LOST PLACE  |
MAY 2008 – NO. 24
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Queens of the Thirties
by Stephen L. Meyers
A look at New York's Queens Boulevard in the 1930s, via its long-gone trolley tracks
Lightly populated Queens Boulevard hosted a Manhattan and Queens car in 1935. The view is near Grand Avenue in Elmhurst. The then under-construction competing Independent subway line's opening would shortly replace the streetcars and the rebuilding of Queens Boulevard to handle motor vehicular traffic would completely erase any signs of the Manhattan and Queens.
The inner portion of Queens Boulevard carried the trolleys on single-track rights-of-way between the automobile lanes.
In the area around Forest Hills, the trolleys ran on a center-of-the-road reservation. This is Queens Boulevard and 72nd Street in 1937.
This sylvan area of Queens is now a forest of apartment houses, the trolley is long gone, and running under Queens Boulevard is the Queens line of the former Independent subway system.
Reprinted with permission from Lost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island, by Stephen L. Meyers. Available from the publisher online at www.arcadiapublishing.com or by calling (888) 313-2665.
Photos courtesy Stephen L. Meyers.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Stephen L. Meyers is the author of Manhattan's Lost Streetcars, he is a longtime member of the Electric Railroaders' Association in New York and other rail groups. In Lost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island, Stephen L. Meyers gives these lines — more than 20 of them — new life. With exceptional images and fascinating detail about things like the tiny storage battery cars and the trolleys that met all the trains, he traces the streetcar era from the late 1800s to the mid-1930s.
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