Queens Chronicle 38th Anniversary Edition 2016

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Mischievous youths ruled rural Glendale

BY CHRISTOPHER BARCA Associate Editor

Vincent Arcuri Jr. was your typical kid who loved playing hide and seek.

He and his friends would run around the neighborhood farm, ducking in and out of the fields and tall grass, hoping to remain hidden just long enough to win the game.

“There was a pond back there,” Arcuri said last Thursday. “The owner had some cows, pigs, goats and ducks.”

The shotgun-wielding farm owner didn’t appreciate their games, however, as he spent many an afternoon shooing 9-year-old Vinny and his buddies away.

No, Arcuri didn’t grow up in rural Iowa, the plains of Texas or upstate New York.

This was 71-21 71 St. in 1940s Glendale, decades before the shopping centers, busy streets and popular restaurants took over the neighborhood.

“We had cobblestones a nd t rolley tracks on Myrtle Avenue back then,” the Community Board 5 chairman said with a laugh in an interview at his office. “Everybody played ball in the empty lots, that’s why they used to call it sandlot baseball.”

By the time the 5-year-old Arcuri moved from Brooklyn to 71st Street in Glendale with his parents in 1944, the neighborhood was already undergoing a transition from a rural town to more metropolitan suburb.

There were still a number of farms and open spaces around, but residential buildings were on the rise and so was the population.

That allowed Arcuri to have the best of both worlds, being able to take in nature while also spending his days playing stickball on 71st Street between Cooper and Central avenues.

“The outfield was at Central Avenue and us little guys, before we got to play, were the traffic control officers who yelled when cars were coming,” he said. “Of course there were some broken house windows. But good play-

ers learned to hit the ball straight.”

Many of Arcuri’s fondest memories of Glendale back in the day involve stickball, a sport he said many neighborhood kids couldn’t get enough of.

“Every block had a stickball team,” he said, noting broom and mop handles were the bats of choice back then. “So there was basically a league.”

While he didn’t remember his block ever winning the neighborhood championship, he fondly recalled being the bane of some of his neighbors’ existence.

“I always pulled the ball, so I was the window breaker,” he recalled. “If you had an understanding neighbor, they didn’t mind.

Otherwise, you had to go take up a collection and share the cost to fix it.”

The visuals of the neighborhood may have changed significantly from when Arcuri was a kid in the 1940s, but just as it is for many children today, the playground down the block was a popular place to be.

“There was a bar, deli or funeral home on every corner in Glendale, but we used to hang out in the Glendale Playground on Central Avenue between 70th and 71st streets, right where we all grew up,” he said. “You went out in the morning, jumped on your bike and either went to the playground for the day or explored.”

Those bike trips would lead Arcuri all across the area, from Flushing Meadows Corona Park to the Brooklyn border and beyond.

When they weren’t pedaling their hearts out, Arcuri and his buddies often walked along the railroad tracks that bisect Glendale.

“There was a spot we used to hang out behind Edsall Avenue around 71st Place, where there was a water tower to fill the steam engines,” he said. “We used to walk the tracks to Jamaica or down towards Brooklyn.

That’s what you did back then,” he added.

“We would go all over the place.”

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

VINCENT ARCURI JR.

Cooper Avenue in Glendale, and the cars driving on it, looked much different in the early 1940s PHOTO COURTESY RICHARD HUBER than it does today.

Community Board 5 Chairman and longtime Glendale resident Vincent Arcuri Jr. reminisces over a photograph of cars driving down Cooper Avenue in the 1940s, below, as the 77-year-old sits in his PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARCA office last Thursday afternoon.

The circus used to come to Glendale during the 1940s and 1950s, as well, taking place at 64-66 Myrtle Ave. “Where Stop & Shop is now, that whole property was an empty lot,” Arcuri said.

“Every year, the circus would come and they would march the animals around in the wagons. We would look out for that, for sure.

Went every year.”

Going to movies with his buddies was also something the CB 5 chairman would love to do if he had a spare quarter in his pocket, and there was no shortage of theaters to hit in Glendale and nearby Ridgewood.

“We had the RKO Madison in Ridgewood with the organ. Then you came back down to the Parthenon, where Christ Tabernacle is now. The Glenwood and the Acme were big too,” he said. “I remember Saturday mornings, for 25 cents, you got two features, a serial and 25 cartoons. In between changing reels, they would have games like hot potato too. It was always a great time.”

When it came time for Arcuri to start looking for a job toward the end of his teenage years, the most logical place was the Glendale Bowling Alley.

“It was on 72nd and Myrtle and they had 10 alleys. It was hand-set pins too,” he said.

“It was one other guy, my friend Eddie and me setting pins all night.”

Back then, the legal drinking age was 18.

But come on, what kid waits until his 18th birthday to take his first sip of booze?

“There was more of a European smalltown atmosphere back then, with a bar on every corner,” Arcuri said. “You could walk into a bar at 14 and get a drink. I bought my first drink at Paradise Lounge, where Glendale Pizza is now.

“One of the things to do when you turned

18 was to start at Wyckoff Avenue and have one beer at every bar until you made it to Hillside Avenue,” he continued. “If you could make it all the way, success!”

Just as the aesthetics of Glendale have changed significantly from its days as a farm town, Arcuri notes the demographics of the working, middle-class community have changed dramatically from his childhood.

When his family moved to the heavily German and Lutheran neighborhood in 1944, they were part of the beginning of a 30-year wave of Catholic families relocating to Glendale from Sicily, southern Italy or heavily Italian areas across the five boroughs.

“It went so gradually that everyone just accepted it. But the shifts in ethnicity were obvious,” he said. “It was good though, because there was so much more activity.”

Come the 1980s and 1990s, Arcuri said, there was a noticeable migration of Hispanics to the neighborhood, all while the average age of Glendale seemed to be skewing older.

“Right now, we are probably one of the largest pockets of elderly in the city,” he said.

“Everyone stays here. There’s still a lot of us old timers who are still around.”

Nowadays, Glendale is seeing an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe, something Arcuri says has already rendered the 2010 Census “obsolete.”

When asked about the demographic changes, the CB 5 head said he doesn’t mind as long as property values keep going up.

But there’s a wistful look on Arcuri’s face as he looks at an old photo of Cooper Avenue in the 1940s. He wouldn’t mind going back in time to run through that 71st Street farm with his friends, even if only for one afternoon.

“We had a lot of fun,” he said. “We may Q have been poor, but we never knew it.”

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Shopping at Bohack’s and having milk delivered

BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH Chronicle Contributor

When Queens resident Helen Day laments good things gone by, she can’t help but take notice of what remains.

Day can claim Queens residency for 60 of her 63 years, having first grown up in Maspeth in the 1950s and 1960s and later moving to Richmond Hill, where she lives with her husband, John.

“So between the two places, I’ve really seen a lot of change,” Day said.

“Growing up in that era, kids were more free to play outside, to run around, and to travel alone, too,” she said.

As early as seventh grade, Day walked a few blocks alone to the bus to St. Adalbert’s Roman Catholic School in Elmhurst (the name is now Saint Adalbert Catholic Academy).

“Whereas now, a lot of children are driven to school or walk in a group, even at that age,” she said.

“There were empty lots between houses,” where children would play, she recalled. “And I saw them being filled in with new brick homes in a very short period,” making parking more difficult as time went on.

The daughter of an English mother and a Polish father, Day remembers living among a large population of European immigrants, many Polish, and notes that St. Adalbert’s still says a Sunday Mass in Polish every week.

“When I was growing up there were a lot of ethnic groups, I would say, but not a lot of different racial groups,” she said.

“My mother was English and my father was Polish,” which to Day meant a diet of “very basic food.”

“We used to go to Bohack’s,” the supermarket where the library is now, Day recalled.

“There were Bohack stores all around Queens.”

The company went out of business in the ’70s.

Day frequented one of the many candy stores that punctuated each neighborhood back then. It was situated in a mid-block family home and sold ice cream, Italian ices and candy at two for a nickel or so.

“You could go in there with a little change and come out with a bag of candy,” she said.

Her family also regularly patronized Frank’s Deli & Sons, still open on 72nd Place in Maspeth.

“They’ve been quite a viable business for a long time, but that’s because he was more than just candy — milk, soda, gradually he got into supplying cold cuts and bread,” she said.

“We used to have the aluminum milk box outside the front door and my mother would have dairy products delivered, basically the milk. The milk in the glass bottle with the little paper tag on top, you’d pull it out and there’d be a little cardboard,” she said.

The empty glass bottles weren’t trashed or put out for recycling. They were directly recycled by the dairy, which would pick up the empties when delivering new milk, wash them and re-use them.

“I also remember getting bread delivery,” Day said. We had Dugan’s, Dugan’s bread delivery.”

Bells used to jingle beyond Christmas with the sounds of the ice cream men, namely, Mr. Softee, Good Humor and Bungalow Bar, a

The future Helen Day helps her father, Bruno Kuczkowski, clear up some snow in front of their house on 72nd Street in 1956 and strikes a happy pose in better weather. Today, she lives in Richmond Hill, where her and her husband John Patrick’s wedding photo hangs next to their knickPHOTOS BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH, TOP RIGHT, AND COURTESY HELEN DAY knack-laden mantel.

Richmond Hill original.

“You’d get your quarter out and you’d get a big ice cream cone for a quarter,” Day said.

The knife-sharpening truck would also ring its bells, and home cooks would run out to make sure they could properly prepare any meat they had bought for dinner.

“The other thing I miss: the butcher shop,” Day said. She remembers seeing at least one of those in each neighborhood, usually more. “We had Budzinksi’s, the Polish butcher shop, and on the corner, there was Conte’s Meat Market.”

In the days before prepackaged supermarket meats, there was sawdust on the floor and always a line of people who could view the chop of meat on a big butcher block table behind the counter.

Some of that life can still be had. “I can still drive into Greenpoint, Brooklyn and go to Brooklyn Avenue and pick up my fresh kielbasa,” Day said. And she has noticed a recent influx of Polish delis on Fresh Pond Road and a noticeably large population of Polish-speaking residents, still, in Maspeth and surrounding neighborhoods.

A remnant of the Queens teens’ dating scene remains in the form of the Jackson Heights Jahn’s ice cream parlor. The brand once had a chain of stores across Queens.

“Many people still have memories of going to Jahn’s for birthday parties or other events,” she said.

Day’s palate began broadening a bit in childhood as she met people from other European cultures, but the choices were limited.

“I remember having mayonnaise for the first time. We didn’t have mayonnaise. We had butter on our bread,” she said.“Since then, it’s just grown and blossomed and created even more diversity, which is to our betterment really. You

have so much exposure to so many cultures, it’s just fabulous.”

Day particularly enjoys modern Queens’ truly global cuisines, trying the produce of other continents and eating fresh strawberries any time she wants.

“Years ago, the preservation of the food was not as good as it is today and the international shipping wasn’t there,” she noted. “I remember strawberries being a very seasonal and soughtafter treat, whereas I could eat strawberries every single day now and get them fresh.”

But there’s also much that’s gone.

“What you miss is things like the small movie houses that used to be in every neighborhood where you used to see a single or double feature,” and other places where neighbors can socialize and create a local neighborhood feeling, she said.

“Our old RKO Keith’s [movie theater] has been converted into a Bingo hall, but at least it’s still there,” she said. “The Maspeth movie theater is gone,” she noted.

For shopping, Day remembers having Woolworth’s all over to buy small supplies.

“Some of the stores are taking up on that as far as supplying the needs for small things but it’s been a long time coming,” she said.

She also misses specific family-owned businesses that gave the area flavor, like Leberfeld’s, a department store that sold school uniforms, other clothing and household items.

“I remember taking the bus to Ridgewood with my mother and there were many more stores on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood than in Maspeth,” she said.

The Fair Home, seller of housewares, was one of Day’s longtime Ridgewood favorites.

She can still patronize the store at its current

HELEN DAY

Atlas Park mall location.

“They do good discounts. Very, very nice family-run business,” Day said. “That was nice to see that continuity.”

She’s glad Maspeth has maintained its original character as a home to small businesses.

“It’s still quite the same in that there are many independent shops along Grand Avenue where we use to shop,” including independently owned bakeries, pizza places and restaurants, she said. “Although they have changed many times over the decades, they haven’t been taken over by big box stores because there isn’t that kind of space there.”

Day, who used to work for Verizon and is on the board of Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, is keenly interested in preservation and takes heart that others are on board.

“They are trying to preserve the facades of the old Child’s restaurant” in Astoria, she noted. And she’s been following efforts by some, including the office of City Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Ozone Park), to designate a historic district in an area roughly bounded by 104th Street, Lefferts Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue and Park Lane South in Richmond Hill.

The area includes many Victorian homes built in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, some of which have been partially restored with the removal of aluminum siding and repainting in historically accurate colors.

Day recently observed a period film being shot in Ridgewood.

“They put a film poster at the RKO Keith’s, an old-fashioned ticket booth,” that prompted memories. “I could maybe even think of my dad’s old car, I think his first car was an old Pontiac in the 1950s,” she said.

“And it’s like, wow, this is what it must have looked like way back in the day.”

“People always think of those things. So it’s nice to be aware of what is still here and try to Q preserve it,” Day said.

C M ANN page 7 Y K Page 7 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

Jamaica Estates through the years

BY RYAN BRADY Associate Editor

Martha Taylor, the chairwoman of Community Board 8 and the former president of the Jamaica Estates Association, knows her neighborhood like the back of her hand.

