnant of this scheme is Jewel Avenue, the “J” street in the sequence.

Many of Queens’ subway and el lines have preserved the old names, most of which haven’t been on street maps and signs for over 80 years. The Flushing Line (#7 train) preserves Rawson (33rd), Lowery (40th), Bliss (46th), Lincoln Avenue (52nd) and Fisk Avenue (69th Street); the line’s original last stop in Corona was Alburtis Avenue (104th Street).

The Astoria Line (N, W) is rich in old names: Beebe Avenue (39th Ave.), Washington Avenue (36th Ave.) and Grand Avenue (30th Avenue). The Rockaway Line (A) checks in with Hudson Street (80th St.), Boyd Avenue (88th St.), Oxford Avenue (104th St.), Greenwood Avenue (111th St.).

After the Transit Authority purchased the old Long Island Rail Road right-of-way across Jamaica Bay and on the Rockaway peninsula in the 1950s, it dutifully kept station names like Wavecrest (Beach 25th Street), not a street but a long-gone exclusive gated community built in the 1880s; Frank Avenue (Beach 44th Street); Straiton Avenue (Beach 60th); Gaston Avenue (Beach 67th); Holland Avenue (Beach 90th); and keeps Playland (Beach 98th), named for Rockaway Playland Amusement Park, which didn’t survive the 1980s.

The Jamaica Line (J) preserves an extra letter in Eldert(s) Lane; street signs dropped the “s” decades ago. Even the newer IND lines, built in the 1930s, continue the tradition with 23rd-Ely Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard-Slattery Plaza subtitling older names. The Long Island Rail Road, too, gets into the act. Its Broadway station in Flushing on the Port Washington branch maintains Northern Boulevard’s old moniker, which fell out of favor by the 1920s.

While other boroughs’ former street appellatives can be glimpsed in stone on older buildings, Queens prefers to preserve them on its subway and el signs. There seems to be more affection for the old names in Queens, as there’s a seemingly aboriginal knowledge that a borough full of numbered streets isn’t the natural order of things.

 

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A couple of well-preserved blue and white signs survived on the corner of the little red house at  46th Street and 54th Road and proclaimed it to be the corner of Clifton and Waters Avenues.  Until the 1920s, neighboring east-west streets carried names like Joy, Columbine, Cassell, Halle, Hull, Clinton and Perry avenues, and north-south streets were called Montgomery Avenue, Debevoise Avenue, Berlin Street, Clavin Avenue and Betts Avenue. Clinton and Perry survive further east in Maspeth, probably since there they run askew to the street grid.

 

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A few years ago, though, the owners sold to the Maspeth Environmental, which handles asbestos abatement. House and signs are gone, and very few of West Maspeth’s former single-family dwellings remain from the time I started chronicling this part of Queens in 1998 for Forgotten New York.

Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of Forgotten NY and the author of Forgotten New York and, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens. Forgotten New York the website was the first recipient of the Outstanding New York Website prize, awarded by the Guides Association of New York City in 2015.


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  1. A friend from Maspeth emailed this article to me! It brought tears to my eyes to see the home where I grew up, since this home belonged to my Mom who passed away five years ago yesterday! It was hard to let the house go but one of the last things I did was take those signs off! Not sure why I kept them but could not part with them, pieces of my childhood. I so enjoyed your story! Thank you so much.