Astoria
Astoria is a neighborhood in northwestern Queens, constituting
the part of Long Island City north of Broadway. It was developed
from 1839 by Stephen A. Halsey, a fur merchant who petitioned
the state legislature to name it for the prominent fur trader
John Jacob Astor. During the 1840s and 1850s it grew slowly inland
from the ferry landing at the foot of Astoria Boulevard. Wealthy
New Yorkers built mansions on 12th and 14th Streets and on 27th
Avenue. The German United Cabinet Workers bought four farms in
1869 between 35th and 50th Streets and developed a German town.
On 4th May of the following year, Astoria, Hunter's Point,
Steinway and Ravenswood consolidated to form Long Island City.
Thousands of houses were built in the 1890s and the early twentieth
century. The first rapid transit line, the Astoria elevated, opened
on 31st Street in 1917. The Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Rudolph
Valentino, the Marx Brothers, and Paul Robeson made films, were
later used by the government for making training and propaganda
films. Abandoned in 1971, the studios were eventually restored
for television and motion picture production and one building
now houses the Museum of the Moving Image.
After the Second World War Astoria was largely Italian. Greeks
rapidly increased in number after 1965: one third of all Greeks
who moved to New York City in the 1980s settled in the neighborhood,
and by the mid 1990s they accounted for slightly less than half
its population. St. Demetrious, one of eleven Greek Orthodox Churches
in the area, is probably the largest outside Greece. Other ethnic
groups also established communities in the area, including Colombians,
Chinese, Guyanese, and Koreans, and to a lesser extent Ecuadorians,
Romanians, Indians, Filipinos and Dominicans.
Vincent Seyfried, Encyclopedia of New York City, Edited by
Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1995.
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