Historic Tales Of Long Island City

Historic Tales Of Long Island City by Greater Astoria Historical Society, com­ing June 20 (128 pp., Arcadia Publishing, $21.99).

Ask 100 people from the neighborhood who their favorite character is, and you will get 100 dif­ferent answers, each with a quick story. These nar­ratives are often passed down from one person to another making those characters legends that are woven into an essential part of our community’s oral and written folklore.

Long Island City, along with her sisters Brook­lyn and New York, and a handful of outlying towns, formed Greater New York in 1898. This book is devoted to Long Island City’s past, a rich narrative of the famous and obscure displayed here in one book for the first time.

As to the famous, many of you are aware of lo­cals: Captain Kidd, the pirate, Steven Halsey the dreamer, ‘Battle-Axe’ Gleason, the Mayor, and even Roxy, the dog. You are also no doubt familiar with William Steinway, Isamu Noguchi, Chester Carlson, ‘Whitey’ Ford and Ethel Merman.

But this book goes far deeper and reveals a community that you are hardly acquainted with. For in this community:

The document proclaiming American Inde­pendence was first read on this soil;

The Inland Empire (as they called the great cen­ter of the continent) was linked to the Empire City;

The name of one of its neighborhoods is on the first page of the Information Age;

The Steinways built and developed the enter­tainment industry , 

And where Sony showed the world what a tran­sistor could do, and by doing so, showed us our fu­ture;  

This book builds the case as to why our com­munity should be proclaimed as the ‘Cradle of Cre­ativity.’

But there is much more.  The Dutch Kills mill­stones ground wheat that was shipped in kegs which help launch New York City as a world cap­ital – an event so important that flour kegs are de­picted on the New York City Coat of Arms. For these reasons Long Island City also deserves the name ‘New York’s Other City.’