www.qns.com I LIC COURIER I SEPTEMBER 2019 27
Legends
GRAPE LEAVES IN THE LOBBY
It was September 1916, the midpoint
of World War I. The blood of a thou-sand
years of European culture and
history flowed into the mud of Flanders
Fields and the Russian steppes. Future’s
promise was but a faint glimmer on a
horizon obscured by dust and smoke
of a holocaust that was to last, with fits
and starts, for a generation.
But in America, New York City’s larg-est
borough was already looking to the
future. Less than two decades after
becoming part of Greater New York, and
a decade after opening a direct link to
Manhattan via the Queensboro Bridge,
the city’s transportation network reached
deep into the borough. By 1916 with the
opening of the Ditmars elevated (which
was planned to continue on to North
Beach – today’s LaGuardia Airport) and
the Corona elevated (which was planned
to continue on to Flushing), the borough
was now open and ready for business.
In a feat never to be duplicated, that
year the G.X. Mathews Company was
issued a quarter of all building permits in
the borough. In September news outlets
announced that the Mathews Building
Company had acquired a vast expanse
of undeveloped land east of Steinway
Street. Hundreds of the still ubiquitous
Mathews Model Flats would soon sprout
from more than 500 empty lots.
For the next decade, along 30th
and 34th Avenues, down 48th and
43rd Streets, and over to Sunnyside
and Woodside, Queens witnessed the
city’s most successful building venture
targeted at a mostly neglected market
of housing – homes for working people.
They were called ‘Mathews Model Flats’.
Proudly commenting on his ambitious
building project, Company President
Ernest Mathews proclaimed in the stilted
rhetoric of the time: “The fact is more
evident day by day that Long Island
City and its adjacent sections are logical
residential sections … for those dissatis-fied
with conditions in the over-crowded
sections of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The
advantage is ours because of our close
proximity to the heart of the greatest city
in the world.”
The firm was started by older brother,
Gustave Xavier Mathews, a Bavarian
who, after making that momentous deci-sion
to immigrate to America, faced his
new future behind a pushcart hawking
flowers. It was Gustav’s good fortune to
marry the daughter of a builder (as family
legend tells us). He decided to follow his
in-law’s vocation. His life, and our city,
profited enormously from that union.
G.X. had a simple business model.
Build with principle. Apply only the fin-est
possible materials (he used non-combustible
Kreischerville Brick), design
attractive facades (he used prominent
architect Louis Allmendinger), insist on
healthy apartment layouts (a window
in every room) and fix an affordable
price tag (hundreds of buildings were
sold without a single foreclosure). He
was also, it seems, a Socialist. He built
only for the working class. Years later
when Metropolitan Life Insurance, which
financed his purchasers’ mortgages,
asked him to build Stuyvesant Town,
he refused. Its targeted market was too
middle class for his tastes.
When the war broke out in Europe,
Gustav had a small fortune locked up in
Germany. Currency controls forbade him to
take money out of the country. Undeterred,
he converted cash to wine, exported it to
neutral Switzerland, sold it, and brought
his wealth to the United States.
He used that money to build a block
of buildings on both sides of 48th Street
between Broadway and 34th Avenue.
Metal rationing during World War I may
have stopped him from placing metal
cornices on every building on the block,
but he made sure to have terracotta
grape motifs in every lobby – a legacy
of his wine exports.
G.A.H.S. Has Moved!
New Home! New Look!
Astoria History @ Court Square
Our new office is:
Greater Astoria Historical Society
LIC Arts Building # Suite 219
44-02 23rd Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
718-278-0700 / info@astorialic.org
Serving the communities of
Old Long Island City:
Blissville
Sunnyside
Sunnyside Gardens
Hunters Point
Dutch Kills
Ravenswood
Astoria Broadway
Norwood
Old Astoria Village
Ditmars
Steinway
Bowery Bay
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