A lawyer who now works part-time after a career in public service, Taylor grew up in Jamaica Estates and still lives there. Over the years, the community has changed.

“It was much less diverse, much more conservative and in the early days, I guess you could say less femalefriendly,” she said. “I mean it took a long time for even the Jamaica Estates Association to decide that women had more of a role than wearing dresses and serving tea to the men meeting in their houses. It’s come a very long way.”

The neighborhood is mostly filled with beautiful old homes, but homeowners in recent years have sometimes picked newer kinds of houses.

“Many people who live here now decide they need bigger homes, so a lot of people who have bought the old Tudors rip them down and build bigger houses, large houses,” she said. “Some

of them have been rebuilt nicely but some of them, in my mind, architecturally don’t f it the character of the neighborhood.”

Jamaica Estates has also become much more diverse, with immigrants from all over the world, something Taylor has embraced. The neighborhood — where Donald Trump grew up — was once much WASPier, according to Taylor.

“As a matter of fact back in I would say maybe around 1950, maybe earlier, there was a black family that was moving into the neighborhood,” she said. “And somebody went around with a petition saying they couldn’t live here, and when they got to my house my father took it and ripped it up.”

The neighborhood is home to many ethnicities now.

“We’ve gotten a lot of South Asians, a lot of Bukharians, there are Greeks, there are Filipinos, African Americans, Chinese, Korean,” said Taylor, a Democratic district leader.

She predicts that Trump will not do very well in his old haunts.

“Quite the opposite,” she said.

Taylor remembers the Republican candidate from the neighborhood when

MARTHA TAYLOR

Martha Taylor, who grew up in and has advocated for the neighborhood, knows Jamaica Estates better than anyone. they were both children.

“My parents were friendly with [the Trump family],” she said. “He couldn’t get along with anybody. Kids didn’t really want to play with him. He would go and ask his mother to interfere.”

The demographic changes can also be seen in the neighborhood’s commerce.

Above, Taylor as a child in the backyard of her home in Jamaica Estates. Left, she plays on a stoop in the sideyard.

COURTESY PHOTOS

continued on page 18

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Queens, from the outside (barely) looking in

BY SUZANNE CIECHALSKI Chronicle Contributor

In a borough so diverse, it’s hard to imaging anything in Queens staying the same for so long. Lifelong residents have watched changes sweep their neighborhoods, as stores get torn down and neighbors move away. One such person is Larry Penner.

Penner, 63, grew up just 200 feet from the city line in Great Neck, LI. “I lived in Great Neck, but my social life, and my whole life really revolved around [Queens],” he said.

Through the years, Penner has watched the streets, stores, faces and neighborhoods of Queens change.

“There’s virtually nothing left that I can remember [from growing up],” he said, in a phone interview with the Chronicle. Out of roughly 50 different establishments that he can think of on the spot, he can only name six that remain today.

Such places include a pizzeria once called Sal’s that’s changed owners several times, and Brickwell Cycling, once known to him as North Shore Bicycle.

“Many of the stores I patronized in the 1960s have become distant memories,” Penner said.

A store that he remembers fondly is Mangel’s Delicatessen, one of many favorites that once existed on Northern Boulevard. Penner said his parents would send him there for groceries — a cheaper expense than it is today.

“A dollar would buy milk, bread, a head of lettuce and still leave some change,” he said. Added Penner, “Money went a lot farther in the ’60s.”

For him and his friends, however, money wouldn’t be just about groceries.

When the government began issuing mostly copper coins to replace silver ones in 1964, Penner said, the neighborhood kids used the outdated coins for sheer fun and games.

“Sometimes for fun, we would place coins on the tracks by the LIRR Station on Little Neck Parkway,” he said. “It was funny seeing

the flattened coins though they were no longer of value.”

As a child, Penner said, there were an abundance of spots where he and his friends and family would go for some fun, such as the Playhouse and Squire movie theaters, the Freedom Land Amusement Park, which once stood where Co-op City is now located, and K iddy Cit y, a n a mu sement pa rk i n Douglaston.

“It was fun going there because they had all these games you could play for a nickel or 10 cents,” Penner said.

Kids didn’t have to go far for ice cream delights either; Penner recalled how Mr. Softee and Bungalow Bar trucks would weave through neighborhoods in the summer.

Referring to the music that is synonymous with ice cream trucks, Penner said, “In those days you could play the music really loud.”

Now, city ordinances prevent music from being played too loudly. “… As a kid growing up the music was fun and the ice cream was dirt cheap,” he said. Penner, who has a younger sister, said the two would often share the ice cream.

As he grew older, his love for ice cream and admiration for coins would come together as he worked his first job at McDonald’s.

“I was the shake man,” he said.

That McDonald’s, located on the corner of Marathon Park way and Northern Boulevard, still stands today, though it has ch a nge d g r e at ly si nc e Penner donned his uniform and stirred his shakes.

“In those days, it was a simple menu of hamburgers, fries and milk shakes. The Big Mac was the new item of the day,” Penner said.

But despite being an employee, his favorite spot to grab a bite to eat was Wetson’s, a burger chain in New York City that is no longer in existence.

Saying they had better shakes, Penner said, “Even though I worked at McDonald’s, my loyalty was really for Wetson’s.”

And while Penner can name several restaurants that he enjoyed through the years, there’s one that stands out in particular — the Scobee Grill, which, like many other establishments that he remembers fondly, is no longer in existence.

“Twenty-two years ago, I met my wife on a blind date at a booth in Scobee,” he said.

“We had returned every year on the anniversary of our first meeting. My wife and I made our final visit on the last day of operations.”

Penner and his wife, Wendy, became engaged within one year of meeting each other at Scobee. They celebrated their wedding on a Skyline Princess cruise out of Flushing Marina.

Despite the diner no longer being there, he said the two still visit the site each year.

But while Scobee may be the most special of diners to Penner, he laments the loss of many other eateries in Queens that have disappeared through the years.

“I’m very big on diners,” he said. “I think it’s a real shame that we’ve lost so many good diners in Queens.”

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

LARRY PENNER

Larry Penner grew up in Great Neck, 200 feet from a wonderful world of adventure and future memories called Queens.

Larry Penner and his wife, Wendy, can no longer celebrate their anniversary at the Scobee Grill. But the diner at least is a treasured memory, along with an innovation called a Big Mac, and getting far too close to Long Island Rail Road trains than would be recommended today. COURTESY PHOTOS Penner noted that there is greater diversity in terms of stores and eateries throughout the borough, increasing patrons’ variety in choices. He maintains that the preservation of local business is important.

“I think it’s very important to preserve local neighborhoods — if you want to preserve local neighborhoods, you have to preserve local stores,” he said, by shopping there. “[It] only costs a few cents,” he added.

There are many other things Penner says have changed since he was a youngster, including people’s demeanor.

“I don’t think we had a care in the world as a teenager,” he said, as he discussed taking public transportation late at night. In those days, he said, people would take public transit at “crazy hours,” not realizing that “there were bad people out there.”

Nowadays, awareness on public transportation at any hour has increased greatly.

Also noting the differences in public transit then and now, Penner, a retired federal transportation official, remembered how bus drivers had a coin counter to make change for passengers. “[They] would drive the bus and make change at the same time,” he said.

Penner calls the differences fascinating.

“Buses were meticulously clean,” he added. Passengers weren’t allowed to have things like coffee, candy or newspapers out on the bus, Penner said.

“In those days, it was very, very strict,” he said. That’s another things that Penner says has changed through the years — people seem to have become less respectful of public transit. Litter on subway platforms and in the buses has increased, he said.

He also says he never remembers potholes growing up.

“People were very meticulous,” he said.

Even the bus Penner once took as a teenager has since changed.

“I rode the original New York City Transit

Q12A bus which ran along Little Neck Parkway,” he said. “In 1990 it was renamed the Q79 probably due to avoiding confusion with the Little Neck to Flushing Q12 route.”

Penner, who has written a plethora of letters to the editor to several local publications, also said, “It wasn’t until the late ’70s and ’80s that the weekly newspapers really expanded in Queens.”

Before then, he said, the Little Neck Ledger was the only weekly paper in the borough.

But Penner’s letters to the editor aren’t his only experience being in print — the politically involved resident organized a bus trip of American Legion post participants to the national Honor America Day Rally in Washington, DC, prompting a story about the trip in Newsday.

“In recognition for all of my activities that year, the local Great Neck American Legion post nominated me for a patriotic student award,” he added. “One Sunday, my picture with award in hand made the front page of the old daily Long Island Press.”

While he said he began his letter writing in high school, when he thought Newsday wasn’t covering the Vietnam War fairly, a great number of his letters, including those in the Queens Chronicle, have been focused on local issues.

“I’ve become like a neighborhood historian,” Penner said. “I know so much about the neighborhood.”

He still frequents some of the borough’s establishments that have existed since his younger days, like Aunt Bella’s Italian restaurant, North Shore Hardware and Queens County Savings. But there’s no question for him that times have changed.

“Walking down Northern Boulevard in the evenings, my wife and I see fewer people dining out and shopping except on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights” Penner said.

“Years ago, we would never see any vacant Q storefronts.”

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Ice skating in the Juniper Swamp

BY CHRISTOPHER BARCA Associate Editor

The year was 1939.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland, kicking off World War II. Flushing Meadows Corona Park played host to the World’s Fair.

Famed singer Marvin Gaye was born.

Innovative neurologist Sigmund Freud died.

And the parents of 5-year-old Lorraine Sciulli put a $2 deposit down on their new home at 62-67 81 St. in a rural town on Long Island named Middle Village.

“In the backyard was a farm,” Sciulli, then Lorraine Pizzillo, said in an interview last Thursday. “But that was just one farm. Right next to it was the famous Pullis farm.”

Having moved from Ver non Avenue i n Brooklyn, getting used to living in a rural area took a little while for Sciulli, now 81.

She lived on the town’s final block of modern row houses, with farmland extending past 81st Street for as far as the eye could see.

One of the more iconic landmarks of Middle Village back then was the Pullis Farm — owned by Thomas Pullis and his family — directly across the street from Sciulli’s childhood home.

The 32-acre site was purchased by Pullis in 1822, and while the “beautiful” farmhouse is long gone, the Pullis family cemetery remains on the northern edge of Juniper Valley Park, where Juniper Boulevard North meets 81st Street.

A handful of headstones remain at the site, having been landmarked and restored by the city in recent decades. But back then, it was just a spooky place Sciulli and her brother didn’t know much about.

“As kids, we called it the Indian graves,” Sciulli said with a laugh in the living room of her 77th Street home. “We knew nothing else back then.”

As it is with many children today, Juniper Valley Park was the hub of activity for youth in the neighborhood. But back in the 1930s, it was known as the Juniper Swamp, a marshy area complete with ponds and peat moss.

That didn’t mean she and her mischievous neighbors stayed away. Far from it.

“Where the upper ball fields are now were ponds that we used to ice skate on,” she said.

“Some of the boys would go what they called ‘bare ass’ swimming. Us girls never went, but the boys did.”

As Sciulli was growing up, the site began its transformation into the park we see today, complete with athletic fields, cherry trees and walking paths.

And enjoying those new amenities on a daily basis was Sciulli — an admitted tomboy who loved playing baseball with her crew of friends.

“I played third base for the Chicklets,” the civic leader said with pride, showing off an old team photo taken after her squad beat the Sesquies, their vaunted neighborhood rivals.

“The irony of winning that game was that we weren’t muscular women, but they all were,” she continued. “And we beat them!

Even now, I want to cheer.”

Sports were “everything” to Sciulli growing up, but she and her friends, including fellow Community Board 5 member and civic leader John Kilcommons, also found time to take in a movie every now and then.

Popular locations were the Elmwood Theater on Hoffman Drive, now home of The Rock Church, and the Drake on Woodhaven

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

LORRAINE SCIULLI

One of Sciulli’s favorite activities growing up was playing baseball with her friends in Juniper Valley Park. The former diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, kneeling on left, played third base for the Chicklets and helped them become one of the best teams in the neighborhood. PHOTO COURTESY LORRAINE SCIULLI

Middle Village civic leader Lorraine Sciulli poses in front of a photo of her husband’s childhood home on Caldwell Avenue near 74th Street circa 1950. Sciulli said the neighborhood today is vastly PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARCA different than it was in 1939 when she first arrived there.

Boulevard, which later became the famed Joe Abbracciamento Restaurant.

“We had boyfriends that came from the local crop and we would go to the movies,” she said. “The Drake was a big place. It was only 17 cents to get in, I still remember that.”

Unlike today, when many recent high school and college graduates look for new experiences by moving to faraway cities, Sciulli stayed in Middle Village when it came time to settle down and start a family.

In fact, after briefly moving into the apartment next door to her mother’s home, the former investment firm employee and her husband, John, moved just a quarter-mile down Juniper Boulevard North in 1967.

“All my friends were running out to Suffolk County because they didn’t have the money to buy anything here,” she said. “I stayed because I got a good job, I saved my money and I was able to buy a house.”

Like his wife of 61 years, John is also a Middle Village native. The first picture one sees upon entering the Sciulli home is of Joh n’s two-stor y childhood house on Caldwell Avenue near 74th Street circa 1950.

“They used to have parties there all the time,” she said with a chuckle, noting Juniper Park Civic Association President Bob Holden, her niece Amy’s husband, lives right next door to John’s old home. “My house is full of memorabilia.”

