newsday

FLUSHING MAN FINDS THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

It is hard for Kevin Walsh to enjoy a walk or ride down a city street.

He's too busy scanning the area for possible additions to his website. On a

recent jaunt along Northern Boulevard, in the space of a few blocks, he

pointed out a rare color-coded street sign and then an old town hall. As

webmaster of forgotten-ny.com, Walsh is chronicling the forgotten and the

overlooked in a city that is forever changing.

"New York has always been about what's new and what's modern," said

Walsh, sitting in his Flushing apartment. Nearby were the computer, books,

stacks of photos, and scanner he uses to maintain his site. "The things that

we have from the old days are largely there by pure serendipity."

A Brooklyn native, Walsh has made a hobby of finding obsolete fixtures -

street and subway signs, lampposts, manhole covers, pavements of bricks and

cobblestones - that have been removed in most of New York and appear to

survive in places only because the city has lost track of them. Another

favorite activity of the advertising copywriter is discovering tiny lanes and

streets that are nearly invisible against the bustling cityscape.

Many of Walsh's discoveries were by accident, such as the one he made a

few years ago in Jackson Heights. During a summertime bicycle ride he rolled

over Jackson Mill Road, an odd little private way near where 95th Street

meets 25th Avenue.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," he recalled, "when I saw a stretch of

trolley tracks that hadn't been pulled up. That was incredible." And, said

Walsh, the tracks followed the route of one of the earliest highways in

Queens: Bowery Bay Road. This double find meant automatic inclusion to his

website.

Two sets of tracks are visible on Jackson Mill Road, and even where they

are covered with asphalt it is obvious what lies beneath. Walsh says the

trolley line, operated by the Brooklyn City Railroad, ferried people to and

from North Beach until the late 1930s, when the amusement area there was

closed to make way for what soon became LaGuardia Airport.

"I think they should be preserved," said Anthony Jones of Manhattan,

looking down at the tracks and the pavement stones still visible in places,

"because they have some historical significance." His mother lives in the

neighborhood, and moments later he was walking down Jackson Mill Road.

Despite a sign that warns it is a private road, people walk up and down it

and park their cars atop it as if were any other city street.

Walsh stood where the tracks cross into a construction area, a new

apartment building rising behind a plywood barrier. "Unfortunately, this

part is going to be obliterated soon," he said. "No one will ever know there

was a road here. No one will ever know there were tracks here." He turned

around and looked back at the rails running down Jackson Mill Road. "There

they stand a good chance of surviving - as long as the city doesn't pave it."

Another roadway oddity is found behind an auto-parts distributorship on

Prince Street in Flushing. What look to be narrow alleyways on the sides of

the building are the entrance and exit lanes of U-shaped Linneaus Place.

"Most of old Flushing was knocked down to make way for apartment

complexes," Walsh said while walking along the street's lumpy asphalt and

exposed cobblestones. Some standard DOT-issue signs are posted in the narrow

entrance lane, as is an obviously handmade marker cautioning drivers to

"SLOWDOWN" because of children at play. "But here we have a tiny slice of

old-time Flushing. It's as if it has been preserved in amber."

The automotive business mostly screens Linneaus Place's dozen row houses

from the eyes of Prince Street passersby. The two-story structures don't

look out of place so much as they look unreal. Surrounded by buildings made

of masonry blocks, the houses look like they were constructed on some

Hollywood back lot. But even studio fa*ades have accessories Linneaus Place

does not.

"There are no storm drains or fire hydrants here," said Walsh, "and the

street lamps are relatively new additions."

Working behind a few orange safety pylons, Daniel Hennessey swept up some

trash that was whirling about the street. "There's like a wind tunnel effect

back here," he said. "Any garbage that's put out keeps blowing around in

front of the houses."

Hennessey has lived on Linneaus Place for 46 of his 47 years. At one

time, he said, his mother owned four houses on the street. "There used to be

mansions here," he said, gesturing toward the rear of the auto-parts business

with one hand while continuing to hold the broom with the other. "And back

here were the stable houses."

