Rego Park - Queens
Where The Living Is Real Good. Just Watch Out For The Squirrels.
The Central Queens neighborhood of Rego Park sits like a lamb chop between Woodhaven Boulevard, the Long Island Expressway, 102nd Street, 67th Avenue, and Selfridge Street.
The neighborhood is often lumped in with nearby Forest Hills, though, despite the best efforts of local real estate agents, the two places have distinct personalities. New York Times writer and Queens native Richard F. Shepard once observed, “To an outsider, it is no longer so easy to tell where Forest Hills leaves off and Rego Park begins, but to those who live there, the areas remain tight little neighborhoods.”
Since Shepard penned that article, the neighborhood has seen considerable changes. The Shalimar Diner is gone. So is Ben's Best, the kosher deli that served hundreds of pounds of pastrami weekly for over seventy-three years. Gone are the Art Deco movie theaters like The Trylon and The Drake, where a packed theater of teenagers once rioted at a midnight showing of the Led Zeppelin movie, The Song Remains the Same, after deciding the sound wasn’t loud enough.
The five and six story red-brick apartment buildings that once defined the streetscape are now interspersed with architecturally uninspired glass towers with names like the Galaxy and the Contour.
Despite having one of the most irritating jingles of all time, the local branch of the department store Alexander’s opened to much fanfare in 1959. It shuttered in the early 1990s, and in the ensuing years the building became a retail graveyard, housing a succession of national chains whose ghostly signage still adorns the facade, a palimpsest of big box failures.
Yet these transformations are inevitable in any city. Change is the lifeblood of what Jane Jacobs called an “immense laboratory of trial and error,” especially in a neighborhood that, just over a century ago, was nothing but marshland and meadow.
WHITE POT
Rego Park was once part of Newtown, the township which stretched from the East River to the Flushing River and encompassed what would later become Maspeth, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Middle Village, Glendale, Ridgewood, Forest Hills, Woodside, Jackson Heights, and Corona. The southeastern portion of Newtown, covering present-day Rego Park and Forest Hills, was known as White Pot.
Most sources claim the name is an anglicization of the Dutch “Whiteput,” said to mean “Hollow Creek,” though, given that the Dutch words for hollow creek are “holle kreek,” not “whiteput,” those sources need to be treated with some skepticism.1 Still, however off the translation may be, there once was in fact a creek (technically a brook) wending its way through the area.
The Horse Brook was an important watercourse in colonial Newtown. Its waters fed the Hempstead Swamp, a vast, freshwater wetland ecosystem that attracted farmers who built homes along its edges, grazed cattle in the wet, open meadows, and planted acres of wheat, corn, and barley in the dark, fertile soil. Among the earliest of these farmers was Abraham Remsen, a descendant of Rem Jansen van der Beeck, who arrived in the colonies in the early seventeenth century. Van der Beeck, appropriately enough, means “of the brook.”
Abraham’s son, Jeromus, was later appointed colonel over half the militia of Kings and Queens counties during the Revolutionary War. The Remsen family cemetery plot, a small triangle of grass with eight weathered headstones, is all that remains of their former farm and estate. The burial site is located at the intersection of Alderton Street and Trotting Course Lane, wedged between a Panda Express, a Wendy’s, and a Petco.
For the entire nineteenth century, White Pot remained farmland. The last group of people to farm the area were Chinese immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. In the wake of anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco in 1877, Manhattan’s Chinatown had seen an influx of residents, and a growing demand for familiar produce like bok choy, napa cabbage, and bitter melon kept the White Pot farmers busy.
CRESCENTS
When World War I ended and embargoes on cement and lumber were lifted, the city underwent one of the largest building booms in its history. Banks and mortgage companies were more than happy to provide developers with money to meet the pent-up demand of returning veterans, and previously vacant swaths of the city were transformed into residential housing.
White Pot’s Chinese-run farms were purchased by two German immigrants, Henry Schloh and Charles Hausmann, who formed the grammatically dubious Real Good Construction Company in 1923. The Germans doubled down on the name, dubbing their new neighborhood Rego Park, a portmanteau of “Real” and “Good.”
Real Good Construction built hundreds of single-family homes and several stores on Queens Boulevard and 63rd Drive. A slew of large, red-brick apartment buildings with names like Jupiter Court, Remo Hall, and Marion Court soon followed.
The most distinctive part of their new development was the area known as the Crescents, a semicircle of concentric streets that, from above, look like the parking lot at a massive drive-in theater or a single, unblinking eye.