The Sciullis have always loved going on dinner dates throughout their relationship, often frequenting Woodhaven Boulevard restaurants on the Middle Village-Rego Park border like Abbracciamento’s — which has since closed and been demolished — or London Lennie’s.

“London Lennie’s started out as a smaller restaurant and we used to eat there,” she said.

“Joe Abbracciamento lived on my street, 81st

Street, and used to be friendly with my parents.”

In her seven-plus decades in Middle Village, Sciulli has seen her hometown evolve from a rural farm town into a middle-class neighborhood known for its clean, safe streets, tight knit feel and an impeccably manicured park.

Sciulli credited the Juniper Civic — in which her parents were involved during its early years — and its original president, Mary Gerken, with helping transform Middle Village for the better.

She may be the first vice president of the civic now, but originally, it was something she had no interest in because it was made up of “all old people.”

“But they made sure they always had input about what went on in this neighborhood,” she said, calling the civic the “core” of Middle Village. “And that interested me, because I saw the amount of control they had over where they lived.”

When asked about the future of Middle Village, what it would look like in 20 or 30 years, she said she doesn’t expect much of a physical change.

But when it comes to the area’s civic power and presence in the borough, Sciulli said that depends on the newest crop of young families growing up in Middle Village.

She hasn’t necessarily been liking what she has been observing.

“I see a disinterest,” she said. “Eventually, if they get a leader within their group, they will get it and understand they can have a say in what goes on.”

She is hopeful, however, that the newest crop of Middle Village residents will “carry the baton” well into the future.

“This is a such wonderful place,” she said.

Q “I’m sure it always will be.”

C M ANN page 11 Y K Page 11 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

From Danish to dim sum in Flushing

BY MARK LORD Chronicle Contributor

Take a walk with Moshe Feder around his Flushing neighborhood and you will soon appreciate just how much the surroundings have changed over the past six decades.

A history and architecture buff who moved to the area between his kindergarten and firstgrade days, Feder, 65, is more than willing to share his thoughts on the ever-evolving landscape.

On a recent tour of his hometown with the Chronicle, he particularly pointed out newly constructed residences that have replaced many of his beloved Tudor revival style homes that used to cover the neighborhood.

“Look at this gigantic thing,” he said, pointing to a home that might commonly be referred to as a McMansion. “They really max out the zoning allowance.”

Pausing in front of another, he said, “You don’t put Greek capitals on generic American residential buildings. It irks me.”

And he refers to one more new home simply as “the most boring box on the block.”

A career writer and editor with a particular love for science fiction, Feder has lived in the same house — his family’s home — since 1957.

Across the years, he has seen houses to the

left and houses to the right change hands and promptly be torn down. One right next door was sold only last year.

“To my surprise,” he said with a relieved tone in his voice, “the new people decided to keep the house.”

Taking particular note of his neighborhood on a recent cool, sunny morning, he was reminded that most of his childhood friends have moved on, pointing to where Tommy, who would become a policeman, used to live.

A few doors down is the former home of his old buddy Peter, a future contractor.

Around the corner was the place where Bobby, another p cop-to-be, resided.

The area used to be populated largely by Germans, Italians and the Irish.

But now, Feder noted, it is home primarily to Asian families.

While St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church on 58th Avenue remains in place, it was forced to merge with another local parish because of the drop in the number of Catholics living in the neighborhood, Feder explained.

And the building that used to house its school is now The Lowell School, a not-forprofit coeducational special-education day facility.

Long gone or forever changed are many

MOSHE FEDER

Garden School

Moshe Feder is Flushing through and through, as he and his sisters Leah and Tamar grew up there in the 1950s and 1960s. The girls may have moved to Israel as adults, but Moshe hasn’t left his hometown. He likes the neighborhood’s dim sum restaurants too much to ever follow their lead and PHOTO BY MARK LORD, LEFT, AND COURTESY MOSHE FEDER leave the borough.

Feder favorites, including most of the oldstyle neighborhood stores.

“We used to have an actual bakery where they baked things,” he recalled. And he bemoaned the disappearance of two candy stores “with actual soda fountains,” as well as a stand-alone butcher shop and fish store.

And then there was Bohack Supermarket, part of a chain that sold more than just groceries, at the corner of Main Street and the Horace Harding Expressway.

It was at Bohack where Feder bought his first 45 rpm singles by The Beatles and continued on page 25

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C M ANN page 12 Y K

The stores and schools of yesteryear

BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH Chronicle Contributor

Dolly Guinther has seen many changes to the neighborhood since moving to Forest Hills Gardens in 1967 at the height of the “Mad Men” era.

“Yes, I’ve had a two-martini lunch in my day,” she said. “Oh yes, that was lovely fun.”

“I was publicity director for Farrar, Straus and Giroux,” the publishing firm, Guinther said. “I quit early when I had twins,” her girls Joanna and Louise.

The ribbon collection at the local Buy-Rite was a great focus of her little girls’ lives, she said. She remembers it being on Austin Street between 71st/Continental and Ascan avenues.

Buy-Rites were a well-stocked version of five-and-dime stores.

“They also had a remarkable collection of ribbon and trimming and stuff,” including thread, toys and similar items, Guinther remembered.

The Buy-Rites have since all closed but the name lives on as a discount liquor chain headquartered in Monmouth, NJ. “We used to have a real genuine Woolworth’s and it was beloved by my children because it had a lunch counter. Not every dime store had a lunch counter, even back then,” Guinther said.

There also was once a little shop on Austin Street near Ascan Avenue that specialized in dollhouse equipment, furniture, small dollies and dollhouses, Guinther recalled.

“My husband had built my children a dollhouse. Every year for Christmas they would receive something from the gift shop. It was lots of fun when they were open,” she said.

“There was a little shop called The Button Store, which featured many different kinds of buttons,” along with sewing equipment, and yarn, also on Austin Street.

Birthday cakes with lots of icing, roses and elegant calligraphy came from the Peter Pan Bakery on 71st and Continental. Forest Hills eventually lost its favorite delis Koch and Nord, now closed, and the Homestead, which still has a location in nearby Kew Gardens.

“One of the most handy establishments was Harold’s Department Store on Metropolitan Avenue. I thought of it as the poor man’s Eddie Bauer,” Guinther said.

Harold’s sold blue jeans, flannel shirts for children and men and socks, and “they also would sell you some needles and thread if you needed it.

“It was a wonderful handy place to get to if you needed something. They retired and went to, I think, Florida. They were replaced for a while by a costume store,” which was open year-round.

Also on Metropolitan were long-lasting restaurants Alberto’s and Chalet Alpina, the latter closing in recent years. Still serving is Eddie’s Sweet Shop, a family-owned parlor for homemade ice cream that looks as it must have at opening, a century ago.

Guinther’s children had a less institutionalized early childhood than most of today’s tots.

“Kids went to, we just said it was play group.

There were four mothers who would take in each other’s children, three or four children. I don’t know that any of us were actually working, we just swapped,” she said.

“There was a nursery school in those days called the Green Corn School, it was pre-K, and it was in the basement of the Church-in-theGardens. It was run by Beatrice Grant and lots of kids in the neighborhood went there before starting school.”

Grant owned the business and hired Guinther, who worked at Green Corn for one season after her children had started elementary school.

“It was very small, she had a staff of, I think there were three of us, and there were about 15 children. She was licensed and fulfilled all the requirements.”

There’s still a nursery school at The Churchin-the-Gardens, which has run the program directly since 1990. The CITG’s affiliated Community House used to host “Miss Upton’s dance class,” which Guinther’s girls attended.

“She taught ballet and sort of country dance and she was a very proper and strict dance mistress,” Guinther said.

“She had a wonderful name, it was Anitra Upton.”

Anitra Upton is listed on Broadway historical records as a cast member of the 1940-41 Broadway musical “Louisiana Purchase,” with ballet choreography by George Balanchine.

Like the Green Corn School, CIG’s dance class has a descendant. “Miss Melissa,” Melissa Wilson, taught her classes at the Community House before moving to Austin Street in 2013 as the Rose Academy of Ballet.

The roster of local elementary schools has held steady since the 1960s, the largest being PS 101, PS 144 and The Kew Forest School.

“My children went to 101 but my daughter teaches at 144,” Guinther said.

Guinther said she wouldn’t think of moving out of the neighborhood with that daughter, Joanna Friedman, teaching at PS 144 and living a few blocks away in the Gardens with her family, and other daughter Louise Guinther living with mom.

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

DOLLY GUINTHER

Longtime Forest Hills Gardens resident Dolly PHOTO BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH Guinther.

The Forest Hills Theater once stood on 71st Avenue and Continental, where the Duane Reade and Buffalo Wild Wings now stand. The theater is just one structure no longer standing in the neighborPOSTCARD IMAGE COURTESY QUEENS LIBRARY hood.

Louise, now senior editor at Opera News, caught her career bug at 101.

“She fell in love with opera in the first grade at PS 101. They used to make school excursions to see dress rehearsals at the Met. Her first-grade teacher had been a member of its chorus.

“She would play them the recording and explain the story and she would get them all bundled up and take them to the Met.” “It was a great, exciting occasion and my daughter never got over it.”

Forest Hills schools are overcrowded today, but it wasn’t always so.

“As a matter of fact, there was a point when there were not so many kids,” Guinther said.

“There were no families with new children who had moved in,” she said. She doesn’t remember when that was, but it may have been in the mid-1970s and 1980s, when the small population of “baby burst” kids hit school age.

“There was a period when there was a question of closing one of the two grammar schools, either 101 or 144.”

She says an influx of families of United Nations workers helped to save the day.

“Another thing that may have affected the schools was when they first started their program of busing and we had our first influx of black kids from Jamaica in the neighborhood schools.”

“Opposed by some but wiser heads prevailed,” she said. “We had a bunch of strong liberals in the parents association at 101.”

Back then, the US Open was held at the Forest Hills Tennis Club, an always-exciting event that was extremely close to Guinther’s house.

“That turned my children into entrepreneurs,” selling lemonade for 10 cents a glass.

“Which I lost money on. I would say, please girls, more ice, less lemons. They lost money on every glass they sold.

“They had a friendly competition with the ice cream truck, a real professional who would park across the street from them. Occasionally

they would swap. I think he lost terribly on that,” she said.

The twins and their neighbors also would compete to attract cars to park on their parents’ property for $5 a day.

“It got so crowded that they would park their cars on the lawns.”

“Oh, they were viciously competitive for cars. They would all run down to the corner to catch the cars and tell them where to park.”

Guinther once had a customer make her an offer. “‘I’ll give you five extra if you wash my car.’

I’m standing here with a master’s degree from Yale University and I’m going to accept $5 for washing a car?”

Today, Guinther’s daughters are both involved with the Gingerbread Players, a neighborhood theater group now doing “a production of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ coming up in November.”

Gone, however, is a group called Friends of Music, a professional group, loosely organized

by Bill Ryden, a longtime resident. They were professional singers who gave cabaret performances of Broadway shows in the gym at the Community House.

“Among them were productions of ‘Street Scene,’ ‘Carousel,’ condensed,” Guinther said.

Those would be followed in a second half of the show with related numbers.

“I was in the local choruses a couple of times and I think the pros were paid but not very much,” she said.

“Bill also used to organize the Christmas caroling in Station Square which they still do, I think, but a little more organizing used to go into it. They had a brass quintet and they would play until their tubas froze.”

The Forest Hills Gardens Corp. still hosts Santa at a caroling event each Christmas Eve, as well as springtime’s Children’s Day in Flagpole Park, “an ancient event.” It includes rides, games and treats like cotton candy. continued on page 14

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C M ANN page 14 Y K

Earning your sea legs in Broad Channel

BY ANTHONY O’REILLY Associate Editor

The children of Broad Channel didn’t have a ball field, basketball court or even a proper blacktop street to play on — the roads were paved with ash, the byproduct of a nearby Rockaway factory.

“We’ll probably find out that it was toxic or something like that,” said lifelong Broad Channel resident Dan Mundy Sr., 79.

So, residents of the island took to the one thing they couldn’t get away from — the water.

Earning your sea legs was a rite of passage in the community when Mundy was growing up and still is to this day.

“You just couldn’t wait until your parents let you into a little rowboat,” he said. “You’d be on a little tether and be able to go up and down the canal but you could never go past so-and-so’s house. You know, ‘Don’t go past Mr. Bury’s house, that’s halfway up the canal.’ But, you’d try to go a little further and further each time.”

Even though they were tethered to a post, Mundy and his friends found a way to make their sea ventures as fun as possible.

“We’d get a Borden’s milk bottle and put a piece of bread in it and with that you caught fish and because the neck was smaller than the top, they couldn’t get out,” he said. “Then you’d use that to catch crab. That’s what growing up in Broad Channel was like.”

As children on the island grew older and, for the most part, more responsible, their parents allowed them to not only go farther up the canals but navigate boats with small motors.

“And once you were old enough you were allowed to get just to the edge of the bay and when you got there you were like ‘Wow, there it is,’” Mundy said. “But with that you had to be careful because then you were bumping into your neighbor’s boats

and that caused a whole lot of trouble.”

Today, growing up in Broad Channel is similar to that, with the exception that children are allowed in much faster boats much earlier than Mundy was.

“You’d look out into the bay and see your grandchildren and call them and say, ‘Hey you, be careful,’” he said.

Although there wasn’t a blacktop road in Broad Channel until relatively recently, that didn’t stop the kids from playing stickball or football. But it also proved to be painful at times.

