I called Robert A. Miller, an amateur local historian in Queens, because I heard that the Long Island Motor Parkway, which once stretched from Queens out to Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island, was about to celebrate its centennial.
True, said Mr. Miller, they began building the parkway in June 1908. And yes, it is widely recognized as the country’s first parkway, and the setting for the Vanderbilt Cup, the first major auto event in the country.
And yes, he’d be happy to meet me on Thursday, on the several-mile stretch of the long-defunct parkway still remaining in eastern Queens. But first, he had another centennial to tend to: Preparing for the 100th anniversary of The Times Newsweekly, a weekly paper covering western Queens and founded in 1908 as The Ridgewood Times.
Wondering how many centennials a man can fit into one day, I arranged to meet Mr. Miller at the Newsweekly’s offices on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, where he and his brother, Arthur Miller, and an unrelated friend, George Miller, of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, were helping the paper prepare an anniversary commemorative insert by pulling news and photos from 100 years’ worth of newspapers.
They were sitting with the paper’s managing editor, Bill Mitchell, and its publisher and editor Maureen E. Walthers, 73, a hard-boiled, wisecracking newsgal who has worked at the paper since 1976. They were all eating lunch, corned beef and cabbage.
“We do things right around here,” Ms. Walthers said, and then they went back to work.
“All the knowledge these three guys have, it’s more than an encyclopedia,” Ms. Walthers said. “They’re mixing all the ingredients and soon it will be cake.”
She picked up a framed copy of the first edition of the paper, published on Aug. 1, 1908 — half in English, half in German — and with a newsstand price of 2 cents. On a box on the upper left is the motto, “Advertise Your Wants In The Times.”
The group was reviewing papers from 1934. The Feb. 9 issue had an article about Lt. Gov. Franklin Haven visiting Ridgewood. The Feb. 16 issue had an article about a local law crated to keep “peddlers, vendors, hawkers and hucksters from the streets of Ridgewood and Glendale.”
“Hawkers and hucksters,” Ms. Walthers said, cackling. “Guess that includes us.”
There was something on Ridgewood’s Knights of Columbus opposing the showing of “immoral pictures and the enactment of the birth control bill.” And an article with the headline “Favor Park on Site of Ash Dumps,” about building what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
A headline in the Feb. 23 issue reported: “Survey Shows H.S. Students Not Influenced By Jazz Age.”
Ash heaps. Jazz Age. Fitzgerald, anyone?
The March 3, 1934, copy informed readers that, “Queens Tax Rate, Set At $2.83, Is Highest in City.”
Were the articles so different than today’s, asked Arthur Miller?
“It’s so old it’s new again,” he said.
But Robert Miller observed that they had run across an unusually high number of articles about women falling out of apartment windows. The cause was often omitted. The men wondered what it could be: Were the women waving to the ice man? Closing the shutters? Was it the heavy clothing? The lack of window guards?
The Times Newsweekly circulation is roughly 25,000, Ms. Walthers said, including about 2,000 copies sent to subscribers in Florida, mostly former Queens residents now retired.
Ms. Walthers told her favorite journalism parable. She came to work at the Timesweekly with no experience (”My experience was stirring a pot in the kitchen — barely finished high school.”) After several years as a reporter, she tried taking a journalism class at Columbia University, she said, and found herself sitting around a table with a professor and students much younger than her.
The professor asked what was the most important thing in journalism, and the students answered Truth and Justice. Finally, Ms. Walthers gave her opinion: “Advertising.”
“The professor took me aside after class and said this may not be the best class for you.” They refunded her tuition and several years later, she bought the Newsweekly, whose cover this week was emblazoned with the usual bold banner headlines:
HE’S SHOT IN BEEF AT A BODEGA
BREAK–IN BID BUST
THEY BEAT HIM DOWN FOR PHONE
Then it was on to the Motor Parkway’s centennial. Mr. Miller and I drove to the remaining stretch of the Motor Parkway and parked in a lot in Alley Pond Park across from Creedmore Psychiatric Center at the corner of Union Turnpike and Winchester Boulevard. We walked past the Alley Pond Tennis Center and past a group of men practicing cricket in a tennis court.
It is basically the east end of a three-mile stretch of what remains of the parkway in Queens, although there are remaining segments on Long Island, said Mr. Miller. It was built by William K. Vanderbilt Jr., a great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon.
“Willie K” wanted a race-road for him and his tycoon friends. The annual Vanderbilt Cup soon drew an international field and crowds of 300,000.
The private 45-mile highway from Flushing, Queens, to Lake Ronkonkoma was built between 1908 and 1911. The architect was John Russell Pope, who later went on to design the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It is listed with the National and New York State Registers of Historic Places in 2002, but never recognized as landmark by the city.
The parkway closed in 1938, and parts are run by the city’s Parks Department as a path for walking and biking and enveloped by a woodsy canopy. Although it is surrounded by busy roads like Union Turnpike and the Grand Central Parkway, it’s handsome banks and curves pull the eye off into the distance, back to an earlier time of sporting chaps in gloves and caps, driving chugging motorcars.
Mr. Miller speaks passionately about its swashbuckling history: The drama and danger of the open-road motorcar races; how rum-runners used the parkway because it was privately owned and not patrolled; how Mr. Vanderbilt had dramatic jurisdictional showdowns over rights of way with Robert Moses, who was building the Grand Central Parkway; the 1910 race that drew 300,000 people and killed several mechanics and spectators; how Mr. Vanderbilt’s vision changed Long Island’s roadways and the shape of the automotive world
“When this opened, there had never been anything like it in the world. It had more reinforced concrete than all the rest of the roads in the United States. Combined!.”
He regrets never meeting “Willy K,” who died Jan. 8, 1944, “two-and-a-half months before I was born.”
Mr. Miller is a retired Queens Library employee who for the past 40 years been studying and giving tours and talks about the parkway. As a young man, he read an article about the parkway and set out with car and bicycle exploring it in Queens and Long Island.
“For 40 years, I’ve tried to make people more aware of it,” said Mr. Miller, 65, whose voice becomes imbued with a touch of regret as he talks about why he never married. “Things just never worked out,” he said, staring down the old parkway narrowing into the distance. “I’ve given just about my whole life to this thing. I guess it’s the romantic in me. I love the way it curves around. It’s like a time warp.”
