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Flushing Meadows-Corona Park

New York City Pavilion / Queens Museum, Aymar Embury II, 1939
New York State Pavilion, Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, 1962-64
Unisphere, Gilmore D. Clarke, 1963- 64
World’s Fair Carousel, William Mangels, 1964

The city’s second largest park was originally a meadow and wetland, but in 1907 industrialist Michael Degnon acquired much of the property hoping to woo the federal government to fund a port on Flushing Bay. He began filling it in with residential coal ash through contracts with the NYC Department of Sanitation and the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company. The port plan never materialized and the area remained for several decades the wasteland immortalized as the “valley of ashes” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). In 1935 the area was officially selected as the location for the 1939 World’s Fair. Landscaping began in 1936 to the designs of Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano and the fair opened on April 30, 1939. The only relic surviving in situ from the 1939 fair is the New York City Building, which later hosted the United Nations General Assembly from 1946-50 (while its permanent home was being built in Manhattan), was renovated as the New York City Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair and is now the Queens Museum. For the 1964 World’s Fair, Clarke and Rapuano updated their original landscape, whose centerpiece was the Unisphere, a 140-foottall globe set above a giant reflecting pool and fountain. Other extant sites include the New York State Pavilion and the World’s Fair Carousel. The State Pavilion was meant to showcase the state’s cutting-edge art, architecture and technology, and consisted of three components: the open-air Tent of Tomorrow; three Astro-View observation towers; and the Theaterama (now the Queens Theatre in the Park). Long neglected, the Tent has been repainted, while its terrazzo floor—an oversized replica of a Texaco roadmap of New York State—has been mothballed, hopefully awaiting restoration. The carousel combined elements from two previous rides, Feltman’s Carousel (1903) and the Stubbman Carousel (1908), both carved by Marcus Illoins on Coney Island. It was moved to its current location in 1968. Ownership of the site was transferred from the World’s Fair Corporation back to the city in 1967, permanently establishing Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.The Unisphere is an Individual Landmark; the NY State Pavilion and the World’s Fair Carousel are listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places.

Corona-East Elmhurst, Queens

The area of Queens comprising Corona-East Elmhurst was called “Mespat” by the Native Americans and “Middleburgh” by the English colonists. It became part of the Town of Newtown, when it was incorporated in 1683 as one of the three original municipalities (along with Jamaica and Flushing) comprising what is now Queens. It remained largely rural until transportation improvements led to suburban development. In 1854 the Flushing Railroad began service through what is now 44th and 45th Avenues (now part of the Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Rail Road). Anticipating commuter service, a group of real estate speculators formed the West Flushing Land Company and purchased an extensive tract that they subdivided into house lots, naming the new neighborhood West Flushing. Just north (above what is now 37th Avenue) stood the National Race Course, also established in 1854. A massive complex and tourist attraction, it was soon renamed Fashion Race Course and notably hosted the first-ever ticketed baseball game, a best of three series between New York and Brooklyn.

In spite of this enthusiasm, actual building activity remained slow through the 1850s and was curtailed during the Civil War. By 1868, however, Benjamin W. Hitchcock, who also developed much of Woodside, acquired more than a thousand building lots in West Flushing, and most were sold by the early 1870s. Another local developer, Thomas Waite Howard, felt the name West Flushing was too easily confused with Flushing and petitioned the U.S. Postal Service for a more poetic moniker: Corona, the crown (or crown jewel) of Queens. Transit lines continued to expand, including the 1876 introduction of horse car lines to Brooklyn, providing connections to ferries to Manhattan, and trolleys running along Corona Avenue began in the 1890s. In 1898 Queens County was subsumed into Greater New York, and Corona, previously part of Newtown, became its own neighborhood with 2,500 residents. In 1904 the Bankers’ Land and Mortgage Corporation launched a new residential development in north Corona called East Elmhurst, comprising 2,000 building lots along the western edge of Flushing and Bowery Bays. Growth accelerated with the opening of the Queensborough Bridge in 1908 and the East River tunnels to Pennsylvania Station in 1911. Perhaps most significantly, the subway system arrived in 1917 with the opening of the Alburtis Avenue (now 103rd Street-Corona Plaza) station. In the 1930s the neighborhood’s eastern boundary, the dumping ground that was once Flushing Creek, was transformed into “The World of Tomorrow” as the site of the 1939 World’s Fair; it later reprised that role for the 1964 World’s Fair and eventually became Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

From the beginning, Corona-East Elmhurst was a diverse neighborhood. Several of its oldest institutions attest to the 19th century German influence, while many 20th century sites are associated with its Italian-American and Jewish communities. The northern section of this tour boasts a remarkable collection of culturally significant African-American sites. The first recorded residents of African descent arrived in the 17th century and settled along what is now Corona Avenue, a section of which (at 90th Street in Elmhurst) is named for the Rev. James Pennington (1807-1870), an enslaved fugitive from Maryland who became an influential Evangelical Abolitionist on the world stage. In the 1920s, Corona saw an influx of African-Americans, many following the Great Migration from the South, and Afro-Caribbean immigrants from the West Indies. After World War II, the area attracted prominentAfrican-American cultural figures and civil rights activists, many of whom are celebrated on this tour.