“If you fell down, your knees were red and bloody because of the ash. It was some rough stuff,” Mundy recalled. “But we just put something around it and continued playing.”

Going to school in Broad Channel was a lea r n i ng exper ience in more than one way.

“From one end of Broad Channel to the other it was almost like ‘Who are they?’” Mundy said. “It wasn’t until you got to school that you learned about the other people on the island. But even then you didn’t really hang out with them. Your friends were the people on your block or those across the street.”

When Mundy was growing up, many of the homes were still classic bungalows.

But it wasn’t because the residents chose to keep the classic look for historical purposes — they were limited on what they could do to the exterior because the city owned the land underneath the houses.

“Everyone had beautiful homes on the inside,” Mundy said. “But you were limited on what you could do on the outside.”

At the same time, the city refused to invest in Broad Channel’s infrastructure, whether it be the roads, putting a library there, installing sanitary sewers or adding another school.

“Behind the scenes, the city wanted us out for one reason or another. Either it was

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

DAN MUNDY SR.

Water skiing on Jamaica Bay was just one way to enjoy the water.

Dan Mundy Sr., a lifelong Broad Channel resident, observes Jamaica Bay from his boat. The waterborne form of transportation was a big part of his upbringing on the island. FILE PHOTO expanding the airports or [Robert] Moses wanted to make the island into a park,” Mundy said. “There was a lot of behind-thescenes political work to get us out of here.”

That ended in 1982 when Mayor Ed Koch ordered the land under Broad Channel residents’ houses to be sold to them.

“Got to give credit to Ed Koch,” Mundy said. “Before him there was a lot of talk and newspaper articles about whether there would be a land sale. Mayor Koch came in and just said ‘Just do it.’ And everyone else sort of fell in line.”

With the land sale, homeowners were able to get a mortgage and either sell their homes or use the money to add extensions or renovate the exterior. Following the land sale, the city finally invested in the island.

“They put a library here, which we never had before,” Mundy said, adding that new ball fields and a school also came to the area.

“That was the first big change in Broad Channel,” he said.

In the ’90s, Mundy and his group began

Dolly Guinther continued from page 12

Mundy’s laboratory allows him to keep a close eye on Jamaica Bay from the comfort of his PHOTOS BY ANTHONY O’REILLY Broad Channel home.

A cat contest used to award ribbons in such cheeky categories as the meanest cat.

“My cat once won the red ribbon for fattest cat,” Guinther said.

“Once a year the kids got off from school and had a day of celebration,” she continued.

“They would congregate at St Luke’s Church and march through the neighborhood.”

“One guy played the bagpipes. They would march to the community house and they would nobly open the swimming pool to all the neighborhood skids who had the day off from school.”

noticing a phenomenon that has grown into an international point of contention: sea level rise.

“The city-owned bulkheads at the end of the block were falling into the bay,” he said.

“We didn’t know what it was called at the time but we knew we had a problem.”

The civic association began lobbying for state funding to raise the streets above the sea level and succeeded in getting the funding. The work, however, was stopped by an Oct. 29, 2012 storm named Sandy.

Mundy said about a third of the more than 900 homes in Broad Channel are in the Build it Back program, which besides fortifying people’s houses will once again change the look of the island.

“A home that you can see under is no longer a bungalow,” Mundy said. “So now you’re going to get a mixture of the two.”

Mundy elected to keep his house the way it is, but storm-proofed the lower level of it.

Still, that doesn’t stop water from coming in. But for Mundy, that’s just the price of living in a place like Broad Channel.

“To outsiders, it must seem strange,” he said. “But when I take them upstairs and show them my view of the bay, then they Q understand why.”

Guinther’s public-relations man husband, Fred, died in April of last year.

“He lived here when he was a child. His parents moved into an apartment on the other side of Queens Boulevard, where they could see the old Ascan farm,” his wife said.

The farm had been passed down from the original Ascan William Christian Backus, originally Backhaus, to his son Frederick, who named Ascan Avenue after his father and lived until 1937, and then Frederick’s son Ascan II, who died in 1948. Fred could have been acquainted with either of the two descendants.

“He used to look out of his apartment and see Old Mr. Ascan going to his outhouse,” Q Guinther said.

C M ANN page 15 Y K

BY ANTHONY O’REILLY Associate Editor

When Augustus Agate’s family moved to Howard Beach from Ozone Park in 1962, there were only two things he knew about the neighborhood at the time.

“There was the Bow-Wow and Pizza City,” he said.

But Agate, a ret i red Q ueens Supreme Court justice affectionately known as Augie, quickly got to know the area and by 1969 the then-25year-old became vice president of the Spring Park Civic Association — a volunteer group that advocated for the needs of the residents south of 159th Avenue on the new side of Howard Beach.

It was his time in that civic group that he looked back on when asked about his time in Howard Beach.

One of the first things he remembers is marching throughout the area protesting the use of supersonic transport — better known as the Concorde — in and out of John F. Kennedy International Airport.

“Always the airplanes,” he said, referring to the fact that jet engines are still a problem in South Queens today. “That was the first big thing that got a lot of notoriety and was publicized in the press.”

Another issue that’s still a problem, though not quite as bad, are the mosquitoes in the area.

AUGUSTUS AGATE

The controversial flight of the Concordes was one of the first major issues Augustus Agate got involved in after moving to Howard Beach. Meanwhile, Pizza City was one of the go to eateries in the neighborhood when he first moved there. FILE PHOTO / FACEBOOK PHOTO

“You were talking mosquitoes that were more than an inch long,” Agat e said.

“The councilman at the time, who was Wa lt e r Wa r d , go t spraying done every so often.”

The massive insects — which according to Agate didn’t carry diseases but were just “annoying” — were in the area because there were more undeveloped parts of Howard Beach that were home Augustus Agate to phragmites, otherFILE PHOTO wise known as “the weeds.”

One of the somewhat now-solved issues in the area was transportation.

“Now, you have the buses that come into Howard Beach by 160th,” Agate said. “Back in the day you didn’t have that. You had to walk all the way to the boulevard if you wanted transportation.”

The Cross Bay Boulevard of yesteryear, according to Agate, was a lot less “commercialized” than it is now.

“You certainly have a lot more businesses there than you did back then,” he said. “When I first moved here there were only two banks. Now, you have seven or eight of them.”

Page 15 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

A look at the old New Howard Beach

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C M ANN page 16 Y K

No one is more true to his school, and boro

BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH Chronicle Contributor

Many longtime Queens residents remember buildings, businesses or bodegas that once were. For Joseph Brostek of Flushing, the most important once-upon-a-times are about people.

Many of those cherished people share ties to his beloved Queens College.

“I met great people, I had wonderful teachers, wonderful memories,” he said.

Queens College is Brostek’s alma mater. His former employer. The setting where he met his wife, then Carol Heiser.

“That’s where I met my sweetheart,” Brostek said. “Carol passed away in 2012 but together we created a wonderful family,” and a 56-year marriage.

“One of my children is a Queens College graduate and she worked on the newspaper there,” he added.

Brostek, who graduated in 1955, served on the college’s alumni board in the 1960s.

“We were very proud when the QC Alumni Association declared the Brosteks the ‘Alumni Family of the Year’ in 1965,” he said.

He took five years to graduate because he suffered a football injury while playing with a community sports team. In his day, the “fiveyear plan” required explaining.

“As things worked out, they also had installed an Air Force ROTC unit and I wanted to be in sync with that unit, so it took a little extra time,” he said. “Taking five years is not unusual any more, but I digress.”

“I’m kind of the unofficial historian of Queens College,” Brostek said. “I entered there as a freshman in 1950.”

“The college opened in 1937 using buildings from the early 1900s when the property was a home for delinquent boys. It was called The New York Parental School, and the boys wore military uniforms and drilled on the Quad.”

A photo from the time shows adults and children with ramrod-straight posture clearly ready for drilling.

Brostek, who was nicknamed Yogi because he played catcher in baseball and shared the same birthday as Yankee legend Yogi Berra, said fraternities were very popular when he went to college. He joined one named Phi Omega Alpha.

“It was a great fraternity that was around from 1937 to 1959,” he said.

“And why I’m focusing on that is, great

Joe Brostek today and in 1965, when he and his family — wife Carol and children Brian, left, Carol Anne, Gerard and Jeanne — were named Queens COURTESY PHOTOS College’s Alumni Family of the Year. Brostek met Carol there and graduated in 1955.

people.” The proof is in the continuance of some of those relationships more than 50 years after the fraternity closed.

“Many of us have stayed together over the years,” he said. “One of our largest reunions was in 2007 when 30 of us met at the Queens College dining hall. Ten of us gathered at a brother’s Long Island home just two months ago.

“One of my fraternity brothers was my best man and he is still my best friend today. His name is Vic.” That would be Vic Stronski, who managed Brostek’s student body presidential campaign to victory in 1954.

“There were banners and fliers and speeches on the Quad. The campaign was contentious, but there were no emails to worry about!” he said.

Of course, Queens life for Brostek has included many off-campus events too. He went to both World’s Fairs — the first when he was only 7, in 1939, and the second, in 1964, when his own children were little.

“Another wonderful memory was in 1969 when the Mets won the World Ser ies,” he said.

“Carol and I had great fieldlevel seats at Shea Stadium.”

Shea stood as the Mets’ first home, from 1964 until 2008. It was named after William Shea, who was credited for restoring New York as a Nat ional Baseball League town. Shea also hosted the New York Jets from 1964 to 1983.

“Right after the last out, Joseph Brostek, second from left, at last year’s Queens College people swarmed the field. graduation ceremony, the 60th held since he first wore the cap People went nuts, they were and gown. He is joined here by Borough President Melinda Katz, jumping onto the field, they left, Councilman Rory Lancman, Council Speaker Melissa Mark- were ripping up the turf,” FILE PHOTO Brostek recalled.

Viverito and U.S. Olympian Gail Marquis.

“A piece landed in the seats near me and I took it home and planted it in my front lawn on Jasmine Avenue in Flushing. When neighborhood children heard about it, they came and rubbed their baseball gloves on it for good luck!”

Brostek has lived in so many New York neighborhoods that he doesn’t remember many of them. He started life on the East Side of Manhattan before moving with his parents to Sunnyside, then back to Manhattan and again out to Queens, to Woodside. He attended allmale Xavier High School, a Jesuit institution that still exists in Manhattan, before landing in Queens Village.

“Queens Village I certainly remember, and that’s when I went to Queens College,” he said.

After graduation and getting married, Brostek served in the Strategic Air Command of the United States Air Force in Topeka, KS from 1956 until 1958 and returned to New York City for a business career in sales, advertising, public relations and production of television shows, trade shows and exhibits.

“I was with a number of blue-chip companies and in 1986, I went back to Queens College, where I became the executive director” of events, managing the graduation exercises and presidential events for more than 20 years, Brostek said.

He enjoyed interacting at graduations with people who received honorary degrees such as Paul Simon, Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Seinfeld. “I have been fortunate to be able to use these skills and experiences in my ‘private’ life,” Brostek said.

He and Carol moved to the Broadway-Flushing area of North Flushing in 1972, which soon drew him into community work.

“It is a beautiful historic community with great neighbors,” he said. “We joined the

Broadway-Flushing Homeowners Association and after a while I became a member of the executive committee. The community is very fortunate to have such an active association.”

The Broadway-Flushing neighborhood has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior and the New York State Register, he pointed out.

“Some years ago I created a half-hour TV show about the Broadway-Flushing community,” Brostek said. “It talked about the history of the area and the importance of people being good neighbors. It was seen by hundreds in the community and also in some school classrooms.”

Brostek is such a history buff that he’s a trustee of the Queens Historical Society and the historian for his parish, St. Andrew Avellino Roman Catholic Church in Flushing.

Anyone interested in the old-time amusements of Queens and beyond might want to see the fruit of some of Brostek’s recent work at the Queens Historical Society.

“For almost the past eight months I have been working on a wonderful exhibit,” he said.

“Toys and Games from the Attic and Beyond” has old Legos, Barbies, Rubik’s Cubes and other toys and games at the society’s home, the 230-year-old Kingsland Homestead in Flushing’s Weeping Beech Park. The exhibit is scheduled to run through June 2017.

Brostek has received some recognition for his work, for which he expresses appreciation.

Former Borough President Helen Marshall twice declared “Joseph Brostek Day in the Borough of Queens.” He enjoyed the honor in 2005, on the 50th anniversary of his college graduation, and in 2010, upon his retirement.

“I understand that getting this honor twice is Q very unusual,” he said.

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C M ANN page 17 Y K

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C M ANN page 18 Y K

Their off-Broadway romance in Queens

BY MARK LORD Chronicle Contributor

Life for longtime Queens residents Debbie and Rene Bendana has been inextricably linked to their involvement in the community theater scene.

Individually and as a married couple, they have lived all over the borough, from Jackson Heights and Bayside to Floral Park, Jamaica Estates to Richmond Hill and, since 1999, Queens Village. As performers, they have been seen on stages in at least as many different neighborhoods.

Over the years, many of the borough’s theater companies have come and gone: Stage Door Rep in Howard Beach, Colonial Church Players in Bayside, The Spotlight Players in Ozone Park, The Way Off Broadway Theatre Co. in FLushing, Theatre a la Carte in Douglaston, The FSF Com mu nit y Theatre Group in Flushing and Theatre Time Productions in Whitestone.

At one time there was even a group known as the Queens Jewish Theatre, from Forest Hills.