Walsh had been to Linneaus Place on more than one occasion, but something

Hennessey mentioned in passing caught the webmaster's attention and made the

trip, on a chilly Saturday morning earlier this month, worth the effort.

"There used to be trolley tracks over behind the houses," Hennessey said,

"and when I was a kid I'd go over there and hop the fence."

"Really?" said Walsh, moving closer and asking if any bits of the line

remained - portions he could photograph and put up on his website.

By this time Hennessey's mother, Louise Hennessey, had opened a

first-floor window and called out through the screen to ask about her son's

visitors.

"I raised eight kids here," Louise said as garbage once again rattled

about the street. "And it hasn't changed much."

Walsh's final stop was at a pair of little streets in Little Neck, both

of them dead-ending off Northern Boulevard, both of them missing from any

Queens map he'd ever consulted.

"It looks like a driveway," Walsh said at the foot of Cornell Lane where

it cuts between two storefronts. "But this is a city street."

Once past the buildings that flank its beginning, Cornell Lane opens onto

an area where everything seems to have been built at three-quarters scale.

The houses, sided with stucco or vinyl or wood, are small. Fences surround

some of the structures, but these are barely knee-high. The asphalt lane is

so narrow that the arms holding the streetlights have been cut down lest the

lights hang over front lawns and not the roadway.

Inside one of the tiny houses, stripped to his undershirt, Jim Deveau

performed some weekend maintenance work with an unseen power tool.

"The only difference," the 48-year-old considered while looking up and

down the street from the front stoop of his grandmother's house. "None.

It's been like this since I can remember. We've just kind of been forgotten

about."

As Walsh smiled and nodded at Deveau's remarks, an older woman burst

through the door and told the man to return inside because he wasn't dressed

for the weather. He listened to his mother.

"I know all about this street," said Mary Deveau. "I was born here."

Before continuing she pointed out her mother, the centenarian resting

comfortably atop a recliner in the family room. "This used to belong to the

Cornell family. You know Cornell Medical Center? Well, people who worked on

their estate lived along here."

Walsh asked Mary Deveau about the next street over, and whether it was

true that one of the houses there was the former stationmaster's quarters

from the Little Neck stop of the LIRR.

"Jessie Court?" she said before confirming that the old railroad property

had indeed been moved there but is now a doctor's office. Walsh was glad to

hear this, and glad to learn the sign-less street's real name - even if the

woman couldn't provide its true spelling.

There was more discovery when Jim Deveau, now wearing a winter coat, came

out into the street and told Walsh about a road that once ran perpendicular

to Cornell Lane but is now part of the local McDonald's. Walsh brought out

his camera and photographed the route of old Wright's Lane.

Jessie Court isn't half the length of Cornell Lane, and it is difficult

to tell where the street ends and driveways begin. The doctor wasn't in his

unique office, and the only person to be found home - a woman in a white

house at the end of the street - wouldn't open her door but did shout out the

correct spelling of Jessie Court.

Hellas Nicodimou of Little Neck Realty, which is on Northern Boulevard at

Jessie Court, said "Jesse" was the correct spelling.

"Many people don't know it exists," she remarked from behind her desk.

"It's very difficult to find."

As Walsh walked down the boulevard, Nicodimou came out of the office and

yelled for him, signaling by waving a big Hagstrom's map book over her head.

Once back in the office, she said she'd been mistaken about the spelling and

pointed to a page in the book's index, where Jessie Court was duly listed.

Then she flipped the pages until she reached the maps section.

"You won't find it there," Walsh predicted. "Same with Cornell Lane."

"No?" said Nicodimou, still flipping.

After the woman found the appropriate map, Walsh tapped at the section of

Northern Boulevard and Marathon Parkway where an angular and anonymous piece

of land was shown where Cornell Lane and Jessie Court should have been

illustrated.

"You know something?" Nicodimou said, looking up from the map and through

a window at Jessie Court. "I remember seeing a street sign there a long time

ago. But sometimes trucks go through here, and maybe one of them tore it

down."