Rural County, Urban Borough

A History of Queens

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Rutgers, 2025 408 pp.

The County of Queens is now the center of power for both the city and State of New York. Today, it is unlikely that any candidate for Governor or Mayor can be elected to office without the support of the voters of the borough – and particularly those in its southeast quadrant, within the 114-zip code. The current mayor grew up in the area, the Speaker of the City Council represents it, the local member of Congress is the ranking minority member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is the county Democratic Party chair. Even the itinerant current mayoral candidate, Andrew Cuomo, grew up in the neighborhood of Hollis.

Most non-residents or non-natives know little or nothing about Queens, its neighborhoods or its history. Few know that Southeast Queens is the largest community of Black homeowners in the country or that in recent censuses Queens was the only county in the United States where Black household income exceeded that of white families. A friend once gave a tour of the borough to a senior City Hall official who asked, when driving through either Douglaston or Forest Hills, why anyone would pay more than $1 million to live in a home IN QUEENS?!!!! It is hard to imagine another jurisdiction of 2.5 million people in the United States that about which outsiders know so little.

Given all of the above, the late Jeffrey A. Kroessler’s recently published chronicle of the borough is indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the city, it current politics or its history. The narrative runs from the settlement by the area’s first white inhabitants to about the turn of the 21^st Century. It is a history of the economics, infrastructure and residential development of Queens, more than a detailed political record. Kroessler is particularly skilled in both keeping the narrative moving along and dealing with great sensitivity modern hot button issues, like immigration, demographic change and racial frictions.

The history of Queens is the history of trains, planes and cars. Until about 1905 to get from Manhattan to Queens, or expressed more broadly, from the US mainland to Long Island, required getting on a boat. While railroads on Long Island date back to the second quarter of the 19^th Century, they ended at the East River’s water’s edge, until engineering technology advanced sufficiently to support moving wheeled vehicles over bridges and through tunnels, For that reason, it is only in the last century that Queens became the hybrid urban/suburban landscape that we find today. Before that, folks commuted to the North Shore via steamboat. The principal function of the several, economically fragile railroads was to haul agricultural products to Brooklyn and Manhattan and return with loads of manure collected in the city’s streets to be used as fertilizer. It is difficult for us to imagine today, but Queens was early America’s breadbasket – the leading county in the growing of wheat. Certainly, the railroads’ use as a vehicle for daily commuters would have been beyond comprehension.

The railroads of Long Island were an intricate story of boom and bust – with the original financing coming from the capital markets of London. The business mandarins of the island saw railroads as the key to goosing real estate values, with a number of competing lines – which explains some of the oddness of the current configuration of LIRR (and the exitance of some now unused rights of way). With the purchase of the various lines by the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 20^th Century, the construction of the train tunnels under the East River and the completion of Pennsylvania Station, the railroad infrastructure took essentially its current form and drove the development in Queens that we know today.

The opening of the Erie Canal made wheat more inexpensive to obtain from further west, and the island’s economy moved towards higher value fruits and vegetable for the growing metropolis. At the same time, the county also became the country’s first center of manufacturing, located along the East River shore. Pianos were an important product, for decades – with Steinway one of the area’s largest employers. Remarkably, that firm remains in business today in Astoria. The Steinway family were major players in the borough’s development for much of the 19^th Century.

When the engineering technology advanced to the state of being able to support bridges and tunnels that could accommodate wheeled vehicle, again the Queens economy was transformed. The Manhattan and Brooklyn workforce seeking escape from crowded tenement conditions sought homes in the less dense settings to the east. The building of the Queensborough Bridge over Blackwell’s Island was in the planning for over one hundred years before it was eventually completed. The project experienced both financial and technological fits and starts. The inclusion of railroad/trolley lines over the bridge significantly added to the challenges of the project.