The disappearance of these and other groups, like the changes that affect neighborhoods in a more general way, may be attributed to a variety of reasons, though one seems to override the rest.

As Debbie put it, it boils down to “the demographics,” saying that when she and Rene married they were surrounded by Italian, Irish and Jewish neighbors. Now, their complex is filled mostly with families of Asian descent.

Sitting in their apartment, surrounded by mementos largely commemorating their theatrical endeavors, the couple recently reflected on other changes they have witnessed over the years.

“The stores I grew up with are gone,” Debbie said. “A lot of times going in stores, I can’t find anybody who speaks English.”

And, until recently, when laws governing signage changed, she said, “You couldn’t read any of the signs. That was difficult.”

The couple had their favorite places to eat, many no longer around, including the Scobee Diner at the corner of Northern Boulevard and Little Neck Parkway, which they would frequent after attending performances at one of the nearby community theaters. Despite serving patrons who were said to include actors Telly Savalas and Alan King, the diner shuttered in 2010 after a sevendecade run. Anothe r, t he Pa la c e Diner, closed the next year after 35 years at the corner of Main Street and the Long Island Expressway.

They had some favorite movie theaters, the names of which escaped them. One, on the corner of the Long Island Expressway and Utopia Parkway, was a small venue that began to specialize in Indian films and, eventually, closed its doors. The other, recalled by Debbie as “a cheapo theater on Main Street and 72nd Drive,” was where they saw the first installment of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the year they were married, 2001. It was still there the last time they drove by.

Not surprisingly, Debbie and Rene met, in 1994, through their mutual love of theater, when they were cast opposite each other in a production of “Call Me Madam,” an Irving Berlin musical presented by the now-defunct Sinai Players.

It was a year later that the group found itself the victim of changing demographics.

As the resident theater company of Temple Sinai in Forest Hills, it became known as the Forest Hills Players when the synagogue became part of a merger among area temples, the result of a decline in membership.

DEBBIE AND RENE BENDANA

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

His fair (leading) lady: Debbie and Rene Bendana starring opposite each other in “Call COURTESY PHOTO Me Madam” in 1994.

Jamaica Estates continued from page 7

“The restaurants all over Union Turnpike are interesting, diverse and for the most part inexpensive,” she said. “On Hillside [Avenue], they were actually similar to what they are now except there weren’t many South Asian stores.”

There is at least one thing, however, that Taylor misses about the old days in Jamaica Estates.

“I miss the fact that we never had to lock our door, we never locked our car doors,” she said. “We just trusted that people weren’t going to commit crimes. It was a much more relaxed atmosphere.”

Crime in the neighborhood, she added, is not committed by people who live there.

“I’ve never known any crime to have been committed in

Debbie and Rene Bendana have enjoyed a 22-year run, first being brought together because of a PHOTO BY MARK LORD mutual love for theater. .

By that time, Debbie, 67, who recently retired after 28 years as a social studies teacher at The Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica Estates, her alma mater, had already been heavily involved in community theater. Since then, she has noticed changes, too, in participants’ attitudes toward the theater, perhaps reflective of changing social mores.

“When we were doing community theater in our younger days, we ran to rehearsal,” she recalled. “We couldn’t wait. We loved being there. Over the years, I’ve seen less of a dedication, less discipline. People show up whenever or don’t show up at all.”

It was their shared love of theater that led the couple to start their dream of launching their own company, Beari Productions, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Middle Village, in 1996, with the premiere attraction a fundraiser for an AIDS hospice.

At the closing night performance of one of their shows, “Godspell,” in front of the cast, crew and audience, Rene proposed. They were married two years later at the church.

The company went on to produce 39 shows over 17 years, but demographics reared their head once more, and Beari threw in the towel.

“Over the years we had tremendous turnouts,” the explained. “We were running to houses asking to borrow folding chairs” to

Jamaica Estates by a member of the Jamaica Estates community,” Taylor said. “There’s no vandalism here, it’s just not happening. People kind of have respect for each other.”

The neighborhood has a company doing security patrol that is mostly paid for by the Jamaica Estates Association, and St. John’s University, which houses students in the neighborhood, makes an annual contribution.

A restaurant that Taylor used to go to that recently closed is King Yum, which was on Union Turnpike by Kent Street.

“They had a fried rice that was wonderful,” she said.

“Their spare ribs were really good. ... It was very typical Chinese food, it was like a throwback and they never changed much till the day it closed.”

The neighborhood is home to some great restaurants in 2016, though.

“In Jamaica Estates, there’s a wonderful little Thai place

accommodate standing-room-only crowds.

Then, it all changed, they said, beginning around 2005. “We started getting fewer and fewer people,” Rene said. “I noticed it wasn’t just us,” added Debbie. “I was seeing it at all community theaters.”

Besides no longer being able to climb ladders to build sets and hang lights, the couple decided to call it quits when they started losing money on every show. “No matter how great the shows and the reviews were, we weren’t getting audiences,” Debbie lamented.

Their last production, “Children of Eden,” a musical rarely produced on local stages, left them $4,500 in the red. “That was it,” Debbie said. “I was finished.”

Now, Debbie and Rene, 69, who got to know his way around the borough driving cars for hire on and off for 42 years, are planning to move to the uncharted world of life in Bear, Del., which they have found on visits to be more retirement-friendly.

“We loved growing up in New York, but it’s become too expensive,” they agreed. Delaware is close enough that “we can come for a weekend,” and, of course, see a play or two.

And while Debbie believes it’s a good idea to “always leave them wanting more,” Rene plans to get back on stage in his new home. “I Q can still do my character roles,” he said.

on the corner of 179th Street and Union Turnpike,” she said, referring to Thai Taste.

Union Turnpike has also changed as an effect of more Jewish families moving into Jamaica Estates, she added.

“Most of the food stores are Kosher now, that’s where the heart of the Bukharian and Orthodox Jewish communities are,” she said.

Some of the places that Taylor used to visit when she was younger are no longer there.

“When I was a kid we would walk to Jamaica and shop all over and go to the Valencia movie theater, which is now an evangelical church,” she said.

But in the neighborhood, especially at this time of the year, there are many great ways to spend time.

“To walk around and look at all the changing colors of the leaves is really lovely,” she said. “And in the spring, Q Jamaica Estates is known for its azaleas.”

C M ANN page 19 Y K

BY RYAN BRADY Associate Editor

South of the Throgs Neck Bridge and north of Bayside, a quiet little community made mostly of co-ops, condominiums and townhouses sits.

“When I first moved here, Bay Terrace was probably the best kept secret in Queens, which was nice,” Bay Terrace Community Alliance President Warren Schreiber said. “Nobody really knew where we were. It was somewhat, I don’t want to say isolated , but it was qu iet because we were somewhat off the beaten track.”

When he was dating his now-wife, Roberta, Schreiber followed her car in his into the upscale neighborhood, which faces the East River. It made quite an impression on him, and he moved there in the early ’90s.

“My first thought was where am I going?

Where is she taking me to?” said Schreiber, who advocates for the neighborhood as the third vice chairman of Community Board 7 and is president of the section of his co-op that he lives in. “I said, ‘Gee, I didn’t know that this existed. But I mean, it was just really nice. Even then, it was a place where people go outside. They walk along the water right down by Joe Michaels Mile and Little Bay Park.”

Some of Schreiber’s favorite restaurants that the neighborhood had then aren’t around anymore, like the Chinese restaurant Joy Island, which used to be at the Bay Terrace Shopping Center.

“The food was delicious, it was a neighborhood place, it was a family place,” he said, adding that he would “dig into the spare ribs and the wanton soup and the fried rice.”

Another tasty place that the Bay Terrace resident loved is the Cake Box, which is also closed now.

“Everybody misses the Cake Box,” the retired MTA employee said.

Fort Totten, which is on the peninsula facing the Throgs Neck Bridge

by Bay Terrace, was an active military base until it was decommissioned in the ’90s.

“It was nice having it, the Army, they were wonderful neighbors,” he said. “You had the soldiers, the men and women they would live there on base. Their kids would go to our local schools ... As a matter of fact I know there’s some of them who liked the community so much that after serving, they permanently moved to Bay Terrace.”

“They were very important to the economy, so we were absolutely glad to have them,” he said.

Since then, Fort Totten has been conveyed to

WARREN SCHREIBER

Warren Schreiber, the president of the Bay Terrace Community Alliance, takes in a beautiful autumn day in his neighborhood. Right, the old Loews theater that used to be in the Bay Terrace PHOTOS BY RYAN BRADY AND COURTESY TODD BERKUN Shopping Center, which Schreiber misses. the city to become parkland and is also used by the Fire Department as a base for fire marshals.

The Bay Terrace Shopping Center, the commercial hub of the neighborhood, has expanded. And while it houses a newer movie theater, Schreiber also misses the old Loews theater that used to be there.

“It might have had two theaters in it, but each theater was large and comfortable,” he said. “It was one of my favorite theaters.”

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“Certainly, people found out about us,” Schreiber said, adding that “a large influx of traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian,” came to the neighborhood.

However, he added, the population increase has not really had a negative impact on Bay Terrace.

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C M ANN page 20 Y K

A love story as dynamic as Jamaica

BY MARK LORD Chronicle Contributor

One of Marge Hall’s fondest memories of life in her native Jamaica, the dynamic, everevolving neighborhood in Southeast Queens, was the time she spent as a student at the Bernice Johnson Dance Studio, the first such school in the borough to be owned by an African American.

“That was the school when we were coming up,” Hall recalled in a recent telephone interview, putting an emphasis on “the.” “That was your recreation. If your parents had the money, you could go.”

Back then, each class cost 50 cents, to the best of Hall’s recollection, at a time when spare change was not always easy to come by.

“We started out in her house basement,” Hall said. “Then she had a studio on Sutphin [Boulevard]; then it grew to a studio near the old Valencia,” a reference to Loew’s Valencia Theatre — a movie palace that opened in 1929, closed in 1977 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

Today, the site is home to the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People church.

During her lifetime, Johnson, who died in 2005 at the age of 94, broke the color line by becoming a chorus girl in the famed Cotton Club. In the years after, she saw her humble dance studio eventually grow into the cultural

arts center that bore her name, which only closed in 2000 when her health declined.

Johnson’s studio holds a special place in Hall’s heart, for it was there that she would have a fortuitous reunion with the young man who would eventually become her husband.

Hall, née Margaret Le Monier, was born in Mary Immaculate Hospital, a community institution on 89th Avenue just north of Rufus King Park, until it went bankrupt and closed its doors seven years ago.

It was the same place her future husband, Raleigh Hall, made his entrance into the m world. w Hall said that baby Raleigh’s mother looked in baby Marge’s car r iage and promptly announced that he would someday be her husband. In between, there would be some unanticipated twists and turns.

When Hall was born, her family was living in a Jamaica housing complex that she described as “the first interracial low-income housing project in Queens.”

“We were among the first occupants of the projects,” she said. “When we made too much money, they moved us to Woodside.”

That was when Hall was 10. She would go on to attend Newtown High School in Elmhurst. Raleigh went to Jamaica High, and for years they did not see each other.

Then one day while in dance class, Marge

MARGE HALL

Marge Hall has lived her whole life in Jamaica near August Martin High School, seen behind her in both images. She brought her dog, Dusty, to homecoming there in the 1980s. She has no plans on PHOTO BY MARK LORD, RIGHT, AND COURTESY MARGE HALL leaving the neighborhood any time soon. turned to see who was beating out a familiar rhythm on the conga drums, only to find it was her old childhood friend.

“Everything went on from there,” she said.

Twenty-one years after his mother’s prophecy, they were married, and together they built a life for themselves and their family, scarcely venturing out of their beloved hometown.

Throughout her 73 years, Hall has seen a lot of changes there.

“In the summer, we walked from the projects to Jamaica High School so we could swim in the pool,” she remembered.

On the way, she and her friends would stop at the Woolworth’s on Jamaica Avenue around 160th Street to pick up some 10-cent bags of broken cookies.

“You didn’t have the money to do much else and the pool was free,” she said. continued on page 30

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C M ANN page 22 Y K

Putting down roots in Forest Hills

BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH Chronicle Contributor

Dick Martinez was born in Manhattan but has spent most of his life in Queens.

“I was born in New York City in Manhattan in 1921, the youngest of seven children,” he said.

But he eventually got a job in Queens, and once he met and married his wife, Marie, of Elmhurst, it was Queens all the way.

Martinez attended the University of Maine and moved back to Manhattan, in a Charlton Street bachelor apartment in the Village.

He got a job in administration at the Kollsman Instrument Company of Elmhurst, which made equipment for avionics.

According to Martinez and the Kollsman, Inc. company’s website, Paul Kollsman was an engineer who had immigrated from Germany. He invented a new kind of altimeter that is considered to be the first accurate barometric altimeter, which gave more accurate readings and enhanced aviation safety.

By the time Martinez joined the company, it had between 300 and 400 employees in Elmhurst.

Eventually, the owner sold it and Kollsman, Inc. is now a private company headquartered in Merrimack, NH. Marie grew up in Elmhurst, but doesn’t remember much of Queens before having a family because she was sent to boarding school for a time. She returned to Elmhurst, where she was living when she met Dick.

They met not in the neighborhood but through a series of chance events.

“I had a classmate from the University of Maine, Frank Murphy,” Martinez said. The two ran into each other while Dick was traveling for a friend’s wedding, and they became roommates.

