On a sunny Sunday in September I took a looping route throughout what I believed were the most historic and picturesque areas in Whitestone, which is between the Whitestone Expressway on the west, Utopia Parkway on the east, the East River on the north, and approximately Willets Point Blvd. and 25th Ave. on the south, though no clear southern boundary with Flushing exists.
I began at 150th St. and Cross Island Parkway at a large apartment house, the appropriately-named Whitestone, one of the few in the area. According to Whitestone resident and author of Arcadia Press' Whitestone review, Jason D. Antos, in the building's early days in the 1920s a number of film actors who worked at the Astoria-Kaufman Studios (now home to the Museum of the Moving Image) lived here at the Whitestone. Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Rudolph Valentino were residents, if only briefly.
Whitestone is bisected by two main highways, Cross Island Parkway, which doesn’t permit truck traffic, and the Whitestone Expressway, which does. The Whitestone Parkway opened first, in 1939, as a connector to the bridge, and upgraded to an expressway in 1958; the Cross Island Parkway, part of the Belt Parkway system ringing Brooklyn and Queens, runs in part along the old right-of-way of the old LIRR Whitestone Branch and was completed in 1940, connecting to what was then the Whitestone Parkway just south of the bridge.
As Agent 86 would say, would you believe that this stucco, windowless structure, the clubhouse of the Dwarf Giraffe Athletic League at 149-50 15th Rd. was once Whitestone's Rialto Theatre?
I’m not sure when the Rialto first opened, but from the looks of this 1940 tax photo, it looks like other theater buildings that opened in the 1920s did when they opened; it probably had live stage shows as well as movies at least in its early years. According to cinematreasures.org, which chronicles former movie theaters across the USA, when the Rialto closed the building was purchased by a Jewish congregation an became Temple Hillel. In 1966 it was purchased by the Dwarf Giraffe Athletic League who still own and run it today. The theater floor was gutted and the room converted into a gymnasium and basketball court.
Its midblock location eventually led to its demise as well as the rise of television. Why are so many theaters named “Rialto,” an area of the San Polo sestiere of Venice, known for its markets and for the Rialto Bridge?
Harpell Chemist, at 14th Ave. and 150th St., has been a Whitestone fixture since 1905. I was attracted by their illuminated sign, since it features Caledonia Bold, a font rarely used on signage and too neglected in print these days. Look at that serifed cap R. It’s a beautiful face. Caledonia is the ancient name for Scotland and the font was so named because the origin of the project was for a Scotch Roman typeface.
Clintonville St. is named for DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828), one of early New York’s pre-eminent politicians, serving in the NY State Assembly and as a state Senator (1798-1811), U.S. Senator from New York (1802-1803); NYC mayor (1803-1815) NY State Governor (1817-1822) and ran unsuccessfully for U.S. President as a Federalist against incumbent President James Madison in 1812.
DeWitt Clinton lived in Queens County, primarily during his time as mayor, in a now-burned-down mansion in Maspeth several miles to the west of Whitestone, though he had a summer house in Whitestone. While he was governor, Whitestone became known as Clintonville in his honor. Though the neighborhood became “Whitestone” again during the 19th century the name is remembered by the lengthy Clintonville St., Clintonville Playground and, until recently, the now-shuttered Clinton, an Italian restaurant at Clintonville St. and 10th Ave. that’s now the Red Parrot Thai-Mexican restaurant.
According to legend, Whitestone takes its name from a large offshore rock where tides from the East River and Long Island Sound met; in other accounts the name is in honor of the White Stone Chapel, erected by townsman Samuel Leggett in 1837.
Seen in the distance in the photo above is the blue onion dome of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church. In my opinion, it’s the second-best onion dome in the city, topped only by the Louis Allmendinger Cathedral of the Transfiguration on Driggs Ave. in Greenpoint. But this one’s in brilliant Technicolor blue. It looks like they stuck the dome on top of a couple of Quonset huts, but it works and has become, since its construction in 1969 by architect Sergei Padukow, a neighborhood landmark. I can’t help snapping it whenever I go by. There’s been an onion dome on Clintonville St. since 1919, when the first St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church was built at this site, now just north of the Cross Island Parkway.
Though Whitestone and College Point’s old boarding houses like the College Point Clubhouse and roadhouses like Flessel’s have vanished, Harold Fiedelmann’s boarding house, at Clintonville St. and 14th Rd. is still there. The now-private residence once was home to LIRR Whitestone Branch workers and employees at the John Locke stamping mill. Locke, who moved his tinware and stamping business from Brooklyn to the wide open spaces of Whitestone in 1853 and helped put the village on the map, still has an avenue named in his honor.
This Martin A. Gleason Funeral Home, at 11th Ave. and 150th St., features a corner double-decked round porch with Ionic columns. It’s a converted Victorian-era private house, and one of a number of Gleason funeral homes in the borough.
You’ll have to use a little imagination, but stroll down curving 8th Rd., between 149th and 150th Sts., and the rural past of Queens can be visualized. The little lane may have serviced stables when the area was originally developed in the early-1900s, and it remained unpaved until the mid-1990s. I think it’s amazing.
One of Queens’ few remaining 18th-century structures is the Colden-Wesson mansion at 2-11 147th St. opposite Francis Lewis Park. It stands within the old estate of the Declaration of Independence signatory, and was built in 1762 and further enlarged in 1926. It has been owned by the family of Queens Supreme Court Justice Charles Colden (1885-1960) and later, by the Wesson family. Colden founded Queens College, whose Colden Center (since renamed for philanthropists Selma and Max Kupferberg) was named for him.
I’m showing the parking lot for the shopping mall anchored by North Shore Farms at 10th Ave. and 154th St., because imagine chuffing steam engines and an old stick-style train terminal here. This was the LIRR Whitestone Branch‘s terminal from 1886-1932; train service had begun from Flushing to downtown Whitestone in 1869. In the 1920s, The LIRR offered the branch to the City of New York as a possible addition to what was then the BMT-IRT Flushing Line (today’s 7 train). The city turned down the offer, and the line was subsequently abandoned. Years later, in the early-1950s, the Transit Authority purchased the old Far Rockaway branch from the LIRR and created the A train extension across Jamaica Bay. If the subway were extended to Whitestone back then, the neighborhood’s development would’ve been considerably different.
I’ve always admired The (Beechhurst) Towers at 160-15 PCB; there’s an express bus stop right there, so the lack of a subway in Whitestone would be no problem. I have a weakness for solid, impregnable-looking brick buildings. I never looked into it though, and I’m satisfied in Little Neck.
The Whitestone Bridge, as seen from Malba, a semi-private neighborhood adjoining the East River. I feel comfortable in spots like Whitestone, College Point, most of Bayside, Douglaston and Little Neck, since most of the NYC noise is left behind, and wandering around these places, you can envision them as they were when they were small towns, before gobbled up by the town of Flushing, and then NYC itself.
—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)