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The borough of Queens has been many things—a playground for wealthy Manhattanites, a recreation area for pleasure seekers, a highly industrialized pocket of New York City, and one of the most beautiful and residential sections of which the city can boast. Queens is home to the Mets, airports LaGuardia in the north and JFK in the south, and a steady force behind New York City, sheltering its laborers, builders, taxi drivers, teachers, fire fighters, police officers, lawyers, businesspeople, and everyone else for more than a century. From the borough’s rural origins to its multiethnic, metropolitan character of recent times, Historic Photos of Queens celebrates the legacy of those who dared to head east, who settled the countryside, and who tempted the Atlantic when they built lives on the Rockaway peninsula. Nearly 200 images reproduced in vivid black-and-white, with captions and introductions, tell the story.
Unbeknownst to most of the city's inhabitants, a rural community of garbage workers once existed on a now-vanished island in New York City. Barren Island was a swampy speck in Jamaica Bay where a motley group of new immigrants and African Americans quietly processed mountains of garbage and dead animals starting in the 1850s. They turned the waste into useful industrial products until their eviction by Robert Moses in 1936, all in the name of progress. Barren Islanders built businesses, fought fires, demanded a public school and worshipped at churches as they created a quintessentially American community from scratch. Author Miriam Sicherman tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost in the annals of New York City history.
In 1870, the communities of Astoria, Dutch Kills, Hunters Point, Ravenswood, and Blissville (near today's Sunnyside) merged to form a new municipality: Long Island City. This once independent city is undergoing an immense transformation as high rises replace single-family homes. It is the charm of a small town in a big city that many new residents have never seen.
A major new history of Brooklyn, told through its landscapes, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early 17th century to today.
Forest Hills grew out of an experiment - the transformation of 142 undeveloped acres into America's first garden city. From the early renderings of 1909 came a "fairy-book suburb," as Sinclair Lewis wrote, with architecture that was inspired by medieval villages. The success of the community bred development of homes, churches, and businesses on nearby plots. Forest Hills landed the most prestigious tennis tournament in the country. Theodore Roosevelt visited. Helen Keller moved in. Only generations later would the peace shatter when residents viciously protested a historic proposal for public housing.
In the 1890s, electric lighting and improved roads were just the beginning of the changes about to take place in Flushing, New York. Once a rural village of wide-open farms and magnificent estates, Flushing transformed into a community of more than 200,000 people and quickly became one of the busiest neighborhoods in Queens. Flushing explores these dramatic changes with many never-before-seen images. Jason D. Antos is the author of three other local history books: Whitestone, Shea Stadium, and Queens.
Thomas Kelah Wharton's travel diaries provide an intimate glimpse into the society of early nineteenth-century America. As a young immigrant from England, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant who fell on hard times, Wharton (1814–1862) navigated the complex world of New York and the Hudson River Valley in the early 1830s and his diaries reveal a vibrant cultural and social scene. Wharton's details of encounters with the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole; the author Washington Irving; Sylvanus Thayer, superintendent of the US Military Academy at West Point; the Greek Revival architect Martin E. Thompson, and many others enliven his story. Skipping two decades to 1853, Wharton—now an established professional living in New Orleans—brought his young family from New Orleans to Boston. The trip to and from Boston illuminates the joys and hazards of traveling aboard steamboats and trains, and touches on the tensions growing between North and South. The diary entries show an inquisitive, observant mind at work. A gifted pen-and-ink artist, the inclusion of Wharton's faithful drawings provide rare and wonderful views of an America from a very unique and personal perspective.
The Jamaica Estates community evolved with the advent of the 20th century. The verdant hills north of the colonial village of Jamaica were blanketed with forests of deciduous trees and dotted with crystal clear glacial lakes. The area's country beauty and tranquility offered people an escape from the congestion of the crowded city. As the Queensborough Bridge neared completion in 1907, two wealthy real estate speculators, Ernestus Gulick and Felix Isman, envisioned a unique community. Together they imagined a residential park offering people the ability to have homes in an area of breathtaking country beauty while working in the city.
Spanning three centuries of Brooklyn history from the colonial period to the present, A Covenant with Color exposes the intricate relations of dominance and subordination that have long characterized the relative social positions of white and black Brooklynites. Craig Steven Wilder -- examining both quantitative and qualitative evidence and utilizing cutting-edge literature on race theory -- demonstrates how ideas of race were born, how they evolved, and how they were carried forth into contemporary society. In charting the social history of one of the nation's oldest urban locales, Wilder contends that power relations -- in all their complexity -- are the starting point for understanding Br...
Journey through the early years of Corona with Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou as they highlight the iconic features that help make up the borough of Queens. Nestled between old Newtown (today's Elmhurst) and the village of Flushing in the borough of Queens lies Corona. Blessed with an enchanting landscape, the area attracted development as early as 1854, when the West Flushing Land Company sought to create a suburban residential neighborhood in its midst. For Corona's cherished way of life, represented by Colonial-era farms, dirt roads, and gaslight streetlamps, this marked a distinct break from the past. Developer Benjamin Hitchcock's novel installment-plan system had helped p...