The homes constructed in communities across Queens as a result of the newly established direct access ran the gamut from wood framed workforce housing to advanced planned communities for the well-to-do. Forest Hills Gardens was an early attempt at a planned community that today retains its appeal. The county is dotted with idealistic attempts at urban design including Sunnyside Gardens, Jackson Heights and Kew Gardens. Later attempts at grand residential development, housing tens of thousands, were less aesthetically and humanistically successful. But Kroessler notes that the provision of housing affordable to lower income New Yorkers has been a challenge in the borough since early in the 20^th Century. While the idealistic origins of the New York City Housing Authority during the New Deal led to some notable accomplishments, ultimately the bureaucratic desire to house as many poor people on as little valuable land as possible led to some truly terrible outcomes – which we continue to suffer with, both in Queens and in Brooklyn and The Bronx as well.

Rural County, Urban Borough, like Nicole Gelina’s Movement, is part of the revisionist history of Robert Moses, with Kroessler crediting many essential infrastructure improvements in Queens to Moses. Insightfully, he draws a bright line between the New Deal funded projects that Moses built both to engage the unemployed and to improve local amenities and the post-World War II, bond funded, projects that destroyed neighborhoods and preferenced the car over mass transit. Arguably, Moses left his mark more on Queens than in the other boroughs or on Long Island, with not just highways, but also his focus on what became Flushing Meadows – Corona Park – to be financed from proceeds from the 1939/40 World’s Fair which failed to materialize. The description of the goals and reality of that fair and their influence on the aspirations of millions of American goals for lifestyles of the future makes for fascinating reading. The ideas of Lewis Mumford, which were a great influence on the fair, did not age well.

From my parochial perspective, having spent ten years working on the redevelopment of Downtown Jamaica, the book focuses more on the history of western and northern Queens. The establishment of Jamaica as the center of railroad access to Long Island is discussed, as is the prominent role for generations of the Jamacia-based King family (although without reference to their Jamaica base). But the development of Jamaica as the thriving civic, retail and commercial center of Long Island, the post-industrial, automobile and racially driven changes of the mid-20^th Century, and its more recent spectacular transformation into a hub for construction for tens of thousands of units of the city’s much needed affordable housing is a narrative that deserves to be related in more detail. The role of the Regional Plan Association’s vision of Jamaica as a satellite office center, and its influence on Downtown Jamaica is a particular topic well worth further examination. Similarly, the impact of the aviation industry, today the county’s most important business, is at least the equivalent in importance to the shaping of Queens as railroads, residential development and agriculture.

Kroessler narrates well the transformation to “The World’s Borough,” a home to immigrants from scores of nations. It is particularly interesting to read of the opposition to development and immigration by business leaders of Queens in the first half of the 20^th Century, which has great resonance later in the century when neighborhoods rose up in opposition to scatter-site, low-income developments during the Mayoral administration of John Lindsay.  One of the consequences of which was the political career of Mario Cuomo. As a young attorney, Cuomo represented communities opposed to the location of denser housing in low rise neighborhoods, and as a result of the credibility he earned with both sides in that battle, was later called upon to attempt to forge a compromise between city government and oppositional communities.

The book discusses with great sensitivity this hostility to housing development in low rise neighborhoods, which Kroessler dissects carefully in order to separate out claims of racism. Queens is a community of neighborhoods of specific character. In the third quarter of the 20^th Century immigrants and the children of immigrants moved to those places to be part of those neighborhoods – in an attempt to leave denser, more chaotic places. At the same time, resistance to change was a bar to the in-migration of Black and Hispanic people to a county that was 70% white as recently as 1980. Given Queens’ diverse population of today, that’s just difficult to imagine having ever been true. This may have been a problem that solved itself without governmental social engineering.

Without immigration, Queens would be a much different, smaller and economically less vital place. It is not an exaggeration to say that migrants from many lands drive the cultural and economy of today’s Queens – making it a truly remarkable place and an American success story. It is a story that needs to be told, particularly right now, and Kroessler tells it superbly.