An anomaly in a city that prides itself on its grid, the Crescents eschew the rigid right angles and uninterrupted views of Manhattan, replacing them with gradually modulating curves. The streets, with aristocratic-sounding names like Asquith, Boelsen, and Cromwell, are lined with a succession of Colonial Revival and Tudor-style homes, though several of those have been augmented or replaced in recent years.
The highfalutin street names were ostensibly intended to attract wealthier buyers though the homes only sold for around $8,000, roughly $140,000 in today’s dollars.
Thanks to several transportation upgrades, including a new stop on the Long Island Rail Road, the introduction of subway lines, and street improvements in the lead up to the 1939 World's Fair, the neighborhood continued to attract residents, becoming a hub for a growing population of Italian, German, Irish, and Jewish immigrants.
ART
Among the Jewish families who would make Rego Park their home were Anja and Vladek Spiegelman, Holocaust survivors, who moved into a small house at 63-12 Carlton Street with their two-year-old son, Itzhak in 1951. Inspired by MAD magazine, Itzhak began drawing cartoons at age twelve, and his work soon appeared in his high school paper as well as in local newspapers.
Itzhak put himself through Harpur College by doing freelance illustration for Topps, contributing to the company’s original run of Wacky Packages stickers and helping bring to life such memorable parodies as Crust Tooth Paste, Kook Aid, and Chock Full O’ Bolts.
Fourteen of the forty-four cards, including Cracked Animals, Ratz Crackers, and Moron Salt were pulled from the series after offended parent companies sent Topps cease-and-desist letters.
In 1968, Spiegelman suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Shortly after his release, his mother died by suicide.
In the early 1970s, now going by Art, Spiegelman began tape-recording conversations with his father about his experiences during the Holocaust. These recordings became the basis of his graphic novel Maus, which recounts Vladek’s survival story using Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
The graphic novel fundamentally altered perceptions of comics as a serious artistic medium and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
BUKHARA
The Spiegelmans belonged to Rego Park’s first wave of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, in the 1940s and 1950s. A second wave followed decades later, arriving from Central Asia.
Bukharian Jews trace their arrival in Central Asia to around 500 BCE, after being taken into captivity by the Assyrians. Isolated from both European and Middle Eastern Jewish centers, Bukharian Jews, who lived primarily in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, developed a distinct culture, language, and religious tradition shaped by Persian and Islamic influences. They spoke Bukhori, a Judeo-Persian language written in Hebrew script, which you can still hear on the streets of Rego Park today.
In the late twentieth century, facing economic decline, rising nationalism, and antisemitism in the final years of the Soviet Union, most Bukharian Jews left their homeland. Today, there are fewer than 200 Bukharian Jews living in the city of Bukhara itself, while more than 50,000 live in the United States, the majority concentrated in Rego Park and neighboring Forest Hills.
While the stretch of 108th Street known as Bukharian Broadway lies in Forest Hills, Rego Park has no shortage of businesses and restaurants offering Bukharian specialties like kebabs, plov, and lagman.
Cheburechnaya on 63rd Drive is probably the best-known of Rego Park’s Central Asian eateries. In a recent review, Robert Sietsema sampled several of the restaurant’s more unusual offerings, including skewers of lamb tail and lamb testicles, which he described as tasting like “smoky chicken.”
I’m not much of a testicle guy, so I opted instead for the justifiably famous Rokhat Bakery. The Austin Street shop was opened in the 1990s by brothers Roshiel and Rafael Samekhov and turns out a dizzying array of leavened and unleavened flatbreads, along with sweet and savory pastries like samsas, a kind of baked samosa. Most of the breads are cooked in massive tandoors, stuck in neat rows along the oven walls like a huddled colony of bats and left to bake in the moist, hot air.
Once you’ve tried the massive noni toki, almost comically large, parabolic rounds of matzo shaped on an inverted wok, you’ll never go back to the flat stuff again.
A video of the bakers in action.
FIRE
My introduction to Rego Park came the day after Christmas, on the eve of a snowstorm, when I improbably found myself right in the middle of two separate emergency incidents. I had just pulled into a spot and paid for two hours of parking when four fire engines came to a screeching halt, surrounding me. As several firefighters started piling out, it was suggested in no uncertain terms that I should move. While I briefly considered bringing up the four dollars I’d just forked over to the city, I decided it would be best to cut my losses and moved my car. By the time I walked past a few minutes later, the trucks had vanished, leaving only a web of yellow caution tape wrapped around some scaffolding. While I was standing there, a car pulled in and parked in my old spot.
