Little Neck and Douglaston are sister neighborhoods in the far northeast of Queens. The border between what were two tiny towns on the north shore of Long Island in the colonial and post-colonial eras, before absorbed into Greater New York along with the rest of Queens in 1898, has long been a puzzlement. Some chroniclers say it’s Marathon Parkway, which stands in for 250th St. I think that allows too little territory to Little Neck, however, and you’ll forgive my bias: I’ve resided in Little Neck since 2007 and live within a football field’s length from Nassau County.
Despite the fact that the neighborhoods are adjacent, easy entrance and egress between them has long been difficult. There are only two roads between the two neighborhoods near the shoreline: Northern Blvd., and a twisting road running between Douglas Rd. and Little Neck Parkway called by its residents Sandhill Rd. in its western section and 39th Ave. in its eastern part. The city’s Department of Transportation can’t decide and so has a sign on the Douglaston end calling it “Bayshore Boulevard.” Its eastern end isn’t on city maps and the city won’t post a street sign.
I’ve discovered a new way to get to Douglaston from Little Neck, though, and it’s due to a short wood bridge at 247th St. and 40th Ave., a short trip from my house. My shortcut to Douglaston runs down the sliver of Udall’s Cove Park that extends south to Northern Blvd. that I call the true border between Douglaston and Little Neck. This route brings you past several of Douglaston and Little Neck’s historic structures and locales.
A silty rivulet, Gabler’s Creek, seeping down from Long Island Sound, twists in a generally southern direction, eventually emptying into the sewer system under Northern Blvd. That rivulet, and the valley that its flow has produced over the centuries, is why travel between the northern half of the neighborhoods was restricted to just two pathways. This wood bridge makes it three. Finally, I can cross the creek into Udall’s Cove Park and walk southwest through the park into Douglaston.
Udall’s Cove is a 30-acre park dedicated solely to wildlife and nature preservation. Udall’s contains salt marshes, a forest, meadow and a freshwater pond. The remains of Little Neck’s clamming past can be evidenced by the wood pilings at Virginia Point, the northern end of Little Neck Parkway, formerly known as Old House Landing Rd. The cove is named for 19th-century settler Richard Udall, who owned a mill in the region; his family owned the property until 1950 when the Nassau County portion of the property was sold to the Nassau County Historical Society. The Udall’s Cove Preservation Committee, which takes charge of the park’s upkeep, was formed in 1969 and the cove was opened to the public in 1972.
A reminder that the city is never far away. The Port Washington branch of the Long Island Rail Road has extended through the cove since 1866 en route to Great Neck, with an extension northeast to the line’s titular town in 1896. Several dozen trains pass back and forth each day through the heart of the park on a raised embankment.
The new park pathway empties out onto the northern end of a neighborhood recently given landmarks protection for its historic structures, Douglaston Hill, onto Orient Ave., which was known as 243rd St. for several decades. Douglaston Hill is a small wedge of territory between Douglaston proper and Little Neck, defined by Douglaston Parkway, the Long Island Rail Road tracks, Northern Boulevard and Udall’s Cove Park.
Douglaston Hill’s shady streets are lined with well-kept homes dating to the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and in some spots, original Belgian block pavement pokes through the asphalt. The neighborhood received a landmark designation by the city in 2004. Some years later, neighborhood residents successfully petitioned the city to have the numbered streets in the neighborhood returned to their original names—one of the few such reversals in Queens history.
Not everything in the neighborhood received Landmarks protection, though, and several blocks are still vulnerable to developers who can tear down houses and replace them with perhaps less esthetic or, in this case, historic structures.
The former St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church was located in a small, one-story building at a stub end of Orient Ave., north of Pine St. It was a house of worship for much of the 20th century, but is now a private dwelling. The A.M.E. Church was co-founded in 1794 by former Delaware slave Richard Allen and gradually expanded worldwide.
At the crest of the hill, walking south, is historic Zion Episcopal Church, seen here from Northern Blvd. Major Thomas Wickes, a patriot originally from Huntington, owned the entire Douglaston peninsula jutting into Little Neck Bay after the Revolutionary War, and subsequently sold it to Wynant Van Zandt in the 1810s. Scotsman George Douglas purchased the peninsula from Van Zandt in 1835. Zion Church was completed in 1830 on plans from Trinity Church architect Richard Upjohn. Wynant Van Zandt is interred in the family vault beneath the cemetery; Van Zandt had held local services in his home before the church was built.
Interred in the churchyard is a colorful character from the peninsula’s early days, the “Bard of Little Neck,” Bloodgood Haviland Cutter (1817-1906), potato farmer, poet and friend of Mark Twain, who immortalized him as the “Poet Lariat” in Innocents Abroad. Twain poked fun at Cutter as a master of doggerel who annoyed fellow passengers on an excursion to the Holy Land in the novel. Cutter self-printed many editions of his verse, little-read today. He owned numerous parcels of land in Little Neck, Great Neck, Manhasset and Plandome that he purchased or inherited. Cutter Mill Rd. in Great Neck, on the site of a mill he purchased from the Allen family, is named for him.
Close to my home are rural enclaves, historic churches, cemeteries and relics. All in an hour’s walk.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)