In the late 1800s, the area of land now known as Queens was a collection of loosely linked villages separated by miles of farmland. The towns of Jamaica, Flushing, and Newtown (later Elmhurst) were settled in the mid-1600s and considered part of greater Long Island. Their municipal governments operated independently of the City of New York on Manhattan Island, and had important commercial and political ties to other towns in the region.
Manhattanites and Brooklynites sought refuge in Queens County from the demands of city life. They gambled at the racetrack in Jamaica, frolicked in the waves at Rockaway Beach, and, as was the practice of the day, picniced in the cemeteries of Glendale. Manufacturers and developers began looking to Queens as a cheap alternative to Manhattan real estate. By the late 1800s, Long Island City and Astoria boasted factories that rivaled those of the Lower East Side.
On May 4, 1897, state legislators forever altered the fate of a once pastoral county. They signed the Charter of Greater New York, consolidating Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Queens into a single city. The borough of Queens was only a fraction of the original Queens County. Its eastern towns joined the newly formed Nassau County, which remained part of Long Island.
Over the next six decades, Queens’ landscape changed dramatically. During the first part of the twentieth century, New York City installed the borough’s basic urban infrastructure. The 1909 opening of the Blackwell’s Island Bridge, later renamed the Queensboro, celebrated the first vehicular link between Queens and Manhattan. The bridge inspired construction of Queens Boulevard, an arterial highway, in 1914. A year later, the first subway traveled from Manhattan to Queens, arriving just south of the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City.
During the 1910s and ‘20s, real estate developers anticipating the arrival of the subway line purchased expanses of farmland for houses and apartment buildings. They built row houses in