Murph eventually decided they should hold a wine and spaghetti party and invited Marie, with whom he worked. But Murph was afraid to invite a woman named Jane that he had his eye on. At Murph’s urging, Dick invited Jane, and the rest was history. Dick married Murph’s invitee Marie, and Murph married Jane.

The Martinezes got married and moved into an apartment on Austin Street, on the south side of Queens Boulevard.

“We moved over here to 75-02 Austin Street,” Martinez said. The building and a neig hb or i ng a p a r t me nt hou s e we r e brand-new.

“They had just been built when we got married,” he said.

Martinez laughed when asked what year that was, saying that he and his wife couldn’t come up with the date when they needed it a few days ago for some paperwork.

“To get the date of our marriage, Marie had to take off the ring. And it was a small ring,” he said. The inscription gave them the date: 1952.

The sub-neighborhood is somet i me s ca l le d “AQUA,” which stands for its four bounding streets of Austin Street, Queens Boulevard, Union Turnpike and Ascan Avenue.

“We had a three-room apartment and two children came along, so we got a two-bedroom in the building, he said. Eventually, there was a third child.

“We decided we needed more room.”

Their apartment building had afforded them a view of nearby Arbor Close and Forest Close, neighboring collections of attached brick houses on the south side of Queens Boulevard arranged around three sides of a city block with shared green space in the center.

So they considered a house in Forest Close, which was built by the big Forest Hills developer Cord Meyer. Cord Meyer was founded

by Cord Meyer, Sr. That house was too expensive, but they found one in neighboring Arbor Close, which was built in 1925.

“This one was $18,400. Now, they’re hitting a million.”

“It was a great place for kids to grow up.

You could ... send them outdoors,” he said.

The kids, two boys and a girl, made friends and got involved in various area activities such as the Community House and the Tri-M CYO swim team. Tri-M is a Catholic Youth Organization team representing Our Lady of Mercy and Queen of Martyrs.

Those churches were already in place when the family moved in.

Dick and Marie have a weekend place out on Long Island, but remain tied to their home in Forest Hills. The family took to the neighborhood so well that the Martinez’s daughter Amy has since raised two children in Arbor Close.

In 1964, the World’s Fair came to town in nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park. As Martinez remembers it, his family attended the fair a bit and he made it over there once.

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

DICK MARTINEZ

When Forest Hills was a shrub: This ad touting the Arbor Close apartment complex in the 1920s would live up to its word. COURTESY PHOTO

Manhattan native Dick Martinez and his family settled in the 1950s into a Forest Hills that was gearing up for a huge future, and a prominent spot in the Queens landscape. PHOTO BY VICTORIA ZUNITCH The International Tennis Foundation’s loaded up on a truck from time to time and Davis Cup tennis championship was more his carted off to various races in other cities.

“The number-one butcher was Gus speed than the World’s Fair or the Mets at Ermish, between Austin and Queens BouleShea Stadium.

Martinez remembers Queens as being far vard,” Martinez said.

The shop on 71st Road was succeeded in less congested than it is today, which makes it recent years by a butcher shop that closed much more difficult to park a car.

“There are 38 houses here,” in his Arbor after a short time in business.

By the time Dick and Marie became Forest Close development.

“There are twenty-some garages. The Hills residents, the neighborhood’s empty lots garages cost an extra $2,000 and you couldn’t were well-f illed in. But development continues. necessarily sell it,” at the time he moved in.

Across the street from the former Gus That’s because parking on the street was extremely easy at the time, so people didn’t Ermish butcher, a former parking lot has been see the point of paying for a garage when they filled in with The Windsor, a high-rise condominium. And a few roads away, on 72nd, a could park in front of their home for free.

Nevertheless, there was one of the com- grouping of townhouses was recently torn munity’s first parking garages nearby, on down to make way for a six-story apartment Q the south side of Queens Boulevard at the building that’s underway.

75th Avenue subway stop.

“There was a restaurant and a gas station,” in about the spot where The Pinnacle Condominium was constructed in 1992.

The parking garage was part of the restaurant and gas station complex, he said.

Martinez remembers that the establishment was used by one of the Cord Meyer family men, although he doesn’t remember which one it was.

“He was a racing car driver and the racing car used to be pa rked up i n t he A Chevrolet dealership storage lot in Forest Hills in the mid-1950s may garage,” he said.

He remembers see- have foretold what perils would await future drivers who did not have a FILE PHOTO i ng the ca r bei ng driveway or a secured spot at their apartment complex.

C M ANN page 23 Y K

BY NEIL CHIRAGDIN Chronicle Contributor

Benjamin Haber has loved parks his whole life. From his current home in Kew Gardens Hills, Flushing Meadows Corona Park is just a stone’s throw away, and he’s been going for the 50 years he’s lived there. The fourth-largest park in the city and the largest in the borough, it serves a half-dozen surrounding neighborhoods and visitors from farther afield, many of whom are working class, with little access to their own green space.

Haber has been a staunch advocate for the park for many years. Under the Koch a d m i n ist r at ion , he opposed Queens Borough President Donald Manes’ proposal to create a racetrack around Meadow Lake, among other plans for development, including building apartments on parkland. The battle was chronicled in “City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York,” by Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett.

He would later oppose the U.S. Tennis Association’s move to the park and then its expansion of operations, as well as Major League Soccer’s proposed stadium for the New York City Football Club.

Two weeks ago, in this newspaper, he penned an open letter calling out state Attor-

ney General Eric Schneiderman for his campaign finance ties to developers planning to build a mall on Flushing Meadows land.

But in fact Haber’s fondness for parks began in Middle Village, where he was born in 1928. “In Middle Village, we didn’t have a playground until much later ... Forest Park became very important to us,” said Haber. “I got involved with Flushing Meadows Corona Park because it always upsets me when bullies try to take advantage of little people.”

In 1919, when his parents moved there with their first child, Middle Village was very much an immigrant community, a diverse area in which one would find Jews, Italians, Swedes, Germans and other ethnicities. Haber’s family was from a small village in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today is part of Ukraine.

Haber recalls the neighborhood of his childhood in charming and vivid detail. A number of these memories he has turned into short stories, which his children had bound into a book called, “Remembrances and Other Thoughts.” As Haber writes in one of these, “No Artificial Preservatives, No Artificial Anything,” “[Middle Village’s] Jewish community consisted of groups of mishpoche (relatives) and landslayt (people who came from

BENJAMIN HABER

Benjamin Haber, third from left in the second row, and his PS 87 classmates getting ready for a field trip to a dairy farm in Middle Village, and today in his Kew Gardens Hills home, before a bass relief sculpture he made remembering those lost in the Holocaust. The plaque reads, “Aunts, uncles, cousins, some old, many young/Fuel for the smoke stacks belching death/I never saw them, nor COURTESY PHOTO, LEFT; PHOTO BY NEIL CHIRAGDIN shall I ever.” — words he wrote as a young teenager.

Page 23 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

Idyllic Middle Village shaped a park protector

because there were farms and people still had horses,” said Haber.

In 1934, when he was in kindergarten, his class took a field trip to Lachter Farm, a dairy farm where Dry Harbor Road meets Woodhaven Boulevard today. The farm belonged to the grandfather of his friend and classmate George Lachter. The profiles of the buildings

the same small European towns).” He describes the several blocks of two- and fourfamily homes as a patchwork of familiar faces — next door lived his mother’s cousin, and her sister down the block and so on.

The landscape of the area was different — there were still streetcars running on Metropolitan Avenue.

“On 78th Street we had a blacksmith shop,

continued on page 30

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C M ANN page 24 Y K

Active in church and state, in war and peace

BY MATTHEW BULTMAN Chronicle Contributor

Rocco Moretto was a recently married 26-year-old when he came to Astoria in 1950.

With their young son, Moretto and his wife moved into a brand-new development along 21st Street, near 35th Avenue. Moretto, now 92, still lives in the same modest apartment, not far from the F-train’s Queensbridge stop.

The area today is, as he describes it, “a busy bee.” But that wasn’t always the case.

“This area right here, it was farm country,” he said. “It had goats and everything.”

Born in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, Moretto returned to his mother’s home there in 1945 after serving in World War II. He married his wife a few years later, before the couple put in an application for an apartment at the new development in Astoria.

Back then, Moretto said, the building tenants were predominantly firefighters and police officers. Over the years many left to buy houses on Long Island and in other places. But Moretto, who had a 44-year career with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and later Amtrak, said he never gave much thought to leaving.

“I was so comfortable here,” he said. “I was involved with the church and with the Little League. It kept me here.”

In those days, Moretto and his family did

their shopping at a supermarket and drugstore on 36th Avenue. A few blocks away, on Broadway, sat The Strand movie theater. When they wanted a night out, Moretto said, they would often take a bus to Queens Plaza and ride the subway into the city.

He remembers being driven home one night by a friend and it was quite a ride, as the streets around his apartment weren’t paved.

“He had a heck of a time getting me here,” Moretto laughed.

Things began change as more people started moving to the area throughout the 1950s.

More developments and condos started to spr i ng up along 21st Street. With them came more supermarkets, convenience stores and other retail establishments.

Moretto was active with St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church, which opened a school on 36th Avenue and 12th Street in 1952 as the number of children coming to the area increased. He also was involved in helping build a new church for St. Rita’s, which was completed in 1966.

And he has always been dedicated to Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2348, on 41st Street, which in 2013 was named in his honor — a highly unusual move for the group, which almost always does that in memory of someone who has passed on. But Moretto is a man

ROCCO MORETTO

Rocco Moretto moved to Astoria five years after his service in World War II ended, one year after this photo of the Strand theater on Broadway FILE PHOTOS was taken. who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, fought all the way to Germany with the First Infantry Division and ended up as one of only two men left in his unit by the end of the war.

A longtime baseball fan, Moretto also helped organize a Little League in the neighborhood, coaching his son’s team for several years. He continued to manage other youth baseball teams for about a quarter-century.

“There was a lot for the children to do,” he Q said.

No place like home in Woodhaven

BY ANTHONY O’REILLY

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

Associate Editor

Allan Smith’s family never had to travel far from their 86th Avenue house, located just off Forest Parkway near Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven to get what they needed.

“From 80th to 85th Street you had every type of store you ever needed,” said Smith, a longtime resident of the community. “Including an undertaker.”

The Woodhaven of yesteryear, the one Smith remembers, was very much like that stretch of Jamaica Avenue stores — you never had to go too far outside the neighborhood, if at all, to find what you wanted.

Smith’s social and recreational activities took place at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, now called All Saints Episcopal Church, at 85-45 96 St. He had three area movie theaters to choose from if he wanted to see a film – The Haven, Roosevelt and Willet theaters, now a 99-cent store, an auditorium for St. Thomas Apostle Church and a catering hall, respectively.

Not to mention, there were diners and bars located on just about every block.

“Many of them were open 24 hours a day,” Smith said.

Now, not so many people shop locally, the theaters have closed and the Avenue Diner, called the Forest View Diner back in Smith’s

younger days, stands as one of the only oldstyle eating establishments on Jamaica Avenue — Pop’s Diner, a longstanding eatery in the area, recently went under new management and is not the classic restaurant many in the area remember.

While Smith looked back on the commercial establishments with fond memories, it was his family’s home he appreciated more than anything else.

He and his family, grandparents included, lived on a dead-end street.

“Dead-end streets were great as a kid,” he said.

“You could play ball and hang out and not have to worry about cars.”

Even those have changed throughout the years.

“The streets in Woodhaven are like speedways now,” Smith stated.

His other big memory of the area was his elementary school, PS 97, now known as the Forest Park School. The students of that institution were, in a word, spoiled.

“We had projectors and movies and special equipment,” said the 77-year-old. “We thought the Board of Education was treating us differently.”

But it wasn’t the defunct board giving the students more attention, it was their parents and teachers.

“It was very active in the sense that we had

ALLAN SMITH

Allan Smith holds a photo of his parent’s 86th Avenue Woodhaven home, which he lived in until he left the coop after college. Right, an old photo of some of the now nonexistent Jamaica Avenue PHOTOS BY ANTHONY O’REILLY AND COURTESY WOODHAVEN CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY storefronts. a very strong PTA,” he said.

The PTA advocated in every way to make the Woodhaven school one of the best in the area. As a testament to their strength, the school offered free tutoring to anyone who wished to take an exam to get into a special high school. When it was Smith’s turn, he and all his classmates got into the specialized high school of their choice.

“It was good for the principal, it was a plus for the school and it made the parents feel

good about all this,” he said.

Smith went to Brooklyn Technical High School and later majored in architecture at Syracuse University, later earning a Master’s Degree at Pratt Institute.

He left Woodhaven for several years and lived in Manhattan — only to come back in the mid-’90s to take care of his ailing mother, who ended up in a nursing home in Manhattan.

Q “We reversed roles,” he said.

C M ANN page 25 Y K Page 25 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

Flushing sure has changed continued from page 11

The Beach Boys.

Following the shuttering of the supermarket, the site was taken over in 1976 by the Palace Diner, a mainstay until 2011, when it then gave way to the New Lake Pavilion, a popular dim sum restaurant and a new favorite of Feder’s.

Also gone is the neighborhood Key Food, the loss of which Feder said had “a major impact” on the area.

“To buy traditional American groceries, I have to go somewhere else,” he said.

The last remnants of the store, emblazed in giant letters on the wall facing the checkout counters, are the first four words of a phrase that once read, “Thank you for shopping Key Food.”

The space is now what Feder described as a “typical Chinese supermarket.”

Moving on, Feder recalled area movie theaters that are no longer operational.

