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| I have never had even a whiff of that peculiar romance most American men feel about their automobiles. When I was a teenager, my fear and apprehensiveness when attempting to learn to drive baffled and amused my teachers: the driving school instructor as well as my cousin Jim, and soon enough the lessons were shelved as a failure. | |||||||||||
There was just something about having to maneuver a multi-ton vehicle among scores of others at speeds of 70MPH or more. I will leave it up to you whether this reflects a healthy prudence or unwarranted cowardice on the part of your webmaster. Millions of people do it, but the prospect of my doing it is something I cannot conceive. I think it's quite prudent, as most automobile advertising taps in to the American male's need for speed and encourages them to drive like maniacs. If I did drive, the Little Old Lady of Pasadena would lap me.
Paradoxically, in a city with America's largest mass transit network, the car is king and ruler absolute. NYC has the smallest number of official bike routes of any major city, and nowhere else, it seems (LA, perhaps?) do cars have the choice on whether they will defer to crossing pedestrians at green lights. Polite drivers will stop, but you never know.
Just one neighborhood over from fab Flushing, where I live, is NYC's westernmost suburb, a neighborhood conceived, built and maintained to accommodate the car, a lifestyle that 90% of Americans but only a smaller number of NYers accept. True to my wont, however, I tend to seek out the oddball, ancient elements of any neighborhood I cover, and will do the same here in Fresh Meadows.
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| The name "Fresh Meadows" derives from the same Dutch source that gave us Flushing. The latter is an English version of Vlissingen, a Dutch town whose name means "salt meadow valley." After Flushing, originated in the 1640s, had been established for a while, colonists started to move to its southern reaches (but not as far as Rustdorp, the next town south, today's Jamaica). They found the area suffused with meadows and swamps fed by fresh water springs, and so named it Fresh Meadows. | ||||
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Most houses in Fresh Meadows, save for a very few, were built as postwar tract housing. Still, there are a number of prewar structures scattered about; on 65th Avenue east of 164th you will see the shacklike dwelling with the wood porch at left, as well as Millard Fillmore's Restaurant (above), located in a building dated 1912 (odd since I can't find any maps from the period that have a road where 65th Avenue is now).
Since by 1912 the New York and Queens County Railway (a surface trolley line) was already well-established on what would be today's 164th Street, it could have been established as a roadhouse in an otherwise wide-open area dominated by farms. |
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By 1910 the major roads through the area had already been established. On this ca. 1910 Hammond map of today's Fresh Meadows area, I have superimposed in blue the present-day names of the roads; their old names are in black. A grid system of streets has now been built around the older roads, but many of them still play major roles. The Central Railroad of Long Island was built from Flushing to Garden City by the latter's builder, department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart. It was shortened to a spur to the Creedmoor Rifle Range (later the site of a mental institution) in the 1870s; Kissena Corridor Park today runs along most of its former length.
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One of the major east-west local routes through Fresh Meadows is 73rd Avenue, a road with an over-200 year old pedigree. In colonial Fresh Meadows the preferred method of marking property lines between farms was to place rows of blackened stumps along the boundary, and before the name Fresh Meadows caught on the area was called Black Stump. Fresh Meadows was thought to be a rather more welcoming name, and Black Stump Road was renamed in the 1920s as part of Queens' renumbering system taking effect at the time. Today, it's one of NYC's few bike paths and is lined with handsome single-family homes like this Tudor. | |||
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| On 182nd Street just north of 73rd Avenue you will see what appears to be a weedy, empty lot, with ivy and ancient trees. This, though, is the cemetery of one of the farming families in the area, the Brinkerhoffs; there are 76 plots here dating from between 1736 and 1872. The tombstones have been long ago stolen or are buried underground. A local developer who claims to have bought it would like to build the usual tract housing on the spot, while the Queens Historical Society would like to keep it as is.
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Major golf tournaments were held at a course built in 1923 in Fresh Meadows by Benjamin C. Ribman--the first sign of suburbanization. But it wasn't until 1946 that the neighborhood's signature project, Fresh Meadows Houses was built, one of the first and best examples of suburban housing in the country.
Fresh Meadows Houses
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| Land was purchased by the NY Life Insurance Company and the complex was finished in 1949; it was called by Lewis Mumford "perhaps the most positive and exhilarating example of community planning in the country." It was purchased by Harry Helmsley in 1983. The project contains several privately owned dwellings but most of it consists of three-story buildings and some high-rises. There are 3000 families and about 7800 units. | |||
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| Fresh Meadows possesses its own unique street layout, which stretches Queens' street numbering scheme to the max, with intersections like 64th Circle and 194th Lane. The layout was built to prevent through traffic so trucks would not roar through. Streets are lined with FM's own versions of street lighting. | |||
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Here we are at the corner of 65th Crescent and 65th Crescent (Fresh Meadows has its own oddball street layout, as we've said) and somehow, the Department of Transportation has overlooked both sets of streets signs on either corner...they're blue-on-white Queens specials from the early 1960s! | ||
The Last Farm
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| The Klein Farm, 73rd Avenue and 195th Street, sold produce for years in a roadside stand until 2003, when the family sold it to a realtor. The farm had been in operation here since 1895. Since the farmhouse and property have never been landmarked, they are now under the gun from developers and it seems that it's only a matter of time until one of Queens' last farms is gone.
The Kleins once owned approximately 200 acres in the area; some of it was sold in the 1940s to NY Life Insurance, which in turn built Fresh Meadows Houses. Former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern recognized the Kleins' farm legacy by naming the adjacent playground for it in 1999.
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188th Street from Utopia Parkway and Jamaica Avenue is subtitled Saul Weprin Street, after the former speaker of the NY State Assembly from 1991-1994; Sheldon Silver became speaker after Weprin's death in 1994. His son Mark now occupies his District 24 Assembly seat, and another son, David, was elected to the NY City Council from District 23 in 2002. | ||
Get Your Motor Runnin'
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| The eastern edge of Fresh Meadows is partially defined by the western extension of the Long Island Motor Parkway, begun as a race course by industrialist heir William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1908, extending east to Ronkonkoma. The newest section of the parkway, built in 1926, is right here in Glen Oaks and Fresh Meadows, running mostly through Cunningham Park, a right-of-way north of Richland and Kingsbury Avenues, and in Alley Pond Park. ABOVE: overpass at 73rd Avenue and 199th Street
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| Did the Motor Parkway extend this far north? The bike path that connects to it does, at 199th Street near Peck Avenue just south of the LIE. I found an old concrete rail post nearby. If it didn't belong to the old parkway, why is it here? | |||
CONTINUE TO FRESH MEADOWS, PAGE 2
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Controversy Over Development Plans on Cemetery May End up in Court [