Queens
Gateway To New York
BY MARIAN VOETBERG A
Aligning its theme with New York City's 100-year centennial celebration of the consolidation

of New York, the

Queens Astoria Historical Society launched its first meeting of the season with "New York The Way It Was: Queens," a video presentation looking at life in this borough from the 1930s through the 1960s. It was Andrew Hessel Green's idea of promoting harbors, developing railroads, utilities and new shipping industry that brought about consolidation of the boroughs in 1898.

According to the presentation, funded partially by the Independence Savings Bank of New York, the urban pioneers who settled in Queens had in common a burning desire to make their efforts succeed and a willingness to help each other. This zeal, risking everything in search of their dreams, was the fuel which propelled them forward.

Home ownership was the ideal of these early pioneers and living on a tight budget did not diminish their sense of pride in their accomplishments, which was especially evident in the maintenance of their "postage stamp" lawns and backyard flower and vegetable gardens.

It was not uncommon in those days to hear the rumble of street sounds, where the ice cream man delivered two scoops for a nickel and where the fruit and vegetable vendor beckoned friends, neighbors and pedestrians for old coats to protect his wares from the impending winter frost. Children played in "lots" and built huts from huge cartons covered with tarpaper and shingles. (Concrete playgrounds were as yet exorbitantly expensive.)

"Sound mind, sound body" was the slogan the schools lived by and Girl and Boy Scout organizations were ready to teach young people survival skills. "They were wonderful people in those days," recalled one woman of her formative years. Teachers and parents were all there to provide kids with what was important and these values were nowhere more tested than on the playing fields where poor and middle-class played together, whether Irish, Italian, Jewish or Black. Though Queens did not have the Dodgers, the Yankees or the Giants baseball teams, the borough did have Dexter Park which seated over 15,000 spectators and where players represented a blend of society.

After a Sunday double-header, children went home to finish their homework, mothers cooked dinner for their hungry broods, and fathers prepared for another work week.

During the week, fathers switched at Jamaica for the BMT or the IND subways to transport them to work, while mothers shopped at big stores like Wallach's, Goodman's and Macy's and youngsters tagged behind, hoping for a fine custard treat relishing how good it tasted. Suburbanites could easily jump aboard the train at Jamaica for all points west.

For all its sophistication, Queens was still a hard-edged industrial area, populated with burgeoning towns and apartment houses, an old-fashioned neighborhood where people clung to their "old world ways". "It was important that you spoke to your neighbor," recalled City Council Speaker Peter Vallone of those days, "and not down at your neighbor." Mutual respect among workers was fostered by the enlightened policies of the Steinway Company and Steinway was a name found not only on pianos, churches and schools, but there was even a Steinway branch of the Communist Party.

Noted actor, Caroll O'Connor, whose family was one of the first to blaze the urban pioneer trial, recalled those early days when a move to Queens was almost inconceivable because Queens was smalltown America, yet only a stone's throw from Manhattan.

Former Governor Mario Cuomo shared how his family occupied a one-room apartment above a grocery after arriving in New York from their native Italy. Real estate developer Donald Trump said his father started as a small ministry helper in Woodhaven and Hollis, before moving to Jamaica and then Jamaica Estates.

Probably no other luminary had a greater effect on the everyday life of Queens folk than did Robert Moses. This commissioner of highways who loved the car bulldozed through properties and whole communities in an effort to establish "great roads and highways". The Grand Central Parkway, the Belt, and the Interborough Parkway were just the start of the "Moses Magic". Acting alone he might not have been so successful but found a dynamic ally in Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a visionary who also had a few transportation ideas of his own. Together they created a dramatic effect.

But playing host to the World's Fairs is the distinction which earned Queens its reputation as the entranceway to New York. For many in Queens this was their first experience with people outside their neighborhoods and with "accents" different from their own, and an opportunity for a new generation to see what their parents had been talking about all along. Both fairs, the first in 1939-40 (though some exhibits were closed in 1940 due to the outbreak of the war in September), and the second in 1964-65, were a tremendous success and the Unisphere, an open globe with the continents modeled on its surface and held up by a slender, finger-like concrete support, the theme symbol of World Fair II, still graces-Flushing Meadows- Corona Park today. To many, the World's Fair was a fairyland where you almost reach out and touch the World of Tomorrow, and the attractions including the Periscope, the Trylon, the parachute jump, the statues, and Billy Rose's Aquacade live on in memory even today.

Movie studios and movie theaters also played a role in the life of the Queens community. Rudolph Valentino and Claudette Colbert made movies in the early 1920s at the Astoria Motion Picture House which still exists today at 35th Ave. and 35th St. as the Kaufman-Astoria Studios. In 1941, the United States Army Signal Corps took over the movie house and made instructional films for the services. Although films did not reflect the true character of the war, they kept morale high both at home and on the way to the front. Every week was spent at the movies, and it was understood you didn't accept a date after Wednesday according to one Queens resident.

Post World War II Queens was "boom" time, especially for those involved in professions of the clergy, homebuilding, and pediatrics. The family was an important stabilizing force in Queens village life, and dating and marriage the natural precursor.

"It was great," one gentleman recalled. "I met my wife after the war. We were engaged three months later and married the following year. We've been married for 49 years."

"It wasn't Queens, it was all those little villages," another said. "My wife was from Bayside and she considered herself a 'notch or two above' on the social scale. I was from Flushing but I always knew, of course, it (Bayside) was a notch below..."Though there was pride in where one came from, it took more than that to make friendship and a neighborhood work."

Another woman reminisced about the days of back porches. "We had back porches so that there were two back porches together. You knew everyone on the block." Holidays were often spent together eating Margarita pie or devouring other festive treats.

Warm weather was spent in Queens parks where extended families met for fun and frolic. But the ultimate fantasy for kids was going to Rockaway Beach. It was another world, away from mother, grandmother, father and teachers. Ride the goats, fun house and Davey Jones Locker were all offerings at Playland, the fun side of Rockaway Beach. "You lived for summertime," another gentleman sighed. There was an "excitement" there that was the whole reason for being alive. It wasn't only the sand, the sunshine, water or fresh air you looked forward to, it was that every day seemed so full of possibilities.

Queens! Queens was the block, the beach, the family, playing jump-rope in front of your house with your friends, having fun. It was the little shops, the small town post office, only a "stone's throw" from Manhattan.

"When I think about it, I don't think that I would have wanted to live anywhere else but Queens," another gentleman said. "Somehow there was a feeling that we were very lucky," added another. "And now I know we were lucky," he concluded.