You might think San Francisco and Flushing have nothing in common, but they share something. At the extreme western end of Flushing, between College Point Blvd., the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Railroad and the Kissena Park Corridor, there’s a cluster of small streets unnoticed except by their residents and the people who work there.
One of the north-south streets is called Haight St., like what was the anchor street of San Francisco’s counterculture, the Haight-Ashbury District—more colloquially, just The Haight. The Forgotten NY camera recently investigated both districts, and the contrasts are as different as the West and East Coasts. Come and see where the smell of incense fills the air and where the smell of the Flushing River suffuses the nostrils.
This extraordinarily-detailed Belcher Hyde property map from 1928 shows The Haight’s street layout pretty much as it appears today, and its present-day street names are in place, as well. In the early part of the 20th century, though, Queens place names were very changeable; DeLong was Charles, Fuller was Henry, Haight was James, and 41st Ave. was Bradford.
Sanford Ave., the only street that continuously extends from one end of Flushing to the other (besides Northern Blvd.) has been Sanford pretty much since it was laid out in the mid-1800s, while the main north-south spine, College Point Blvd., was known as Lawrence St. until 1969, when Lawrence was combined with College Point Causeway to create the boulevard.
From the bottom of the map, you can see Maple Ave. slanting off to the southeast. It forms a particularly large concrete plaza at Sanford Ave. and Fuller Pl.
Maple was built on a slant to accommodate the old right-of way of the Central Railroad of Long Island, which was built in 1873 by department-store nabob Alexander T. Stewart to connect NYC with his new Garden City, a town he built in eastern Queens (now central Nassau) County. The railroad ran just six years until 1879; much of its old path is now occupied by Kissena Corridor Park.
Dragon Auto on Sanford and Maple; Kepco, an automatic power supplies company, has several buildings in the area and has been here since 1946 including its HQ at Sanford and Haight. Flushing’s Haight is a secondary “Iron Triangle” of sorts—home to auto glass, signage, and stainless steel fence manufacturers.
Unlike the Iron Triangle, the City isn’t pressuring them to sell their property to multimillion developers. Yet.
DeLong St. at Sanford Ave. is the entrance to NY Sign City and also Home Depot, which is out of the shot on the left. The stainless steel fences are popular with the new Fedders Specials sprouting all over Flushing.
San Francisco’s “The Haight,” located west of downtown in the vicinity of Buena Vista and Golden Gate Parks, is named for its two main north-south streets. Haight St. is named for California governor Henry Haight (1825-1878) who served between 1867 and 1871. The area was first settled by dairy farmers in the 1870s. After a cable car line was built down Haight St., which runs to Market St. and the downtown area, a proliferation of homes in the luxuriant Queen Anne style were constructed in the 1880s, many of which still stand today. The Depression sent The Haight into a tailspin for a few decades, until it was reborn in 1965-66 into a burgeoning arts and music district.
“Haight Street is just like Carnaby Street [in London]. Long hair, boutiques, ice cream parlors, band sessions and plays in the park, pie fights—it’s just great. It’s a low-rent district so all the kids can afford to live there.”—Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, 1966.
By the time Beatle George Harrison visited The Haight on August 8, 1967, the whole “summer of love” scene had dissolved into a drug-drenched wasteland punctuated by busloads of tourists. Harrison wasn’t impressed, describing those he met as “hideous, spotty little teenagers.” Despite his distaste, Harrison later donated the returns from a 1975 concert ($66,000) to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which he then visited. On August 29, 1966, the Beatles played their last live show in the USA in San Francisco, at Candlestick Park.
What will you find in The Haight these days? A quiet, residential area with dozens of beautiful Victorian-era single and multifamily homes, steep hills especially in Buena Vista Park, and the touristy Haight Street proper. Google map: Haight-Ashbury
130 Delmar St., home throughout 1967 to the Jefferson Airplane.
The house on the left, 122 Lyon Street, was home to Janis Joplin and then-boyfriend Country Joe McDonald in 1967-68. Despite her increasing fame at the time, she was evicted—when her landlord discovered she had a dog.
Left: 710 Ashbury St., an 1890 Queen Anne building that was the headquarters between October 1966 and March 1968 of the Grateful Dead. The cops raided the building in October 1967 and confiscated a pound of marijuana and hash. Right: 715 Ashbury. You wouldn’t think the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club would set up shop in such a placid-looking Victorian but it was a different time.
The Airplane moved from 130 Delmar to the Ionic-columned, Colonial style mansion at 2400 Fulton Street at Stanyan, opposite Golden Gate Park, in May 1968. By then the band was riding high.
Meanwhile, back in Flushing, Pople Ave. runs one block between College Point Blvd. and Saull St. (around here, Queens has proven immune to the relentless renumbering foisted on the rest of the borough beginning in the 1910s). The only famous Pople on the web is British scientist John Pople (1925-2004); I doubt this street, which was formerly called High St. and then Lynch Ave., is named for him; it attained the Pople moniker by the 1940s. This photo epitomizes the relentless development taking place not only in Flushing, but around NYC. With the political climate leaning toward even more development, these scenes will become more common.
—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)