A Visit to Everett Park

There’s an unusual enclave in Queens where Jamaica meets Briarwood, on 145th and 146th Streets and 88th and 89th Avenue east to Sutphin Boulevard, where the avenues are paved with incredible red brick. Every few years I go back to see if the red brick streets are still there, and as of December 2013, I have not yet been disappointed…

The architecture on 146th Street is also fairly special and unique to this area… neo-Federal style attached buildings. Indefatigable NYC photographer Matthew X. Kiernan says that on old maps the area is labeled Everett Park.

This 1915 atlas plate (I labeled some of the streets with the modern street numbers) shows an “Everett Park” on Colonial Avenue (now 146th Street). And, this 1916 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle notes the intentions of the developer F.W. Scutt & Co. to build new housing in the area:

There’s a discrepancy in the article, as it says the homes were to be built on Middletown Street, not Colonial Avenue. I haven’t yet found any maps from this period that have Colonial Avenue as Middletown Street, but in the wild and wooly days of the early development of these streets, the street names were in flux.

Clearly, the attached homes on 46th Avenue are a different beast completely from the ones on the surrounding streets, and it’s pure serendipity that the red brick paving has mostly survived on 88th and 89th Avenues from 144th Street east to Sutphin Boulevard, which used to have the brick pavers as well. White bricks denoting crosswalks were also meticulously laid down on the roadway, which clearly dates back to the early days of Everett Park.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the Department of Transportation discovers this anomaly and asphalts them over.