C R Y D E R P O I N T 6SEPTEMBER From a real estate brochure, 1954. Some came for the quiet. Some came for the schools. Some say they came for the pool. But they all came for the view. It is 60 years – give or take a few months – since the first tenants moved into Cryder Point, a spectacular piece of real estate overlooking where the East River and Long Island Sound meet at Little Neck Bay. An ad in the Brooklyn Eagle from 1954 called the-then rental apartments “The Address of Distinction in a setting of unsurpassed beauty.” It seems now like they were underselling it. With rents ranging from $135 to $300 a month, the ad boasted of “Private Terraces from Each Apartment” and Cryder Point at60 a 700-foot private beach “At Your Doorstep.” “In 25 years of leasing luxury apartments on Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue and other choice locations,” an executive of the Albert B. Ashforth real estate agency, Benjamin C. Pratt, told the Eagle, “the rapidity in which Cryder’s Point suites have been rented is my most unique experience. The magnificence of the property has sold itself.” The land on which the project was built had been a home to Manhattan’s upper crust. In the 1880s, at the height of a popular craze for yacht racing, the Cryder -- which had owned the land for most of the century -- sold it to a wealthy group of New York bankers. The Land and Water C l u b was formed there for what was then a revolutionary new type of club. In the 1880s, the word “club” meant men only – and the new Land and Water Club allowed women in. “The purpose of the club is to furnish a summer resort for its members, who are mainly addicted to yachting and who desire some convenient spot where they can find good anchorage for their yachts, obtain a good dinner, enjoy a night’s rest, and then be able to return to the city in time for the business of the day,” the New York Times said in June 1883. “The spot chosen for the club-house cannot be surpassed. The grounds are 16 acres, finely wooded and there are commodious barns. The lawn gives ample room for a half-dozen lawn tennis courts.” Fast forward to the 1950s, and The Dodgers weren’t the only ones who were open to the suggestion that sunshine and flowers awaited those willing to try something new. The Brooklyn Eagle was the perfect place to advertise a project like Cryder Point. And for all sorts of reasons, families with the means were itching to move from Kings to Queens. Marty Lassman, who lives in the 21 building, recalls the shock of coming home from the Army in 1956 to find his parents had moved to Cryder from the apartment he’d grown up in at Wilson Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. “It was an unbelievable change from a tenement,” he says simply. But the publicity had been wasted on Marty’s parents; the owners of a modest Eastside restaurant in Manhattan where the whole family worked, “they used to t a k e rides on Sunday and found Cryder totally by accident,” he says. A month before the first apartments in the 01 Building opened in July 1954, 80 percent of the apartments had been rented, and half of the 21 building was gone, four months ahead of schedule. Twenty percent of the apartments in 41, the third and last building, which wouldn’t even open until late that winter, were also taken. “My parents had friends who loved it here,” says Barbara Haravay, who has lived at Cryder not once, but three different times. She’d grown up in Flatbush and graduated early, before age 16, from Erasmus High, when her family pulled up stakes and moved to a ground floor apartment in the 01 building in the early 1960’s. “The pool was full of young people,” she says, recalling that the apartments seemed to attract a lot of “show business people,” among them the singer Janice Harper (look her up on YouTube). “It was surreal,” says Florence Braunstein, who’s lived in the 21 building for 43 years or so. Compared to Brooklyn -- even compared to her garden apartment on Hillside Avenue (where tenants were forced to move out if they had more than one child) – Cryder Point “had room to raise a family,” she said. Cryder offered what people from Brooklyn seemed to want the most -- room. “It was easy to raise kids here,” Florence says. “There was always something to do. And to make a playmate, all you had to do was pick up the phone.” The developers of Cryder were, no surprise, from Brooklyn themselves, the sons of immigrant parents. With offices in Forest Hills, Harry Sudakoff and Jack Chutick were centrally located Credit: Collection on Jason D. Antos Postcard of the yacht club that was on the site here from the late 1880s. 6 CRYDER POINT COURIER | SEPTEMBER 2014 | WWW.QUEENSCOURIER.COM
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