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    Valley Stream
    Valley Stream
    Valley Stream
    Ebook174 pages57 minutes

    Valley Stream

    By Bill Florio

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    About this ebook

    In this photographic history of Valley Stream, author Bill Florio documents vividly the long and illustrious history of this Nassau County village.


    Located near the south shore of Long Island at the gateway to Nassau County, the village of Valley Stream has grown from a bucolic farming community in the 1840s to a dense suburban hub full of history and diversity. Consisting of communities named Foster's Meadow, Rum Junction, Skunk's Misery, and Hungry Harbor, the town saw nightlife and leisure blossom after Merrick Road was built and the South Side Railroad pulled in. The village incorporated in 1925, finding itself a center of industry as the location of the Ridgewood Reservoir's conduit pipe, Curtiss Field, Bulova Demco, and later, the birthplace of Snapple. Over the years, Valley Stream gained attention through many of its attractions, including the William R. Gibson Houses, Hoffman's, the Pavilion Royal, Green Acres Mall, the Rio Theatre, Valley Stream State Park, and Itgen's Ice Cream Parlour.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateFeb 9, 2015
    ISBN9781439649749
    Valley Stream
    Author

    Bill Florio

    Bill Florio is a local historian and author of Images of America: Valley Stream. He is the executive director of the Nassau County Historic Properties Mapping Board and is responsible for the official map of Historic Nassau County. Images for this book have been collected from the Long Island Suburban Studies Institute at Hofstra University, the Nassau County Photo Archive, the Queens Public Library, the Elmont Memorial Library, and local residents.

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      Book preview

      Valley Stream - Bill Florio

      Walker.

      INTRODUCTION

      The land that became Valley Stream did not have a name until the mid-19th century. The northern portion, near Elmont, was referred to as Foster’s Meadow and the southern part as Near Rockaway. In the southwest, the swampy squatters community was called Hungry Harbor. In general, the whole area was called the land between Jamaica and Hempstead.

      The first documented activity in what would become Valley Stream, the Pea Soup Affair, occurred during the American Revolution. The town of Hempstead was fiercely Tory, and Isaac Denton and Isaac Smith plotted to poison Gen. George Washington’s pea soup to ensure a British victory. John Hendrickson of Valley Stream discovered the nefarious plan and alerted local colonial authorities who then pursued the pair to Hungry Harbor, where they escaped.

      Robert Pagan moved to Valley Stream from New York City after emigrating from Scotland and set up the village’s first general store on the corner of present-day Henry Street and Hendrickson Avenue. That intersection became the village’s first town center. Mills began popping up along the dirt roads. The Wright family built a sawmill around today’s North Corona Avenue and Morris Parkway and a gristmill on North Corona Avenue where it meets Franklin Avenue. The Cornell family set up a mill on the corner of modern-day Mill Road and Sunrise Highway.

      Pagan saw a problem with the mail delivery system. To retrieve mail, farmers had to travel miles to Hempstead, losing precious daylight hours. In 1848, Robert Pagan proposed establishing a post office branch in his general store. He looked towards the valleys and hills in the north and the streams in the south and created the name Valley Stream for the mailing address. It stuck.

      The increased population along Long Island’s south shore led to the construction of a new plank road to alleviate the traffic on Hempstead Turnpike. The Merrick Plank Road was built in 1853, allowing residents from Jamaica and the south shore to travel to the Methodist camp in Merrick. When the road came through Valley Stream, the village’s downtown shifted to the corner of modern-day Merrick Road and Central Avenue.

      Ellen Pagan, Robert Pagan’s wife, formed the first church in Valley Stream inside the Pagan homestead on Hendrickson Avenue. When the community outgrew that location, they opened the Sinner’s Hope Chapel on the land where Wheeler Avenue School now sits. That congregation has evolved over time into the current Grace United Methodist Church.

      New neighborhoods took shape in previously unsettled parts of the land. Tigertown was a squatter’s community that first appeared around 1880, known for drinking and fights. Shanties and other dwellings were built from old soapboxes and barrel staves. Years later, in 1903, the community’s mayor, Jake Golder, tried to fight off the sale of the squatters’ land by John Miller and Christopher Schrieber, who wanted to develop it.

      Cookie Hill was another squatter community known for its ladies of ill repute, including two named Black Sue and Speckled Elsie. Nearby Skunk’s Misery was named for the smell of a fertilizer plant. Rum Junction became the lively area that arose around Rockaway Avenue and the railroad.

      The South Side Railroad came through Valley Stream in November 1867, connecting Jamaica to Babylon. Though the railroad did not stop there until 1869 when the Far Rockaway branch opened, Valley Stream’s downtown shifted to Rockaway Avenue surrounding the tracks. The Rum Junction area was filled with hotels and taverns where riders waiting for a train could get a drink or spend the night.

      The Brooklyn Water Works and New York City Water Company built their aqueduct system from the Ridgewood Reservoir in Queens through Valley Stream along the future route of Sunrise Highway, past the Milburn Pumping Station in Freeport to Massapequa Lake. Most of the ponds and streams in Valley Stream were once part of the system. Sunrise Highway was built in 1928 over the conduit line, and the village was deeded all the remaining watershed properties (including the Village Green) in 1989. The steep hill under the railroad tracks on Hicks Street and Central Avenue is the buried conduit line.

      By the 1920s, residents of Valley Stream were interested in incorporating as a village. The first election for incorporation was held on September 14, 1922, at the Corona Avenue firehouse. It passed by eight votes, but that was deemed an insufficient majority. A second election was held on November 9, 1922, in Jacob Ruehl’s barbershop, but the proposal was defeated by a large number of votes. A third attempt on January 30, 1925, at the Corona Avenue firehouse brought an overwhelming majority out for incorporation: 669 voted for and only 293 against the measure.

      The village drew its boundaries as the fire district lines and intentionally left out the marshy Hungry Harbor area, believed to be useless property. They opened the village offices at 34 West Merrick Road on May 21, 1925.

      Development began in Valley Stream in earnest. The Gibson Corporation started building houses along the Roosevelt Avenue section in 1922 and later along Cochran Avenue and Dartmouth Street in 1927. William Gibson even convinced the Long Island Rail Road to put a stop in his new development. In 1929, Gibson Station opened.

      New roads and neighborhoods were appearing all over town, including Wallendorf Park, Ormonde Park, Fairhaven Park, Irma Park, and Rosedale Garden. Previously unmapped roads and road names were coming into use as other thoroughfares changed names. By the turn of the 20th century, Sand Street became Central Avenue, Mill Road became Corona Avenue, Rockaway Road was now Roosevelt Avenue, New York Avenue was renamed Valley Stream Boulevard, Linden Street was now Gibson Boulevard, Hempstead Avenue became Fairview Avenue, Merrick Avenue

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