Early years For two centuries following the arrival of settlers from England and the
Netherlands, the area where the village of Woodside would be established was sparsely populated. The land was fertile, but also wet. Its Native American inhabitants called it a place of "bad waters", and it was known to early European settlers as a place of "marshes, muddy flats and bogs", where "wooded swamps" and "flaggy pools" were fed by flowing springs." Until drained in the nineteenth century, one of these wet woodlands was called Wolf Swamp after the predators that infested it. This swamp was not the only place where settlers might fear for the safety of their livestock, and even themselves. One of the oldest recorded locations in Woodside was called Rattlesnake Spring on the property of a Captain Bryan Newton. Woodside was settled by farmers in the early 18th century. In time, inhabitants learned how to farm the land profitably. The marsh grasses proved to be good for grazing and grains, fruits, and vegetables could be grown on the surrounding dry land. By the middle of the 18th century, the area's farmers had drained some of its marshes and cut back some of its woods to expand its arable land and eliminate natural predators. Agricultural produce found markets in New York City, and at the beginning of the 19th century the area came to be "abundantly conspicuous in the wealth of the farmers and in the beauty of the villas." Another observer of this time praised Woodside's "pure atmosphere and delightful scenery." In the 19th century, the area was part of the Town of Newtown (now
Elmhurst). The adjacent area of Winfield was largely incorporated into the post office serving Woodside and as a consequence Winfield lost much of its identity distinct from Woodside. Some idea of the bucolic nature of the place that would become Woodside can be seen in descriptions of an ancient central landmark, a great chestnut tree. The tree was hundreds of years old when it finally came down in the last decade of the 19th century. It stood on high ground near a junction of three dirt roads and "was of great diameter, some 8 or 10 feet"—perhaps 30 feet in circumference. Its size and central location made it a natural meeting place, its surface one on which to tack public notices, and a strategic point of considerable military significance during the Revolutionary War. The neighborhood's location about three miles from Hunter's Point on the
Long Island Rail Road line made it an ideal location for a new suburban community. In 1874, the
New York Times described Woodside:
Agriculture By the middle of the 19th century, drainage and improved agricultural techniques had increased the proportion of Woodside's arable land to some two-thirds of its total. Flowers and dairy products were added to the fruits and vegetables which farmers took to city markets. In 1860 a corporation presided over by a local resident, John C. Jackson, built a gravel-topped toll road between
Flushing and the ferry at Hunters Point. The Plank Road disappeared during construction projects of the later 19th century but
Northern Boulevard tracks closely resemble the route of Jackson Avenue.
Residential estates . Owned by Louis Windmuller, German immigrant, New York merchant, financier, and philanthropist, the estate was one of the last in Woodside to be sold for development. In 1936 the city acquired most of the property for a park to be called Windmuller Park and in 1942 the heirs sold the remainder to a developer for construction of
garden apartments. As other well-to-do merchants had done in other areas of Queens, Kelly and Buddy bought farm property for use as a rural estate where they planned to live in the warmer months of the year. Not long after, a friend of Kelly's, William Schroeder, bought another parcel of the Sackett property for the same purpose. Like Kelly, he came of a family that had emigrated from Germany and, like Kelly, he had achieved wealth as a merchant in
Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike Kelly, however, he did not move North, but kept the estate for use during summer vacations. Not long after, he bought a farm owned by the family of Thomas Cumberson who had died in 1849. It is quite possible that he learned of the place through acquaintance with Schroeder or, more likely, Kelly. Windmuller was of a younger generation than Kelly, Schroeder, and Sussdorf. He emigrated to New York in the aftermath of the
Revolutions of 1848. Only 18 years old and penniless, he found success as a commission agent, bringing goods to clients in the U.S. from Germany and other European countries. In 1867 he had accumulated enough savings to buy property adjoining Sussdorf's. The land had formerly belonged to the Morrell family, but had been acquired by a speculator, John A. Mecke, and became available to Windmuller upon Mecke's death and the bankruptcy of his estate.
