I am interested to find out what Flushing was like in the late 1920s.
Last week, I unearthed documents relating to my grandfather’s brief flirtation with emigrating to America. He sailed on the RMS Cedric in 1928 from Queenstown and ended up living on Amity Street, Flushing (his job was ‘compressed air worker’, a far cry from the shepherd he’d been in Ireland).
The only Amity Street I could find in New York today is in Brooklyn Heights. It is lined with fine brownstones and looked far too fancy for a humble Irish immigrant.
Most of the street names in Flushing seem to have changed but I have managed to identify where my grandfather lived by comparing a modern map with one from 1873 (on geographicus.com). What was Amity Street in 1928 now appears to be Roosevelt Avenue, close to Flushing Main Street station on the LIRR.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a description of that area 80 years ago? Was it a terrible slum or did it have any redeeming features?
It isn’t much, but 1928 was the year the famous 7 train (subway & L) made it to Flushing. Flushing meadows the huge park there was a disaster area of coal ash. It is actually mentioned in the Great Gatsby.
This was before the World’s Fairs and before the Mets.
Here’s a pictorial history that includes some mention of Amity Street as well as (on page 79), a picture. It looks kind of charming, actually, with a bunch of churches nearby.
And, if your grandfather lived on Amity Street in the early 1920s, one if his neighbors was a baby Nancy Reagan, whose lived on Amity street from her birth in 1921 to 1923,
I made a documentary film on Gatsby in 2003, and I have a load of photographs of the Flushing area around 1925. Not sure how to get them to you, because they’re not digitized and I only have permission to use them in my film. I got most of them from the archives at the Jamaica library and the Queens Historical Society–they might be able to help you.
The NYC archives (at Chambers street and Centre street) also has an archive of photos of streets and houses all over the city including Flushing from that period.
If so, you can get a picture of what life was like for such a worker some 409 years earlier from David McCullouch’s book The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklun Bridge.
But he might not have been a caisson worker. Compressed air was used for a lot of things then (and today, for that matter). They used it for those compressed-air mail-tube devices, for instance, and for a brief while (many years earlier) they even tried to drive the subway with compressed air.
I live now just a few blocks from where your grandfather lived. Flushing’s not swanky, but it’s quite comfortable. The area now is a Chinatown, with a heavily Jewish sector a bit further away. Maybe grandpa changed his mind about the emigrating thing when he went through a snowy NYC winter?
Again, thanks. Next time I’m in NYC, I’ll have to go…
I’ve seen a documentary about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the terrible conditions down in the caissons. I hope the grandfather was not working underground as he’d had a pretty bad time of it in the trenches between 1916 and 1919.
The papers I found also included an award of workman’s comp - $133.33 for 5 1/3 weeks at $25 a week. Frustratingly, there is nothing to say why it was awarded. The grandfather was missing the tip of a finger, so it might have been that. The settlement is dated 12/8/1928 - he arrived (on the RMS Cedric, from Queenstown) on 25th March 1928.
He was pretty old for an emigrant - 38 - and left 7 children back at home with their mother (the oldest, my father, being nearly 13). The next one was born in January 1930 so either the grandfather came home not later than March 29 or he sent some very passionate letters from America.
Lovely pictures of a time long passed. But as a long-time Queens resident (born and raised), I can tell you that those pictures are of a neighborhood called Maspeth, which isn’t very near Flushing. It is true, though, that one of the main thoroughfares in Maspeth is Flushing Avenue.