Those include RKO Keith’s, a former movie palace on Northern Boulevard that is but a shell of its former self today, and the Prospect, on Main Street, where Feder used to attend screenings every week with a friend or his uncle.

Normally, they would go for a treat at Jahn’s ice cream parlor next door after catching a film.

The area library has seen its share of renovations over the years and is now, once again, temporarily closed, much to

Feder’s chagrin.

Though it has long been at the same location, “It’s not the library I went to as a kid,” said Feder, who claims to be “the library patron with most seniority.”

Despite sometimes longing for an era now past, Feder finds much consolation in at least one aspect of life in Flushing.

“All the fantastic food that became available to me,” he said. “I love being able to get dim sum seven days a week.”

And now Feder would actually like to see one more change made to his neighborhood, the “long, clumsy name” of a nearby street, Booth Memorial Avenue.

Back in the 19th century, he said, the street was known as Ireland Mill Road.

It eventually became North Hempstead Turnpike, and with the opening of Booth Memorial Hospital, it was again renamed.

The hospital is now operating as NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens. Its original name honored Salvation Army co-founder William Booth.

“It’s a weird situation,” Feder said, “having a street named after a hospital that no longer exists.”

He would like to see the street name changed to something simple, like Mill Road, a throwback to its earlier name.

“Two syllables,” he pointed out. “In the long run, it would make our lives so much easier and it would correct the illogical Q situation.”

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But it wasn’t all work for Agate in Howard Beach — he looked back on the miniature golf and batting range that once stood on Cross Bay Boulevard.

There were also businesses dedicated to “kiddie rides” and places where people of a younger age could go to enjoy themselves.

That’s one of the things missing from the Howard Beach of today, Agate said.

“The younger people, they all go outside of the area for things like that,” he said. “So you could always use something like that in the neighborhood.”

For Agate, it wasn’t a store or the scenery that kept him in Howard Beach — it was family.

Many of his relatives lived nearby and years later he started one of his own.

Agate’s personal history has some connections to that of the neighborhood, as well. For example, in 2000 he became the first Howard Beach resident elected as a justice — a resident before him had been appointed but moved from the area before winning their first election.

“It added to the prestige of the area and I think a lot of people liked the idea of having a justice from the area,” the now-retired justice said.

In 2004, he was elected to the state Supreme Court’s 11th District, which covers Queens.

He retired last year.

Agate believes it’s only a matter of time before the area produces another justice.

“My former law assistant lives in the area and I think she’d be a good one,” he said, referencing Tracy Catapano-Fox. Agate was also a defense attorney for one of the defendants in the infamous 1986 “Howard Beach incident,” in which a group of young white men got into a fight with several black men, chasing one of them into oncoming traffic where he was fatally hit by a car.

“I think a lot of people were upset that a group of people gave a terrible black eye to the community,” Agate said. “And the media hyped it up as this racial incident. I don’t know how much of that is true. It was just because it was a group of white and black men, the media hyped it up into this racial incident.”

For a while, the community suffered a reputation crisis.

“The Queens County Women’s Bar Association was looking for a place to have their gala and I was friendly with the Russos and a couple of the minority partners asked me ‘Oh Howard Beach.

Am I going to get chased?’” Agate said.

“I said ‘No, I don’t think so.”

Today, very few people bring up the incident when Agate tells them he’s from Q Howard Beach.

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QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016 Page 26

C M ANN page 26 Y K

SE Queens: ‘A great place to live’

BY MICHAEL GANNON Editor

Archie Spigner smiles with ease when a sked wh at he wou ld def i ne a s h is neighborhood.

He lives now in Addisleigh Park. But in 1958 the South Carolina native had just moved to Hollis from Harlem.

And the longtime and pioneering former city councilman is perhaps no more in his element than in St. Albans at the Guy R. Brewer United Democratic Club, the Linden Boulevard site named for his mentor, and where he first began working his way toward becoming synonymous with Democratic politics in Southeast Queens.

He admits he had little time to partake of the surroundings and neighborhood landmarks upon first moving to the borough.

“Our house was near a park at 183rd Street. Kids and grown-ups would go there. But I was busy working six or seven days a week to pay the bills, pay the mortgage. A lot of people were doing that.”

Raised a Baptist, he said he and his wife had barely moved in when they got a knock on their door from the minister of the nearby Grace Evangelical Lutheran congregation, welcoming them to the neighborhood.

“He invited us to come and visit his church,” he said. “I started going there.

“I was a good neighborhood,” he said.

“The schools were good — maybe not great, but good. They still are. They could be better, but we’re working on that. Crime could be lower, but we’re working on that. I was able to buy a house and years later sell it after it appreciated quite a bit. I bought another one, and it has appreciated.”

The Dean of Southeast Queens Politics has witnessed myriad changes since 1958 — and indeed he was responsible for some of them.

Some of the changes, he says, aren’t necessarily good or bad.

But he admits there are some things that he misses.

“You used to have neighborhood stores along places like Linden boulevard and Merrick Boulevard,” he said. “You had the hardware store, the paint store. You would have small shops, small grocery stores, small places where you could get food.

“A lot of them were black-owned businesses, people from the neighborhood,” he said.

He says there are still a few here and there.

But time, as anywhere else, has kept going.

“You still have good shopping along Jamaica Avenue,” Spigner said.

“But when a big supermarket opened on Hempstead Turnpike in Elmont — I don’t remember the year — it hurt our small grocery stores, because everyone began going there.”

That, along with an ever-growing immigrant inf luence, has turned some of the more traditional grocery stores into bodegas. There also is a more diverse offering of ethnic takeout food establishments.

“And what really killed a lot of the small businesses was Valley Stream [the Green Acres Mall] and Roosevelt Field,” he said.

Both malls opened in 1956, and began expanding in the 1960s, bringing big-name stores that would have been anchors by themselves at smaller venues.

“And you can’t beat free parking,” Spigner said.

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

ARCHIE SPIGNER

Small, locally owned businesses, such as these on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica, once thrived along the commercial corridors of Southeast Queens. But malls opened up in Nassau County in the 1950s and ’60s, and in later years national drugstore and other chains would close down others. FILE PHOTO

Archie Spigner moved to Southeast Queens and whether it was his first home in Hollis, his current one in Addisleigh Park or a neighborhood in St. Albans, above, the attraction has never for a PHOTO BY MICHAEL GANNON moment faded.

Large national chain pharmacies, like pretty much everywhere else, have largely replaced the small neighborhood dr ug stores, which again, he said, were usually owned by people from the neighborhood.

“Now you have a chain pharmacy being built at the intersection of Linden and Springfield [boulevards] — about a block from a CVS,” he said. “Somebody decided you needed to sell cereal and toys and beer and greeting cards. Drugs seem to be the smallest part of their business.”

Brewer, who also came to Queens from the south via Manhattan, was one of the first African Americans elected to the state Legislature. Spigner would be the first elected to the City Council.

The serious side of politics also had its more relaxed moments “You used to have more small neighborhood bars, owned by local people,” Spigner said. “You could finish a meeting at 10 p.m. and go out to a small place, usually owned by a local businessman. Places like the Village Door, Club Ruby or Bob’s — I’d better stop — places where you could get reasonably good drinks at a reasonable price.”

That also allowed leaders to meet with residents for everything from casual conversation to addressing problems they were having with city services, quality-of-life issues or even their personal lives, giving that added connection.

Spigner said a phenomenon of recent years has been a proliferation of small churches, called storefront churches by many, in spaces that used to teem with the small businesses of the past.

“I’m not saying it’s bad or good,” he said.

“Some people ask me how I can say that. If the businesses were available, they’d be there now. And I’d rather have small churches than empty buildings.”

Spigner served on the Council from 1974

to 2002, in the days before term limits.

He does not hesitate when asked about some of the changes to the neighborhood that he ushered in.

“Buying the Jamaica Water Company,” he said.

The entity — not the city — supplied water to Southeast Queens until after the Big Apple acquired it in 1996. Residents long had complained about water quality, and the acquisition, followed by the shutting down of its pumps in 1997, brought Jamaica and surrounding neighborhoods onto the more modern system.

“Of cou rse, it was a double-edged sword,” Spigner said. “The water table rises when you’re not pumping out 50 million gallons a day.”

That, combined with poor or indifferent engineering — and decades of city neglect — combined to create flooding conditions that have adverse effects even today in many neighborhoods.

Spigner, for example, had no vintage photos to lend for this article.

“We lost a lot when our basement flooded,” he said. “I lost pictures, mementos, lots of things. A lot of people did, every time it rained.”

The city in recent years began building out its storm sewer system in parts of Southeast Queens that long had been neglected. Just over a year ago the city and its Department of Environmental Protection approved more than $1.5 billion over the next 10 years, with Mayor de Blasio fasttracking half the money to accelerate the process.

“We’re working on that,” Spigner said.

One thing time seemingly will never change is the councilman’s love of the public arena, and for Southeast Queens.

“It was a great place to live and raise a family,” he concluded.

Q “And it still is.”

C M ANN page 27 Y K

BY MARK LORD Chronicle Contributor

Jack Eichenbaum has lived in three foreign countries and four states besides New York, but to the Flushing native, Queens is home.

So much so, in fact, that in 2010, he was selected by a committee of archivists and historians to become Queens Borough Historian.

He recently recalled the days of his youth in an interview with the Chronicle, reminiscing about various area attractions that no longer exist.

He has fond memories, for instance, of Kiddy City, a small amusement park off Northern Boulevard between Bayside and Douglaston.

“I used to go there every couple of months,” Eichenbaum said, noting he especially enjoyed the mini-golf course and hamburgers.

A fire shut down the park in 1964, while Eichenbaum was on leave from New York. It reopened on a smaller scale for a few more years, but ultimately folded.

According to Eichenbaum, over the past 10 years, wetlands have been restored to the site.

“It looks like a natural landscape,” he said.

The historian also remembers Fairyland Amusement Park, at the intersection of Queens and Woodhaven boulevards, billed as “Queens’ Largest Funland for Children.”

It closed in the late 1960s, replaced by the Queens Center Mall.

And then there was Rockaways’ Playland, an amusement park on Beach 98th Street that opened in 1902 and permanently closed 80 years later, the victim of rising insurance premiums.

Today, the site is occupied by a housing development.

Eichenbaum also remembers the Sunnyside Gardens Arena, a popular boxing and wrestling venue on the southeast corner of Queens Boulevard and 45th Street, which hosted famous fighters such as boxer Floyd Patters o n a n d w r e s t le r Bruno Sammartino.

The space was also the site of political rallies, including one that brought then-Senator John F. Kennedy there during his 1960 presidential campaign.

The building was demolished in 1977 and replaced by fast-food restaurants and other shops.

And Eichenbaum bemoans the fact that only a few structures remain from the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, not far from his place of birth.

That happened in Flushing Hospital, 73 years ago. Eichenbaum lives just eight blocks from there, in the same apartment he has called home since 1978.

JACK EICHENBAUM

Borough historian Jack Eichenbaum has watched his beloved Flushing and surrounding neighborhoods change dramatically over the course of his 73 years on Earth. But at the end of the day, he PHOTO BY MARK LORD, RIGHT, AND COURTESY JACK EICHENBAUM can’t imagine calling anywhere else home.

Eichenbaum attended PS 31, JHS 74 and Bayside High School. On his way to class at JHS 74, he witnessed the construction of the Long Island Expressway along Horace Harding Boulevard. A few years later, he watched the Clearview Expressway being built.

“Bayside was cut in half by the Clearview,” he said.

Around the same time, he recalled, the Bayside Links, a golf course, was demolished; the site was sold for $3 million to developer Jack Parker, who built 600 modern ranch single-family homes.

He grew up in Bayside, right near the railroad

Page 27 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

Flushing’s Eichenbaum has seen it all

station, but he said he came of age with songs like “California Dreamin’.”

“California beckoned,” he said. “Cars beckoned.”

He was 20 when he left New York, and he stayed away for 13 years.

Eichenbaum earned his Ph.D. in urban geography, which he taught at the University of Washington in Seattle in the early 1970s.

He has also taught a course called “Geography of New York City” at Hunter College and one called “Changing Neighborhoods of Queens” at Queens College. continued on page 30

Congratulations To The Queens Chronicle, Especially to Mark Weidler, Publisher, and Staff on their Anniversary of Thirty-Eight Great Years of Journalism

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C M ANN page 28 Y K

Little Neck, as decades have passed

BY RYAN BRADY Associate Editor

Little Neck is like a suburban oasis in New York City, and few people are more familiar with it than Udalls Cove Preservation Committee President Walter Mugdan, who moved there 40 years ago after growing up in nearby Douglaston.

“It’s not exactly urban, but on the other hand we’re much more densely populated than a classic suburb,” Mugdan, who works for the Environmental Protection Agency, told the Chronicle.

As a child, he would often swim in Little Neck Bay during the summer and play in the wetlands and wooded areas that are now owned by the Parks Department in the Udall’s Park Preserve.

“Playing in these woods was a tremendous experience of freedom,” he said. “I’m afraid that children nowadays do less of that kind of thing.”

The park preserve, which Mugdan calls a “little slice of nature,” is a sizeable green space in Little Neck and Douglaston that the preservation committee has fought to keep pristine.

Demographics have drastically changed in the neighborhood, which borders Nassau County. As a child, Mugdan went to school with the Italian and Irish working-class kids from Little Neck along with the children from Douglaston.

Walter Mugdan, who has lived in Little Neck for 40 years, has advocated for Udall’s Park Preserve.