The next incident occurred less than an hour later while I was taking a picture from the median on Queens Boulevard (once known as The Boulevard of Death).
Several firetrucks, most likely the same ones I had encountered earlier, were barreling down the boulevard at breakneck speed. Apparently, they had determined that the shortest path to the emergency they were responding to went directly over the median I was standing on. They announced this last minute route change by leaning into their horns while shooting me incredulous looks that could have been interpreted as either “This guy again?” or “What are you, a fucking idiot?” though likely a combination of the two. I ran out of the way of the incoming trucks and decided to stick to the side streets for the rest of the day.
AND FUR(R)Y
As harrowing as my brushes with Rego Park's fire department were, they pale in comparison to a several week stretch in 2020 in which a “possibly deranged” squirrel (or group of squirrels) terrorized the neighborhood around 65th Drive near Fitchett Street.
At least three separate incidents involving squirrel attacks were reported in the area, some involving significant loss of blood.
“Next thing I know it’s an MMA cage match and I’m losing. It just basically runs up my leg and I’m like, ‘OK squirrel, hello — what are you doing?'”
The first reported incident involved local Micheline Frederick who was holding the door open for her furniture movers when a rodent suddenly ran up her leg. “I thought ‘it’s a small rodent, how bad could this be’, so I stood completely still and the next thing I knew the blood started to fly.” Frederick urged her neighbor Licia Wang to keep a look out, but the warning “was not sufficient.” Wang became the squirrel’s next victim.
The story was picked up by all the major local TV stations, The Guardian and, of course, The Post, whose reporters outdid themselves in describing the squirrel as a “fluffy madman,” a “bushy-tailed beast,” “blood-thirsty vermin” and a “fur monster,” vivid prose that should have put its authors immediately in contention for a Pulitzer. While being attacked by a deranged squirrel truly sounds horrible, compared to the headlines of today, this masterpiece truly qualifies as a feel good story. (Warning, the photos are rather gruesome.)
And if you were wondering, there have been no reported cases of a squirrel transmitting rabies to a human in the US.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s field recording captures sounds of the aboveground train, the interior of the Rokhat bakery, and some of my many encounters with emergency response vehicles.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s most famous photograph was this portrait of Leo Tolstoy he took in 1908. The most remarkable aspect of the portrait is that it is reproduced in color.
While certainly not the first to do it, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique that involved taking three separate black-and-white images in rapid succession through red, green, and blue filters, then later overlaying the images and projecting them through matching filters, which would then produce a vibrant color image. The portrait impressed Tsar Nicholas II, who commissioned Prokudin-Gorsky to create a survey of early 20th-century Russia and provided the photographer with a railroad-car darkroom. Between 1909 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled all across the Russian Empire, documenting its people and landscapes in vibrant color.
As part of his survey, he spent time in the Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand and made these color photos a good 15 years before Rego Park had even become a neighborhood.
All photos courtesy of the Library of Congress. More here.
ODDS AND END
Eight months after he moved to the US, Jaques Pépin started working at the Rego Park Howard Johnson's. A far cry from the orange-roofed fried clam-serving HoJo's of the eighties, the Rego Park branch, which opened in 1940, was a destination. The floors were lined with thick soft carpets under glittering chandeliers with booths of maroon leather upholstery. The restaurant closed and was demolished in 1974.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the Rego Center Mall kept losing tenants can be attributed to the terrifying, screeching predator soundtrack that management used to blast in the mall’s public spaces to deter pigeons.
What’s Out? Squirrels invading your home. What’s In? Squirrels protecting your home.
11 minutes of bread baking in a tandoor oven in Azerbaijan.
There is a reception tonight (Jan 8th) at the Ivy Brown Gallery for Coco McPherson’s show, the Last Meatpackers of Washington Street. The show runs through January 22nd.
A reader pointed out that “Wijde Put” is old dutch roughly translates to a body of water larger (wider) than a well which is a strange expression but clarifies the origin of White Pot a bit. (Thanks Christoph!)
Are there any uninteresting neighborhoods in NYC - seems not! Or maybe it’s just that you research and write so well. Loved the stories behind the squirrels, the Led Zeppelin riot, and the lost parking spot, and laughed at your interpretation of the overhead photo of the Crescents as a drive-in. Thanks for a great read.
Huzzah! You made it to my neighborhood, and did it great justice with those lovely photographic compositions. Real Good Post!