Dozens of history buffs on Tuesday night descended on Neir’s Tavern—itself a link to Woodhaven’s past—to join city historian Kevin Walsh as he narrated a brief trip down Memory Lane via his 48-image “Forgotten Queens” slideshow.
“Queens Boulevard—it’s traffic-choked now, it was traffic-choked back then,” Walsh chuckled as seemingly every head in the room delivered a knowing nod simultaneously. The picture on the screen was of the massive thoroughfare well before it earned its nefarious “Boulevard of Death” moniker.
An image of the Grand Central Parkway under construction at 164th Street and Hillcrest Avenue in the 1930s elicited a round of “oohs” and “aahs” from the grown-ups, while several children craned their necks up to catch a glimpse of Queens’ past.
“It’s a rural feel that is almost unthinkable today,” Walsh noted, providing a bit of context. A slide featuring Mata’s, a popular lunch destination on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk for decades, lit up more than a few faces in the audience. Burgers, Walsh said, and the signature chow mein sandwich were a dime each when the eatery opened back in 1938.
“You don’t see that now,” Walsh said.
Hidden in the background of a picture of Queens Plaza circa 1940 was the Brewster Building. Once the home of a Rolls Royce assembly plant and a carriage factory, the Brewster was mentioned in the Cole Porter classic “You’re the Top.” The site is now the corporate headquarters for JetBlue.
Walsh’s images of the plaza boasted trolleys.
“[Queens Plaza] remains of Queens great transit hubs,” he noted.
As he captioned the black-and-white images of Astoria, Walsh lamented the fate of the community’s landscape.
“Much of Old Astoria has senselessly fallen to the wrecker’s ball in recent years,” he said.
The audience wrapped things up with a round of applause for Walsh, a Flushing resident who authored “Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis,” and curates forgotten-ny.com.
“What’s great about this is how many people came out—to see our past, the way things were,” said Ed Wendell, president of the Woodhaven Cultural & Historical Society, which hosted the event. “It means a lot.”
Steve Ort of Howard Beach said he uses Walsh’s presentations as a starting guide for his own personal tours of the borough.
“[The show] was a way for me to see additional photos I hadn’t seen before,” he said.
By Michael V. Cusenza