Middle Village is so named because it’s directly between Williamsburg and Jamaica traveling on Metropolitan Ave., laid out around 1815 to connect the two towns. The eastern end of Fresh Ponds, where Forest Park is today, was called “Dry Harbor” because it was said that houses there appeared to be sitting atop the crests of trees and hills, resembling a harbor without water. In the early-1860s, developer George S. Schott acquired am amount of land in Fresh Ponds as repayment of a debt owed him. As the Civil War drew to a close, he founded what’s today known as Glendale, named after his hometown of Glendale, Ohio. At this time, the area’s main occupation was farming. In the late-1800s, picnic grounds and beer gardens flourished due to an influx of German immigrants into the area.
Getting to Middle Village and Glendale without a car is difficult. It requires subway and bus rides, and/or walking. After taking the LIRR to Penn Station I got #2 train to Fulton St., jumped on a J and took it here, to Myrtle Ave. and awaited an M. At this station you can see the superstructure of an abandoned portion of the Myrtle Avenue El that extends west to Lewis Ave. Trains ran on this portion from 1888-1969, after which only the section east of Broadway remained in service.
This magnificent, though deteriorating, building is also visible from the south end of the platform. The former Prudential Savings Bank at #5 Stuyvesant Ave. and Vernon Ave. at the border of Bushwick is a worthy sentinel at the uneasy line separating the two Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s a classically-themed building with an entrance pediment, Corinthian columns and a dome originally lined on its interior by Guastavino tiling, constructed in 1908 by the German-American design firm Daus & Otto. Rudolph Daus also designed the Church of Notre Dame on Morningside Dr., which gets lost in the massive shadow of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The bank didn’t survive the ravages of the late-1970s, was purchased in 1994 and converted, after most of the interiors were removed, into the Urban Sports & Cultural Center, teaching martial arts.
After a 15-minute ride on the M to the last stop at Metropolitan I regarded the canopied platform and simple brick station house. There has been a surface railroad traveling to this spot on Metropolitan Avenue east of the Rentar Plaza shopping center and Lutheran/All-Faiths Cemetery since 1906, when a steam train line was founded to bring passengers from Myrtle Ave. to what was then simply Lutheran Cemetery. By 1915, the tracks were reinforced for heavier rail and electrified, with a wooden stationhouse constructed. In 1974 a fire claimed the stationhouse, as well as a few subway cars, and the current brick stationhouse opened in 1980.
A law was passed in 1847 that banned future cemeteries from opening in Manhattan. As a result, Lutheran Cemetery was founded in Middle Village in 1852 by German churches located in Kleindeutschland, Manhattan. Many of the victims of the 1904 General Slocum steamboat tragedy, in which a fire broke out on a steamboat headed up the East River to a Bronx resort and over 1000 passengers, mostly from Kleindeutschland, were killed and were laid to rest here.
Many Slocum victims are buried in Lutheran/All-Faiths Cemetery. Most of them were from the Lower East Side, a neighborhood then known as Kleindeutschland: Little Germany. In the years after the tragedy, most of the German-Americans in the neighborhood moved away. Only a few German inscriptions on buildings, such as Freie Bilbliothek u. Leshalle (free library and reading room) on the Ottendorfer Library at 2nd Ave. and E. 9th St.) are reminders of Kleindeutschland.
The Lutheran Cemetery Slocum monument was unveiled in 1905, one year after the fire, by the youngest survivor, two-year old Adella Liebenow, who lived until 2004 when she was 100. The inscription on the front of the stone is repeated in German on the back.
Metropolitan Ave. east of the entrance gate and west of 69th St. This short section of the avenue is currently mired in controversy as an MTA project, the Interborough Express, a project championed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, is supposed to be a crosstown light rail route connecting Bay Ridge and Jackson Heights. Though few regularly commute interborough, the proposed line connects to many existing subway and rail lines.
While the majority of the line is supposed to run along the existing NY Atlantic Bay Ridge Line and the Connecting Railroad, a short section was originally going to use the short tunnel under All-Faiths Cemetery; however, that tunnel is too narrow for light rail and the MTA prefers to run the light rail on sections of Metropolitan Ave. and 69th St., which already are busy auto and bus routes. Local residents and representatives oppose the plan.
Walking through the cemetery to the southern entrance on 73rd St. and Edsall Ave. allows passage into Glendale, a neighborhood that contains a number of anachronisms, including the passage of the Long Island Rail Road Montauk spur from west to east. This sleepy line now carries freight only, but it’s just a decade or so since at least one daily passenger train plied the tracks here. And, until March 1998 Glendale had its own LIRR station, which in its final years consisted of a bare spot in the weeds alongside the tracks.
When I stumbled across The Assembly Bar at Cooper Ave. and 73rd St. I noted that the exterior doesn’t look like a bar; more like a beauty parlor. I didn’t stop in and even yelp.com doesn’t list it. In fact it has appeared in two feature films: “Trees Lounge, “with Steve Buscemi, and “Chuck” with Liev Schreiber as Chuck Wepner, boxing’s “Bayonne Bleeder” who (nearly) went the distance with Ali.
Those who’ve read my website forgotten-ny.com know about my attraction to alleys and dead ends. Valentine Pl. is off Cooper Ave. just west of 80th St. in Glendale, near the Atlas Mall. It appears on maps as early as 1915. Buildings along Cooper Ave., then called Central, and Valentine Pl. were there long before the rest of the area was developed.
This was my third visit to The Shops at Atlas Park, an open-air shopping mall located south of Cooper Ave. between 80th and 82nd Sts. Unlike most “shopping malls” that are shops arranged along a parking lot, Atlas Park has a real mall, albeit one with artificial grass. The mall’s anchored by Forever 21 (formerly Century), Foot Locker and other retail, and has restaurants such as California Pizza Kitchen. I also visited when a bookshop, the name escapes me, was located there. I liked the white neo-Classical buildings, but was more fascinated by the leftover brick buildings from when this was Atlas Terminal, a freight exchange on the Long Island Rail Road (see below). That building now hosts Home Goods, which is essential when you’re in need of large ceramic roosters.
The house on the right, one of a number of attached houses on the south side of Cooper Ave. facing the St. John’s Cemetery, #89-70, stood in for the exterior of 704 Hauser St., Archie Bunker’s house in Astoria, in the opening sequence of on the TV show All In the Family, whose frank humor devised by the late Norman Lear could never be attempted today on network television. The flagpole was already in place in 1971 when the show debuted. On another funereal note, my uncle has a plot with some room for me in the same St. John’s, and I keep meaning to make arrangements for my eventual deposit there, but I’d like to delay the inevitable as long as possible.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)