Residential development As farms gave way to
country estates, so country estates would, in turn, give way to residential development, as, in the decades after 1850, the land was broken into small lots for construction of single-family houses. As before, this new shift was brought about largely by improvement in transportation resources. In 1854, the first steam-powered passenger rail service came to the area. In that year a passenger depot of the Flushing Railroad from Long Island City to Flushing opened for operation near the southern boundary of what would become the village of Woodside. The line gave access to New York City via the Hunters Point Ferry and to Brooklyn via horse-drawn omnibus. In 1861 a second line opened running directly through what would shortly become the village of Woodside. This was a segment of the
Long Island Rail Road which operated between Hunters Point and
Jamaica, replacing an earlier segment which passed through Brooklyn to the ferry dock in Williamsburg. In 1869, another line, the
Flushing and North Side Railroad, traversed the same path through Woodside. And soon after, in 1874, a short spur, the Flushing and Woodside Railroad opened its station in the village. The construction of this rail service led directly to the division of property near train stations into small lots for construction of houses for working-class families. The area that would become Woodside was not the first community to grow out of Queens farmland. Before the end of the 1850s Woodhaven,
Astoria,
Maspeth, Corona, Hunters Point, and Winfield all attracted land speculators. Woodside's developers were, however, among the first to divide properties into lots for construction of small homes for working-class families. In doing so they were the first to use a set of new sales techniques to lure buyers. And they were the first to apply a name to a locale which emphasized its real or supposed virtues. A late 19th century author said "Woodside" was an appropriate name for the community these land speculators created. He maintained that others, created later, were "without the slightest significance, historic or otherwise, and of the kind apparently chosen by boarding schoolgirls to roll romantically from the tongue.".
Benjamin W. Hitchcock The Kelly family was linked to A. P. Riker's by marriage. Riker, a customs officer, was John A. Kelly's son-in-law. Members of the Kelly family were publishers, and it may not be a coincidence that the agent with whom the Kellys contracted for development of Woodside farmland was a publisher of
sheet music, periodicals, and "subscription books" named Benjamin W. Hitchcock. Hitchcock had a flair for publicity and innovative sales techniques. Once the area had been surveyed and 972 plots laid out, he organized excursions from the city, hired brass bands to play, and gave prospects free lunch. The first sales event took place on February 18, 1869. Hitchcock priced empty lots at $300. Employing an innovative sales technique, he sold them on the installment plan. Purchasers made a down payment and owed $10 a month until the note was paid off. He took a 25% commission on each sale. To entice purchasers he sold lottery tickets with first option on choice lots as one set of prizes. Other prizes included option to purchase one of five houses already built on the property. It may have been he or perhaps Kelly who gave the name "Woodside" to the area. A member of the Kelly family, John A. F. Kelly, had used it in occasional pieces he had written for a local newspaper during the 1850s and 1860s. In 1899 one of the original purchasers told a reporter than he had bought a lot with a tiny house on it, only 20' wide by 16' deep. The price was $480, and he paid $125 down and $10 a month until he'd paid off the note. Hitchcock had an instinct for spectacle akin to
P.T. Barnum's. After his success with Woodside he undertook similar real estate promotions in other parts of Queens including hamlets that he dubbed Corona and Ozone Park. When the economy soured and that business declined, he ran a theater, got involved in machine politics, and sponsored some beauty contests including one, the "Congress of Beauty and Culture", which was censured for its overall sleaze and the swindling of its participants. While the other major landowners of Woodside used agents to develop their holdings, A. P. Riker set up a real estate office in the center of the village from which he managed his own property and handled real estate transactions for others. He was also a partner in local businesses: a grocery store in 1876 and, in 1878, a fruit and vegetable canning business which employed 100 workers. The developers who followed Hitchcock's lead in Woodside were less flamboyant though similarly successful. In 1863 John Mecke bought farmland from a family, the Moores, who had lived for more than a century and a half on what would become the northern part of what would become Woodside. He intended to subdivide, but became insolvent and, in 1867, died. His heirs sold the property to two carpenters, Henry G. Schmidt and Emil Cuntz, who, in 1871, deeded their property to an organization known as the Bricklayers' Cooperative Building Association. This organization seems not to have been what its name suggests since it was a New York corporation headed by Charles Merweg who gave his occupation as "speculator in real estate". In any event, the Association erected a housing development in north Woodside which it called Charlotteville. The name was later given the more common spelling of Charlottesville. Other 19th-century developers included Charles F. Ehrhardt who sold lots in the northern part of the village and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company which converted two properties on the west side into salable lots. These and other real estate developers profited from their sale of lots to home buyers, but the growth of Woodside's housing market was hardly a smooth upward trajectory and, some 40 years after Hitchcock's first lottery, the village was far from completely saturated with homes. A minutely detailed property atlas from 1909 shows buildings on considerably less than half of the village's surveyed lots. In fact, although affordable by standards of the time, Woodside's small single family houses on their small lots were too expensive for growing numbers of laborers who crowded the tenement apartments of Manhattan and nearby Brooklyn. In the years before the
Panic of 1907 and again after its close, the wage-earners in many of these low-income families, having been able to improve their skills and obtain higher-paying jobs, began pressing for construction of housing that was better than the tenements but still within their means. Although real estate developers had previously thought Woodside to be too remote and rural in character for marketing of low cost rental units, some changed circumstances convinced them to meet this need by putting up higher-density apartment buildings in the village.
