The community of Woodhaven lies just east of the undefended border between Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills and Queens. It’s a fairly large neighborhood located between Forest Park on the north, Liberty Ave. on the south, Eldert La. (the official boundary of Brooklyn and Queens) on the west and Woodhaven Blvd. on the east.
Visitors to Woodhaven can travel on the J train from Williamsburg, Bushwick and East New York to the Forest Parkway station; connections to the J can be made from the A and L trains at Broadway Junction.
From the 1830s to the 1850s, the area was known as Woodville. But this was before zip codes, and there was some Post Office confusion between New York City’s Woodville and another Woodville upstate. In 1853, residents voted to change Woodville’s name to Woodhaven.
Any discussion of Woodhaven begins with Neir’s Tavern, at 78th St. and 88th Ave., which bills itself as New York City’s oldest, opened in 1829. It’s still one of Woodhaven’s cherished touchstones; few outside Woodhaven know about it, but mostly everyone from the area does. It’s preparing to celebrate its bicentennial in 2029.
The origins of Neir’s Tavern are entwined with the former presence of the Union Course racetrack—the first dirt racing track in the United States—which occupied several acres in Woodhaven in the early- to mid-1800s. Prize fighting and horse racing were popular spectator sports as well as for gambling. Match races at Union Course pitting steeds from Queens against touted horses from the South drew crowds as high as 70,000.
Cadwallader Colden—whose great-grandfather was acting governor of New York State and mayor of New York City in the colonial era—founded the Blue Pump Room, or Old Blue Pump House, to slake the thirst of Union Course patrons. The tavern survived past the late-19th century while the race track didn’t.
The Neir’s name comes from Louis Neir, who purchased the place in 1898, adding bowling alleys, a ballroom, and rooms for rent upstairs. Though Mae West’s connections with Woodhaven and Greenpoint are mostly undocumented, tradition holds that she gave one of her first public performances—if not the first—here at Neir’s. Patrons say that they have seen Mae’s ghost.
The exterior of Woodhaven’s post office, built in 1940 on Forest Parkway just north of Jamaica Ave., may look utilitarian and mundane, but it’s a prime example of the streamlined Art Moderne style, with its enameled panels. A look inside shows a view of a Works Progress Administration mural by Ben Shahn, seen here.
Forest Parkway was conceived by its developers as Woodhaven’s showcase street. Several surviving examples of Queen Anne and other Victorian-era architectural styles can still be found on its six-block length between Jamaica Ave. and Forest Park. When built in 1900 it was the first paved street in Woodhaven.
While her tree grew in Brooklyn, Betty Smith, neé Elisabeth Wehner (1896-1972), largely wrote her famed novel—which takes place in nearby Cypress Hills—in this beautiful house on Forest Parkway near 85th Dr. She spent her early years in Williamsburg and attended Girls’ High School, where her childhood experiences influenced the book.
At Park Lane South and 85th St. we find a rare well-preserved NYS historic sign from 1936, standing on private property. The sign marks the first address in Queens to be renumbered under the “Philadelphia plan” which renumbered most of Queens’ streets, with lower numbers at the East River and proceeding east and south. Many years ago, when Queens was a collection of small towns divided by acres of farms and fields, every town and city had its own street naming and numbering system. This was all right when Queens (then also comprising what’s now Nassau County) was a separate and self-governing county. Once Queens consolidated with New York City and subsequently became slowly urbanized, this was a situation that couldn’t be allowed to stand, as a plethora of Washington Streets, Main Streets, and 1st and 2nd Streets found themselves in the same street directory in the city ledgers.
And so, the Queens Topographical Bureau, under the guidance of C. U. Powell, unified Queens’ street system in the 1910s. To do this just about every street in Queens was assigned a number. Numbered Avenues, Roads, Drives and Courts run east-west, while Streets, Places, Lanes and Terraces run north-south. Streets run from 1 to 271, and Avenues from 2 to 165: why Queens doesn’t have a 1st Ave. is a mystery. This also necessitated every existing house to be assigned a new address, and gave rise to the unique hyphenated Queens house numbering system in which the numbers before the hyphen refer to the nearest numbered avenue or street, or what a named street’s number will be.
A short walk into Forest Park from Park Lane South brings you to its carousel. Some time ago, every year, saw the closing of more of New York’s classic carousels, but Forest Park’s, just off Woodhaven Blvd. south of Myrtle, is still delighting people as it has since it was moved here from Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1972.
This Daniel Muller carousel, built in 1903 and containing 52 wood horses and other animals, is one of two of Muller’s remaining in the country. It replaced an earlier carousel in Forest Park that burnt down in 1966. It’s $3 a ride for all ages, and renovated in 1989.
In a heartening development, other carousels were recently restored and placed in East River Park in DUMBO, as well as the famed B & B Carousell (sic) in Coney Island.
—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)