Right, the neighborhood Long Island Rail Road station in 1967.

PHOTOS BY RICK MAIMAN AND COURTESY THE DOUGLASTON AND LITTLE NECK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

With expensive homes on the real estate market, the neighborhood is a bit more upscale now, and has seen an influx of Asian immigrants.

“I would say there’s been an obvious demographic change, there’s been a strong influx of Asian families who are very attracted to the good school districts and things of that sort,” he said.

Little Neck boasts a great selection of restaurants, including many Italian ones, on

Northern Boulevard.

Compared to when Mugdan was a kid, there are “more and better restaurants” in Little Neck, he said.

“There’s a really good Turkish restaurant called the Kebab House,” he said, adding that he also likes Little Saigon Cuisine, a Chinese and Vietnamese restaurant, and Aunt Bella’s, an Italian eatery.

One eatery that closed down in 2010, the

WALTER MUGDAN

Scobee Diner, is missed by many in the neighborhood.

“I can’t tell you how much we miss the Scobee Diner,” said Mugdan, who would order fish at the restaurant, which was located at 252-29 Northern Blvd. “For an extra four or five dollars, two people would share our meal ... I’d go there with my wife or other members of my family.”

Another location that Mugdan misses is Virginia Variety, a store that went out of business around “25 or 30” years ago, according to the preservationist.

“It was the most amazing store — you would go into this relatively small store that was completely occupied from top to bottom, completely occupied by stuff,” he said. “You could buy just about everything from toys to school supplies to garden furniture.”

Like many in Little Neck, the EPA official uses the neighborhood’s Long Island Rail Road station to commute to work in Manhattan.

“Because these train stations are literally within walking distance for many residents, it’s a very convenient way to commute,” he said.

The neighborhood, according to the preservationist, has “a sense of community that I’m not sure exists in equal measure elsewhere in the big metropolis. That’s why the civic associations in the area are still active Q and thriving.”

Watching an airport, and its impact, grow

BY MATTHEW BULTMAN

38TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2016

Chronicle Contributor

When Rose Marie Poveromo moved to Astoria as a teenager five-plus decades ago, LaGuardia Airport was still relatively new.

Marine Air Terminal, now called Terminal A, was the original airport terminal building. What’s known today as the Central Terminal Building, or Terminal B, didn’t open until 1964, followed years later by Terminals C and D. The “ice cream cone” control tower had begun operations in 1962. And Poveromo said there were no jet aircraft, only prop planes.

“O n 81s t , 82nd street, there was a huge mountain of soil,” she said. “But as the jets started to come in, they needed to make an entry to the terminal so that mountain of soil came down and now it’s the entry to Marine Air Terminal.”

Poveromo spent most of her childhood in east Manhattan, in a building near 20th Street and First Avenue. Her family had to move when she was about 16 years old, as a hospital in the area began to expand, and they made their way to western Queens.

She still lives in Astoria Heights, in the shadows of LaGuardia Airport. A semiretired real estate broker, she has been active in various community groups, including the United

Community Civic Association, which she has led for almost a quarter century.

The group has been actively involved with what she calls “assaults to the quality of life,” things like poor air quality and noise. The growth of LaGuardia Airport, which is among the busiest airports in the U.S., has been the source of at least some of these kinds of issues.

“We’re all over things that truly affect our quality of life,” she said.

To be sure, the airport isn’t the only thing to change in Queens since Poveromo moved here.

In 2015, an estimated 2.3 million people lived in the borough, a population increase of more than half a million compared to 1960.

Long Island City, once filled mostly with industrial buildings, has become one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods for residential development.

And in Astoria, the area around Kaufman Studios has become an entertainment catchall, Poveromo said.

“What you see happening over in the last 50 years, there’s been a growth not only in homes and massive multiple dwellings, but there’s been an increase in traffic,” she said.

“That certainly has a lot to do with Rikers Island and LaGuardia Airport.”

Poveromo has noticed other changes, too.

ROSE MARIE POVEROMO

Rose Marie Poveromo came to Astoria around the same time the second control tower at FILE PHOTO, LEFT, AND COURTESY PHOTO LaGuardia Airport was built in the early 1960s.

Growing up, she would play stickball and kick the can with other children in the neighborhood. When the weather was warm, the kids would sometimes go up to the roof of their building, or as they called it, the “tar roof beach.”

And every so often, she would sit on the fire escape with her sister and have an ice cream sundae.

“That was a treat,” she said.

Poveromo said it seems some of that “personal touch” has been lost over the years.

“The younger generation is so intent on using those gizmos,” she said. “It’s different now.”

Still, Poveromo has never given much thought to moving somewhere else.

“Why would I? It’s still the best community,” she said.

“You put your roots somewhere and build friendships,” she added later. “These are things you don’t go into a store and buy.

These are things you build with your heart, Q with your emotions.”

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C M ANN page 30 Y K

Benjamin Haber in MidVille

Bay Terrace

continued from page 23

continued from page 19

were so low — all six stories or below, but most in the area topping out at two or three — that from the top of PS 87, Haber could watch the construction for the 1939 World’s Fair all the way in Flushing Meadows.

“There were no supermarkets; it was all small family-owned stores, which is important, because during the Depression, they’d give you credit — which you’re not going to get in a supermarket,” said Haber.

Places like Leblang’s, the drugstore, became extremely valuable as a first line of medical attention in a time before regular doctor visits.

This genuine human decency is a trait Haber often invokes when delivering anecdotes from childhood.

He tells one about the local bakery, Eichel’s, which would close for the Sabbath from noon on Friday until Saturday night.

Clans were welcome to use the still-hot ovens to bake cakes and cookies for family gatherings, anything they liked — except for loaves of bread and challah, which they were expected to buy. Friday nights would see a band of youngsters shuffling tray upon tray of sweets from their mothers and aunts in Eichel’s back to their houses, sneaking the occasional nibble.

For fun, in leaner times, there were stoopball, stickball, “Johnny on the pony” (where the goal was to build a pile of kids climbing over each other until all fell

driveway here in the morning, I actually have to wait to get out of the driveway because the cars are all lined up to go to the Cross Island Parkway,” Schreiber said.

“Even with all those changes, it’s remained a relatively quiet, low-crime area and we’re happy about that.”

Perhaps due in part to the work of Schreiber and others in the community alliance and CB 7, Bay Terrace has not seen the level of overdevelopment that some other areas have had, although it has changed over the years.

Benjamin Haber’s World War II emergency ID card, which has his fingerprints on the back.

He was too young to fight in the war himself.

PHOTO BY NEIL CHIRAGDIN

down) and “chase the white flag” (tossing a handkerchief in the air and catching it).

The girls would skip rope and play potsie (hopscotch) — street games were prevalent. So excursions into greener spaces made for excitement.

“Rumor had it that Nicky Arnstein, the racketeer, buried money in Juniper Valley, so we would go there and dig — but we never found money,” said Haber. “That ultimately became Juniper Valley Park, which is a very beautiful park, but when I was a kid, it was a swamp.”

Turning his thoughts back to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Haber observed, “The important thing about this park — who uses it? People who don’t have summer homes, people who don’t go to the Q Hamptons. They need the park.”

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Jamaica native Marge Hall continued from page 20

In high school, she was selected as captain of the cheerleading squad. She also happened to be its sole black member.

“To be captain and black was something to us,” she said.

At the time, the students in the school were predominantly white and Jewish.

In 1967, a few years after graduation, she and Raleigh bought a home in the area, where they reside to this day. He handled an extension himself.

“He opened the whole top and put a box on top,” she said.

That he had the know-how was not surprising. Hall and her husband run a construction company, which she said is the first black company to build under the New York City Housing Partnership.

Many of the places that used to be neighborhood landmarks are no longer around.

Hall used to frequent The Alden, a movie theater on Jamaica Avenue at 165th Street.

“I think you paid 15 cents for the movie,” she recalled.

The theater had opened on New Year’s Eve in 1928 as the Shubert Jamaica Theatre, a venue for live performances. Several years later it was converted into a movie theater, eventually closing in the mid1980’s, last operating as a quadraplex.

Also long gone is Jamaica Racetrack.

“I walked to school,” Hall said, “and I could hear the races being called.”

Today, the space is occupied by Rochdale Village.

“The majority of people when they built it were young, white, Jewish families. We had to stand our ground to get in there.

After that, came white flight.”

Today, in the section of Jamaica where she has lived for nearly 50 years, most of her neighbors are senior citizens — many of whom grew up in the area — or their children, who have taken over their homes as their parents passed on.

According to Hall, the neighborhood is now home to more immigrants than in the early days, and the ubiquitous McMansions are popping up everywhere. With these changes, Hall said she is no longer as close to her neighbors as she once was.

“There used to be more sharing and caring,” she said. “We used to know everybody. Now I only know two neighbors across the street. With the change of culture, everybody sticks to themselves.”

Also, gunfire recently sounded perilously close to her residence.

“We never heard that before,” she said. “I was sitting at my kitchen window and said, ‘Those were gunshots.’”

Still, home is home.

“We were born in Jamaica,” she said.

“We love Jamaica, and we’ll be here until the day we die.

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Eichenbaum continued from page 27

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Demographics in the neighborhood have also changed since he moved there.

“I guess at one time Bay Terrace was predominantly Italian, Jewish, Irish, maybe some German, and now that’s changing,” he said. “We’re starting to see an influx of Asian families, people of color are moving in, we have Hindus Sikhs, Muslims. So, we’re starting to see a large amount of diversity.”

Overall, the community alliance president said, the neighborhood is a great area.

“Bay Terrace is a wonderful, wonderful place to live,” Schreiber said. “We have great schools, we have some of the best schools in Queens. It’s a safe Q neighborhood.”

Over the years, there is “virtually no neighborhood that has not changed,” he said, including “incredible ethnic changes.”

He has personally experienced the demographic transition from older folks of European heritage to younger Asians.

In 1970, he explained, the foreign-born population of New York City was 18 percent, and 12 percent in Queens. Today, the overall foreign population in the city is 37 percent; in Queens it’s a full 50 percent.

“It’s fascinating,” he said. “People here are from all over the world. They came here with

some needed professions ... doctors, engineers, lawyers. Immigrant small businesses saved the city.”

Flushing, he pointed out, went from 85 percent white to 85 percent Asian.

As far back as 40 years, he sensed that change in the borough was imminent.

“All the interesting people couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan,” he reasoned at the time.

“In Long Island City, the subway was convenient, artists were moving in. They’re the leaders in how things go.”

Even after witnessing a lifetime of change, Eichenbaum remains a Queens-ite through and through.

“Somebody put me here,” he said, “and I’m Q staying.”

C M ANN page 31 Y K

BY NEIL CHIRAGDIN Chronicle Contributor

Look at a map of Hollis and one can see the grids, uniform blocks and numbered streets.

But beyond Hillside Avenue to the north, the neighborhoods like Holliswood and Jamaica Estates offer a distinct contrast.

The roads bear names like Wexford Terrace and meander according to the topography. Many of Holliswood’s streets are less romantic in name — Epsom Course is named for a former horse racetrack on the site when racing and wagering on the trotters was considered a gentlemen’s sport — but also share a pleasing asymmetry, with expansive lawns and large trees. It’s where former Gov. Mario Cuomo grew up after his family moved from South Jamaica.

Marc Haken is co-op president of Hilltop Village #4 in Holliswood, and president of the Friends of Cunningham Park which expands into Holliswood, Hollis Hills and elsewhere.

But he still refers to his neighborhood as Hollis.

Like many in Queens, he says the diversification of the area is one of the primary agents for change over the years.

Noting the basketball court behind his

building — “If you own a basketball court, you are king of the teenagers” — Haken said he sees youngsters of Ghanaian, Guyanese, Nepali, Sri Lankan and Haitian descent all playing together.

“It’s a great thing; I love it,” he said.

Haken, who was a schoolteacher in the neighborhood for 30 years, says he has seen the demographics of the students change from mostly German, Italian and Irish to i nclude a much la rger group of nationalities.

In his capacity as president of Friends of Cunningham Park, and also as a member of Community Board 8, where he chairs the Youth, Education and Library Committee, Haken has demonstrated enthusiasm for community advocacy, beginning with the restoration of Cunningham Park’s facilities and stocking it with activities throughout the year.

Under his leadership over the past few summers, the park has been able to schedule an eclectic roster of events, including five summer movies, two Shakespeare presentations and a recent concert featuring music from the 1960s.

“We had tie dye shirts and dynamite dancing all over the field,” said Haken.

Cunningham Park has also hosted a health fair, and, for the younger set, provided

MARC HAKEN

Page 31 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 10, 2016

A neighborhood grows in Holliswood

Retired Hollis-area teacher Marc Haken went from being at the head of the class in Hollis schools in the 1970s, left, to putting Cunningham Park in a class by itself in terms of the number and COURTESY PHOTOS variety of cultural, family and entertainment activities. a puppet show and put out a bouncy house.

“The only problem is it’s too small for me,” he said.

Sometimes Haken’s role in change has been more about preservation or restoration such as with the the old Vanderbilt Motor Parkway. Back in 2002, he and Friends of Cunningham Park were instrumental in

getting the route on the National and New York State Registers of Historic Places.

William Vanderbilt built the 48-mile road in 1908 as a private speedway. It eventually became a toll road which closed in 1938, and in Queens only vestiges still exist, such as one running between Hollis and Queens Village from 199th Street to Winchester Boulevard. Q

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