Other factors connections to Manhattan—the
Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and the
Steinway Tunnel in 1915—enabled the working members of a tenement-dwelling immigrant family to rent a
garden apartment in Woodside while having jobs in the central city. The commute was cheap and short, and during rush hours, the five-cent trip took as little as eight minutes to
Times Square. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Woodside residents could find employment to the east in Brooklyn, to the north in
College Point, and, especially, to the west. Hunters Point, Sunnyside, and other west-Queens communities possessed foundries, rail yards, chemical works, and numerous factories, including the famous
Steinway Piano factory. When, in 1870, these communities formed themselves into
Long Island City opportunities for employment grew rapidly, so much so that by the turn of the 20th century, the city could boast that it had the highest concentration of industry in all the United States. There were jobs within Woodside as well. The village had long had the city's largest cemetery,
Calvary, as a stimulus to local business. It also possessed a brewery, a major florist, and many local retail establishments. In 1875, the
Bulova Watch Company established its headquarters there. Along with good transportation and access to jobs, Woodside possessed many other local amenities. It was an attractive place with plentiful open spaces, many trees and wooded areas, healthful air, and an overall pleasant ambiance; one news article in 1926 described this as "sylvan beauty", One newspaper article published in 1926 singled out its school, P.S. 11, as "one of the leading public schools in Queens." As in nearby communities of the time, religious observance played an important role in the lives of Woodside residents, and its churches both reflected this importance and signaled welcome to prospective newcomers. Riker's 1852 map of Newtown shows an Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, and Presbyterian church in Newtown Village or Winfield. In 1854 St. Mary's Winfield, today's Blessed Virgin Mary Help of Christians, became the first Catholic parish. Much of its congregation and all its early pastors were of German nationality. The first church in Woodside proper, St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal, showed the dominant faith of the area's oldest and most prominent residents. It was established in 1874 by the families of landowners who had farmed there from its earliest settlement as well as by the estate-owning Germanic families that had moved in during the middle decades of the 19th century, including the longstanding Rapelye, Hicks, and Riker families and the newly arrived Sussdorf, Windmuller, and Kelly families. Two years later, residents from among the still newer owners of small houses set up a Baptist church. One early resident, Julius Adams, bought a tiny house on one of Hitchcock's small lots. At first he earned his living as a shoemaker, and, succeeding in that business, expanded into others. In 1881 he built Sanger Hall—a German-style beer hall, a dance hall, and performance space for German singing societies and theatrical entertainments—and as the Hall thrived, he added dining rooms and even a bowling alley. In 1889, another resident built Heimann's Hall, a beer garden, dancing pavilion, and dining hall. Early in the 20th century a movie theater joined the options for local leisure-time activity.
20th century As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Woodside's plentiful advantages convinced real estate developers to invest substantially in high-occupancy housing and duplex homes to complement the single-family units which had dominated the area. The Woodside Development Corporation built four-story apartments with stores on the ground floor and both two- and one-family houses on two large plots of land near the center of the village. When a citywide aerial survey was taken in 1924, Woodside was shown to have quite a few other multifamily apartment buildings and duplexes along with its many small single-family homes. During the 1930s and into the post-war era, Woodside residential development continued to grow, although more slowly than in the boom years following World War I. Empty lots continued to be filled with one- and two-family houses, compact apartment buildings continued to be constructed, and larger, elevator-style high-rises were put up. In 1936, a last large tract of undeveloped land was made available for construction of garden apartments when a portion of the 10-acre Windmuller Estate was sold to developers. A community profile, published in 1943, characterized Woodside (along with Winfield, its neighbor to the south) as "a district of small homes and middle incomes." The area still had few apartment buildings and very little industry. Although the rapid population growth of the 1920s had fallen off in the 1930s, the authors of the profile expected improved transit (the
IND Queens Boulevard Line which opened in 1933) and a new shopping center to draw larger numbers of new residents. The number of single-family houses is given as 2,159, double-family houses as 1,711, and larger residential buildings as 868. In 1949, construction was completed on the Woodside Houses, a public housing complex built and operated by the
New York City Housing Authority. The complex consists of 20 six-story buildings with 1,358 apartments. It is located in western Woodside, bordering Astoria, between 49th and 51st Streets, 31st Avenue and Newtown Road.
21st century At the turn of the 21st century, Woodside was finally seen to be built up. The neighborhood nonetheless continued to be seen as an attractive place to live—characterized by "wide avenues, leafy streets and a mix of private homes, small apartment buildings and the occasional towering co-op." The population was about 1,800 in 1880; 3,900 in 1900; 15,000 in 1920; and 41,000 in 1930. and by 2000, the population had risen to 90,000. ==Demographics==