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Elmhurst: A long road to prosperity

BY ROBERT POLNER | NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER

March 18, 2006

For Ceil O'Mara, the end of old-time Elmhurst arrived when the elms along Maurice Avenue began to disappear. One by one, the trees were leveled to make room for newer, younger ones, or sometimes none at all. And with that, some longtime neighbors also began to leave, selling their gracious homes with sweeping side lawns to developers, to be replaced by smaller houses or apartments.

There was good money to be made in housing after World War II, and many people took the cue, leaving for new suburban sprawl and warmer climes, recalled O'Mara.

"Never again would Elmhurst have that quaint, small-town feeling that I so benefited from as a young person," said O'Mara, 94. During her youth, books were held aside at the local library for her and slices of staff birthday cakes for her to eat. She arrived there dutifully each day after school, a girl of 8, and waited for the light to go on in the kitchen of her house across the street. It meant her widowed mother had returned from work, and she could go home.

That era, of course, has long been consigned to misty memory. When O'Mara, who now lives in a historic section of Jackson Heights, walked along Broadway with a friend about a year ago, she barely recognized it. "Really, it's like a different world altogether," she said.

Change arrived by subway

Like O'Mara, Vincent Seyfried, who has written and published 30 histories of Queens and Long Island communities, stands somewhat perplexed by the neighborhood's ethnic kaleidoscope.

"In its earliest days you were either Dutch or English," said Seyfried, 87, speaking of the Colonial era in Elmhurst. Seyfried grew up in the Hollis section of Queens and lives in Garden City.

Seventeenth century settlers made camp at Newtown Creek in what they called Maspeth, only to face a bloody attack within a few years at the hands of a local tribe. The survivors straggled off, many returned to England, but a cadre returned and started fresh in a nearby area that was named Middleburgh, then New Towne, later Newtown and finally, in the early 20th century, Elmhurst.

For more than a century after the Revolution, the community remained a rustic and marshy dominion of cows, horses, pelt hunters and blacksmiths. The city's oldest congregation still in existence, the First Presbyterian Church of Newtown on Queens Boulevard, began in 1652.

So intractably rural was the Elmhurst area that the first electric light wasn't seen in the burg until 1895, almost 20 years after the bulb's storied advent. That first light bulb, described excitedly in the community's handwritten histories, glowed inside a farmhouse. As the 20th century dawned, the area surrounding Queens Boulevard was still dotted with dairy farms, the largest taking Elmhurst as its name.

By the time the Queensboro Bridge had opened in 1909, the Queens trolley system extended the length of Queens Boulevard from Long Island City to its easterly end in Jamaica. Bus companies bought up many of the trolley companies.

Henry Ford's horseless carriage proved to be even stiffer competition for buses and other forms of commuter transit, jamming Queens Boulevard almost as soon as its two lanes were paved with crushed stone leading to the new bridge to the East Side in Manhattan.

The boulevard was widened in the 1920s to accommodate six lanes for automobiles. To make room for the widening project, the First Presbyterian Church of Newtown was lifted and moved back 125 feet to its present spot, absent its original steeple, and today marks a stately contrast to a furniture outlet next door.

In 1937, the year after the establishment of the Italian Charities of America in response to the fast-growing Italian-American community in Corona, the IND subway line arrived at Broadway and the boulevard, requiring a massive excavation.

"That's really what did it," Seyfried said. "As soon as the subway came in, that's what drew huge numbers of people to move in, to take over the land, to build high-rises."

Road to tomorrow

Two years later, in 1939, the Great Depression was slowly coming to an end. Just as it ended, the World's Fair opened on the blackened site of a Brooklyn incinerator company dump (rendered as "The Valley of Ashes" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby").

The fair brought Queens out of the Depression's doldrums, and the Grand Central Parkway was built by New York master builder Robert Moses as an outlet to the "World of Tomorrow" extravaganza.

Moses in 1941 cooked up additional plans to turn Queens Boulevard into an expressway, but World War II got in the way, and business development slowed through Queens. When the weary, wounded and victorious returned from the war, many eschewed city living and, with federal low-interest loans to assist them, bought new homes on former potato farms and other places on Long Island.

Even the World's Fair of 1964-65 and its Eiffel Tower, rocket ships and animatronic Abe Lincoln (he stood up and delivered speeches) failed to dampen the mass enthusiasm for moving to the suburbs.

There are echoes of the Elmhurst of O'Mara's childhood. Clotheslines still stretch yard to yard; side streets still are given over to games of hopscotch; the hull of an old fire alarm bell remains; the faded name of the one-time drinking haunt facing the boulevard, recently exposed by the demolition of a building next door.

And there are recent moments frozen in headlines and pictures, such as President George W. Bush's high-security campaign stop in August 2004 at the Italian Charities of America headquarters on Queens Boulevard, where the union for city firefighters, heroes of Sept. 11, endorsed his bid for a second term.

O'Mara said myriad changes have rendered Elmhurst and its best-known drag, Queens Boulevard, busy and crowded, and architecturally scrambled as well. Yet the neighborhood has become a "more dynamic place, too," she said, "where new Americans get their start and are making contributions."

"The men and women there today come from all over the globe, but they want the same things that my parents desired -- an education for their children, food on the table and a roof overhead," O'Mara said. "I'm rooting for them to succeed."