The Queens That Gatsby Knew

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Although F. Scott Fitzgerald never lived in Queens and his best known work. “The Great Gatsby,” in not a novel about the borough, the book does offer a glimpse of what Queens must have been like half a century ago to a sharp‐eyed if somewhat romantic observer.

Fitzgerald had a tendency to heighten his impressions: A functional bridge turned into a gateway to the world's fortunes; a landfill became a waste land. But in between we do get a picture of what were essentially small towns that had not yet experienced the full impact of the metropolis.

Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck, L. I., in the fall of 1922 and in going to and from New York. used either the Long Island Railroad out of Great Neck, Douglaston, Bayside and so on to Penn Station, or drove on Northern Boulevard, passing flushing, Corona and Astoria and then taking the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. The bridge, completed in 1909 is seldom cited these days as an architectural gem, but it was striking and promising enough to call forth some of Fitzgerald's prose. In “Gatsby” he wrote:

Over the bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.

He added:

The city seen from the Queenshoro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time in its wild promise of alt the mystery and beauty in the world.

That may have been the last time anyone wrote about crossing the 59th Street bridge in such lush terms. Drivers, pouring over the bridge today, bumper to bumper in rush hours and in the usual gray smog, find it more ordinary. To be fair, the view of the bridge coming in from Queens has been obscured by dense industrial buildings and housing developments. Northern Boulevard, which leads off from it, reveals for some of its length the less attractive side of a run‐down highway.

Low, box‐like structures, truck parks, car washes, garish cocktail lounges. used car lots and boarded up buildings give the area a seedy look. Queensboro Bridge Plaza, once sparkling enough to merit special mention in a 1920 Chamber of Commerce brochure, is today stained brown, rusty and flaking. But when Fitzgerald wrote of driving “under the spidery girders of the elevated.” decay had not set in.

But it was Main Street in Flushing off Northern Boulevard that was the focus of Queens for Fitzgerald. For it was there that the climactic act in “Gatsby” occurs: the killing of Myrtle Wilson in front of her husband's gas station. Fitzgerald himself doesn't mention Flushing or Northern Boulevard, but it doesn't take elaborate detective work to locate the place from the evidence in the novel:

About half way between West Egg [Great Neck) and New York, the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile.

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A glance at a map that also details the route of the Long Island will show that both roads come to meet right in the heart of Flushing. And in the most famous passage in the book, he goes on to describe it:

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into the ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash‐gray men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Brooding over this waste land out of a billboard were the face and spectacles of Doctor T. J. Eckelburg, which later on in the book appear to the demented imagination of the cuckolded husband, as the seeing eye of God. In those empty spaces and graying heaps, part of which was known as the Corona Dumps, Fitzgerald found his perfect image for the callous and brutal betrayal of the incurably innocent Gatsby. You would be hard put to find much of Fitzgerald's Queens today. Northern Boulevard whips by with scarcely a look at Main Street. The area, as is the rest of the borough, is solidly built up —though with some areas less than others, and one can still find streets with one‐family houses neatly maintained.

On a recent afternoon, trees along the sidewalks in one section of Flushing were being pruned of dead and low limbs. These at least had the look of small towns and villages, which in Gatsby's days, Queens largely was. Only a few years before Mayor Gaynor had called Jackson Heights the cornfields of Queens.

Bridge Spurred Growth

Queens started to grow as a residential community when the Queensboro Bridge opened. By 1920 the population numbered 500,000. (It is now two million.) The real boom started with the draining of Flushing Meadows and the choice of the site for the 1939 World's Fair. The opening of the Queens‐Midtown Tunnel helped, as did the improved roads to the fair.

World War II slowed down the pace of development, but after the war the rush was on. The series of fantastic intersections at Grand Central Parkway, Union Turnpike and the Van Wyck Expressway would have seemed to the Fitzgerald of the 1920's like something out

Occasionally it is possible to get a whiff of the past. A photograph of Main Street in Flushing, taken in about 1920, shows a wide street with a sprinkling of cars standing at the curbs. There was lots of curb space. Traffic was so slight that it left room for a long view down the center of the street to the railroad trestle.

A barber pole in candystriped red and white stood guard in front of a shop. Just beyond, Buick announced its wares. Across the street a sign simply said SODA. In the distance the spire of St. George's Church was visible and the large round clock in front of Conovitz the Jeweler set the time at exactly 6 o'clock. The Janice Theatre was showing “The Great Air Robbery.”

Some Gone, Some Remain

Well, St. George's Chuich remains, its spire as stately as ever. And so does the old clock in front of the Conovitz shop. And if one looks hard at the shops along the street, one notices that many of the buildings are one‐ and two‐story affairs as they were 50 years ago. Only the facades are different.

But Main Street has none of the feel of a small town. It has the hurried and harried tempo of 14th Street off Union Square or of Fordham Road off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. On a recent busy Saturday, it took one car three green lights to turn off Main Street to Kissena Boulevard end on an ordinary Monday morning, the policeman at one intersection had to caution pedestrians to wait for the light so that wheeled traffic could get through.

Most of the changes though are more momentous. There is never a moment, for example, when the air is not filled with shark‐tailed jetliners headed toward La Guardia Airport.

And although one is not likely to see today housing advertisements that read, “Highly restricted but moderately priced,” the fact is that Queens has become one long suburb and the farther east one goes, roughly speaking, the higher the economic level. Movement is away from the center of the city, leaving pockets of trouble behind. There are areas in Long Island City that present the familiar pattern of high crime rate, poverty and drugs, and there are other pockets, in Jamaica for one, where the same is true.

New Roads Help Little

In spite of the new roads and the increase of horsepower in automobiles, the highways into and out of the city in the morning and evening are one long tie‐up. It is likely that a motorist today will average more than 40 or so miles an hour that were the going rate in Fitzgerald's time—at least during nonrush hours. That's one way of measuring progress.

On the other hand, living in Queens is far more inviting than it appeared to him. It has the largest park areas of all the city boroughs. It's the home of Shea Stadium and of the Mets and Jets. And the valley of ashes Flushing Meadows ‐ Corona has been turned into a green and pleasant land. Fitzgerald would surely have noticed that.