Greater Astoria
Historial Society
35-20 Broadway, 4th Floor | L.I.C., NY 11106
718.278.0700 | www.astorialic.org
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32 NOVEMBER 2018 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
THE CRESCENT
The subway and elevated stations are
dropping former street names. Bid
farewell to Ely, Beebe and Washington.
Now it’s 44th Drive, 44th Road, 44th
Avenue and 30th Drive, 30th Road and
30th Avenue – all names with utility but
lacking in charm or sense of place. But for
the few scraps of the past that linger, there
is often a story to tell. Take for example
Crescent Street.
Its start can be traced to a tattered document
dated 1850, entitled Map of 465
Valuable Building Lots on L I. It depicts
an area bounded by the East River, 30th
Avenue, 31st Street and Broadway. Four
farms are blocked in various colors. Their
fields are scored by a grid of building lots
and imaginary streets. In the map’s center
is a lane entitled “The Crescent” between
30th Avenue and Broadway. It follows the
course of a slight bend along an old property
line. A faint dotted line through the 19 lots
on the street’s west side traces the shape
of a crescent.
Wikipedia defines the term crescent in
architecture as “where a number of houses,
normally terraced houses, are laid out in an
arc to form a crescent shape. A famous
historic crescent is the Royal Crescent in
Bath, England.” It goes on to list a number
of well-known examples in the British Isles
built between the 1700s and early 1800s.
In Queens, we find a modern example in the
six crescent streets of Rego Park.
A sales prospectus announced the sale
in the June 1, 1850 edition of the Literary
American. It mentions no restrictions
on use and places no floor under each
bid. The entire parcel was to be disposed
quickly in one sale at any price. This lack of
covenants doomed the real estate scheme
to failure. Savvy New Yorkers knew that
buying property where “anything goes”
was not a good idea for either long term
investment or residence.
A glance at an 1873 Astoria Map
showed only about a half dozen properties
were sold as great homes, some as
multiple parcels owned by the same family
(Whitney who themselves were builders)
while the vast majority of the generous sized
lots remained empty, most subdivided into
a crazy quilt of speculative plots.
A “chemical works,” probably a boneboiling
place for animal carcasses, sprung
up on Sunswick Creek. That facility, along
with a nearby carpet factory, soon polluted
the marsh which was, incidentally,
the source of water for Grant Thorburn’s
Nursery. More on this later.
Who was the investor behind this
doomed scheme? Two of the four farms
assembled for the project, James McDonald
and Abel Samis, leave scant presence in the
historical record. The third, Samuel Waldron,
deceased, was the scion of what was once
the largest land owners of Yorkville and,
having been pushed out of Manhattan by
the street grid, had purchased a few plots
in Astoria before quitting farming for good.
Our attention now focuses on the remaining
name, William Robert Prince of
Flushing, who ran a nursery in direct competition
to Thorburn. The latter, being nearer
to the Manhattan ferry, was likely drawing
a good deal of business from the distant
Prince Nursery in Flushing.
Prince’s purchase of land next to competitor
Thorburn cut off the latter’s opportunity
to expand, and, in selling land with
no restrictive clauses, may have wanted to
intentionally attract business that polluted
Sunswick Creek, Thorburn’s water supply.
Perhaps that was the point of this project.
Thorburn shortly left Queens and never
again mentioned Astoria in his extensive
writings. Ironically Prince also soon shut
down his Flushing nursery, too.
Legends
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This image adapted from an invitation to the
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