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History

The Borough of Queens is a massive urban complex with a population of more than two million.

The original Native American inhabitants gave way to the Dutch and English in the early 17th century, leaving little behind except the names for a number of places.

The Dutch founded the colony of New Netherland in the years 1609-1624, with its center in the southern tip of Manhattan. They built farms in Brooklyn and settled the northwestern shore of Long Island along the East River. The first known settlement in what is known today as Queens appeared some time after 1637 in the area of Astoria, Hunters Point, and Dutch Kills.

English settlements began in the 1640s when English from New England took up lands in Maspeth. After these settlers were driven out by Indian attacks, a more robust settlement began further inland at Newtown around 1652 , (Elmhurst today). The English started Flushing in 1645 and Jamaica in 1656, but the ruling Dutch authorities gave these places Dutch names and forms of government. With Dutch farmers from Brooklyn settling among the English, "Queens" was a place of diverse cultural traditions from its beginnings. In 1683, years after the British capture of New Netherland, the English government divided the province of New York, (including Long Island) into twelve counties. These included Albany, Cornwall, Dukes, Dutchess, Kings, New York, Orange, Queens, Richmond, Suffolk, Ulster and Westchester.

For more than 200 years thereafter, Queens existed as a vast territory comprising not only the present day area of Queens but also what is now called Nassau County. The western part of Queens county was divided into three units or "towns" named Newtown, Flushing, and Jamaica.

The towns were separated from each other by features of the terrain, including the marshland between Newtown and Flushing and by the great moraine ridge between both of these northern towns and Jamaica to the south. Outside of the small villages that existed with in each of these "towns," people farmed the land. The first census in 1790 recorded just over 5,000 inhabitants in what is today Queens.

The American Revolution disrupted the lives of every villager and farmer, and divided neighbors against one another. Except in Newtown, the majority favored the British, whose army defeated the American forces under George Washington at the Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn) in 1776. That defeat made the area of present-day Queens, a near totally secure base for British troops. Queens endured a seven-year occupation, at the end of which, many pro-British Queens residents fled.

From the time of British withdrawal in 1783, until the 1830s, Queens continued as an area of farms and villages. The county government was located in Mineola (present-day Nassau County) and the population saw little growth. However, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, New York City began to grow at an extraordinary pace and, together with Brooklyn, exerted increasing influence over Queens.

Queens began to absorb an ever-increasing flood of new settlers. Urbanizing forces became apparent in the 1830s, and in 1839 Astoria became the first village to be officially founded within Queens since the 17th century. In 1848 Ravenswood along the East River began as a fashionable residential area, and established the "Gold Coast" tradition that moved eastward over time, move eastward through parts of Flushing, Malba, Bayside, and Douglaston and then beyond.

In the 1850s land speculators bought up farms for conversion to village lots. Maspeth, Corona, Long Island City (Hunters Point area), and Winfield all started between 1852 and 1854. New Yorkers and Brooklynites traveled to western Queens to visit the immense cemeteries forced upon the county by New York's 1848 "health" ban of burial grounds from lower Manhattan. Also, manufacturers, needing rural settings within reach of New York City, built factories in areas such as Whitestone, Woodhaven, and College Point.

Waves of Irish and German immigration reached Queens during the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish settled in Astoria and, to a lesser degree, in Jamaica and Flushing. Many Germans entered Queens by way of Brooklyn via Metropolitan and Myrtle Avenues, making Middle Village, (which had been English), almost wholly German by 1860.

At the start of the Civil War, Queens had a population of just over 30,000. During the quarter century that followed the war, the initial urbanization of western Queens was largely completed, and Glendale, Richmond Hill, and Queens Village all got their start. In the early 1870s, piano maker William Steinway began production in East Astoria, creating a manufacturing village out of farm lands. Following the economic depression of the mid-1870s, Ridgewood boomed as a residential community when the Brooklyn City Railroad built its car barns there in 1881. Also, the flow of population out of Brooklyn led to the creation of Ozone Park in 1882 and Morris Park in 1884.

In other parts of Queens, growth was more spotty. Some large farms in Bayside were converted to building lots in 1872. and south Flushing was subdivided the following year. In 1885, Population growth became more impressive when compared to the prior decades of the century, expanding from 45,468 in 1870 to 56,559 in 1880, and 87,050 in 1890.

The last decade of the 1800's saw the critical action of the New York State legislature establishing the Greater City of New York. By this act, the state consolidated Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and the present-day area of Queens into a single city of five boroughs,(1898). However, the establishment of Queens as a borough did not create a "Queens" identity. The area still had many centers with diverse local traditions, and much of it was still farmland and open country. The new "Queens County," which was made coterminous with the borough,was also severed from its former eastern territory, which became Nassau County.

During the course of the twentieth century there developed some consciousness of Queens as an entity in its own right, but it never would it displace the residents' sense of being, first and foremost, from Maspeth or Howard Beach or some other place.

The first decade of the 20th century brought continued population growth, with much of it traceable to the sudden expansion of rapid transit into Queens.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the Long Island Rail Road in 1900, electrified it through Queens in 1905-1908, and opened the Penn Tunnels under the East River in 1910, it brought nearly the entire borough of Queens within the suburban commuting zone of Manhattan. Even more crucial to development was the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909. This span ended the isolation of the borough's road system at precisely the time when mass use of the automobile was getting underway in the United States.

A new road system grew up to accommodate the traffic, and Queens Boulevard was laid out as the main arterial highway of the new borough. From 1915 on, much of northern and southwestern Queens came within reach of the New York City subway system. Service reached Hunters Point in 1915 and Astoria in 1917. Another branch extended along Queens Boulevard and the newly created Roosevelt Avenue, reaching Corona in 1917 and Flushing in 1928.

In southern Queens, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company built an elevated line along Liberty Avenue through Ozone Park and Woodhaven to Richmond Hill in 1915 and along Jamaica Avenue through Woodhaven and Richmond Hill to Jamaica a few years later. These improvements in transportation, prompted new, explosive growth. During the 1920s, Queens rocketed from 469,000 to more than a million.

The opening of the Triborough Bridge and Grand Central Parkway in 1936, and that of LaGuardia Airport in 1939 contributed further to Queens' metropolitan character. The World's Fair of 1939-1940, put the borough on the national map for the first time, and brought about the elimination of the colossal Corona dumps and the building of the Whitestone Bridge. The fair site later became Flushing Meadows Park (more recently renamed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park).

After World War II, growth surged again,and cityblocksize garden apartments sprouted in many areas. Remaining tracts of land in northeastern Queens, were then devoted to the construction of single family and attached housing. By the early 1960s, much of central Flushing, once celebrated for its country-squire atmosphere, was home to multi-story apartment buildings, which extended block after block along many streets.

In the Queens of today, only one farm survives as an historical restoration. Though now a physically mature urban territory, Queens is also an area of intense social dynamism. It has become a multiethnic place: the home of Greeks, Italians, Blacks, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Colombians, Asian Indians, Puerto Ricans, Israelis, and still other groups. It is today, the most culturally diverse community in the United Sates of America.