They look out over Flushing Avenue between Navy Street and Carlton Avenue, their windows ivied and hollow. Sadly, apart from the 1807 Commandant’s House, possibly designed by Charles Bulfinch, on the far western end of the complex, most of the Navy Yard’s old officer’s quarters, some dating from the mid-to-late 19th Century, have been allowed to rot. The Navy Yard is thriving in its new role. Tugboats are repaired and maintained, and ships are still built here, along with furniture design, electronics and jewelry making along with over 200 other businesses there’s also a NYC tow pound and a water pollution control plant. After a 150-year history of building some of America’s premier fighting vessels from the Monitor, Arizona and Missouri on down, the Navy Yard was decommissioned in 1966 and is presently the home of 200 private businesses its six dry docks, one of which is shown above, are still in operation. It’s not easy to get photos of the Brooklyn Navy Yard it’s still protected by miles of barbed wire, guards, dogs, Janet Napolitano, you name it. Instead, to paraphrase a twangin’ Duane Eddy classic song title, it’s five miles of bad road. You’d think that a road with a pedigree like Flushing Avenue’s would be the El Camino Real of Brooklyn and Queens. Queens has blurred its conection to the rest of Long Island by renaming its old roads, but Flushing Avenue survives as a historic throwback. Amboy Road in Staten Island went to a vanished ferry to Perth Amboy, New Jersey White Plains Road in the Bronx goes to a network of roads that, if you go the right way, will get you to White Plains formerly, Queens had a whole group of Hempstead and North Hempstead Turnpikes (of which Hempstead Avenue is the only vestige, connecting to Nassau and Suffolk’s lengthy Hempstead Turnpike). (To muddy the water even further, an even older road extended southwest from what would be the Brooklyn and Newtown Turnpike at what would be Broadway in the colonial era, joining a highway known as Cripplebush Road, which ran approximately in a north-south route where Bedford Avenue is today.)įlushing Avenue, therefore, is in the tradition of streets and roads named not for where they are or where they go, but rather for what their destination was meant to be. In 1868, the hills were leveled, the road was straightened and, by 1893, the road had its present form and length it has today, extending out to the junction at Grand Street (later Avenue) and Maspeth Avenue. Beyond Bushwick Avenue the road ran in a sinuous, circuitous fashion to avoid hills. (A long wooden pole, or pike, was placed across the road this pike was turned, or moved out of the way, when the toll was collected.) The B&N was extended to Broadway in 1850, and to Bushwick Avenue in 1858. ![]() (At its western end, Flushing Avenue becomes Nassau Street further east, a short street just south of Flushing Avenue and Kent Avenue is called Little Nassau Street.) By about 1805, tolls were being charged and the road was known as the Brooklyn and Newtown Turnpike. The westernmost section is the oldest, dating to the colonial era and earlier it ran east from the now-filled Wallabout Mill Pond in what is now the Navy Yard east to Bushwick Avenue. It would eventually lead to Newtown (a large area, known today as Elmhurst and northern Maspeth) and then to Flushing via North Hempstead Turnpike (what is now approximately 63rd Road) and then along either now-vanished roads (Strong’s Causeway, obliterated in the 1950s by the Long Island Expressway) or all-but-vanished roads (Head of the Vly Road, now a short lane called Vleigh Place) into Flushing. In the colonial era, marshy land and creeks cut Flushing off from traffic from the west, and as there were few good roads into Flushing, carts and coaches had to first go to Jamaica and travel north from there.įlushing Avenue, in the past, was a toll road built to be an alternative to the southern approach. The first thing to remember about Flushing Avenue is that it doesn’t go to Flushing in fact, it doesn’t approach within five miles of it.įlushing Avenue takes its unusual name because of the relative isolation of Flushing, Queens. The Long Island Rail Road, celebrating its 170th anniversary in 2004, crosses Flushing Avenue in style at 56th Street in Maspeth
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