3. The Birth of a Suburb, the Growth of a Ghetto

Don’t ask me, said Simple, I don’t expect to have the money to spend on nothing more than a bottle of beer on Saturday nights. But if I did have a big bag of loot all at once, I bet you a fat man I would buy myself a house in Jamaica, Long Island, own a dog, dig a garden, and raise some chickens to eat.

Langston Hughes

South Jamaica, before the early twentieth century, enjoyed a somewhat fugitive geographic existence as the southern and less-developed part of the Town of Jamaica. (South Jamaica first made it into the New York Times on August 1, 1853, in a description of a storm with hailstones the size of hens’ eggs.)1 Early references to South Jamaica often emphasized its rusticity. As late as 1929 there was mention of goings on amid the “woods of South Jamaica.”2 These woods were soon to vanish forever. In 1898, with consolidation, Jamaica had become a part of New York City, and with consolidation, Jamaica as a legal entity ceased to exist, and the town simply became a part of the newly formed Borough of Queens. Consolidation wrought a fundamental reorientation of southeastern Queens. Since the mid-seventeenth century the area had seen itself as part of Long Island, with its ties trailing to the east. But even though, as one observer reported as late as 1926, “many people…do not know that Jamaica is in New York City,” Jamaica residents increasingly looked west, considering their neighborhood as a periphery of the expanding metropolis.3

In the early twentieth century, as population and development increased, South Jamaica gained new life as the name of a neighborhood. The character of South Jamaica changed rapidly, as its forested areas were cleared for roads and highways, and its farms sold and subdivided. In 1929 a real estate developer marveled at how rapidly South Jamaica and the entire South Queens area had grown, and how much new private housing had been built over the previous decade. By 1940, the area was almost entirely developed, with little open space left.4

Map 2. Rochdale Village vicinity, ca. 1968

The northern part of Jamaica had always been more developed, and it now attracted middle-class and upper-class housing, some of it quite posh. The southern area of Jamaica, below Hillside Avenue, had more modest housing. By 1910 large portions of southern Jamaica were developed in “plain but good one- and two-family houses, close together on small plots, stretching in long rows along the streets.” These were initially occupied primarily by German and Irish families of modest incomes, moving out from Brooklyn.5 In 1939 the New York City Guide of the Federal Writers’ Projects sniffed that most new housing in southeastern Queens were “undistinguished products of the Queens building boom of the 1920s.”6 It was this southern area, just south of Jamaica’s central business district, that became the center of the black population in Jamaica.

There had been a substantial black population of slaves in Jamaica before the final emancipation in New York State, in 1827. Jamaica’s Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church—now a central institution in South Jamaica—was founded in 1834. In the 1890s the black population led a heroic and ultimately successful struggle against Jamaica’s segregated schoolhouse for colored students, leading to a 1900 bill passed by the state legislature declaring segregated schooling illegal in New York State.7

But the main source of the increased black population in the early decades of twentieth-century Jamaica was migration from other parts of New York City after World War I, a pattern that was similar to but far less documented than the growth of the city’s other large black neighborhoods, notably Harlem and Bedford- Stuyvesant, where small wedges of black settlement established themselves, and then, through a variety of forces, gradually expanded in size and scope.8 The combination of extensive housing development in the early decades of the twentieth century, along with the growing desirability of new housing north of Jamaica Avenue, left landlords after World War I with vacant rooms, and they started renting to blacks, primarily from Harlem, and to poorer whites.9 An official with the New York Urban League wrote in 1926 that “until a few years ago the center of the Negro population [in Jamaica] was in the section around Portland and South Streets, living in old-law tenements—the population has a combination of Negro Italian and Pole frequently living in the same house.”10

But by the mid-1920s, large numbers of black families were moving to South Jamaica, not only to rent apartments, but to buy houses, and it became one of the few areas in New York City where blacks could escape the habitual problem of being charged excessive rents for apartments.11 South Jamaica was soon the premier area for black homeownership in New York City.12 This was in part through conscious effort and planned design. Merrick Park Gardens, off Merrick Boulevard and 108th Avenue, was developed by J. Franklin Patterson around 1917. By 1925 the Frederick Douglas [sic] Realty Company, with its headquarters on New York Boulevard (which would later form the southern boundary of Rochdale Village) was also building private homes for blacks, sometimes in conjunction with local Jewish developers.13 The Urban League official James H. Hubert, wrote in 1926 that it had “developed into one of the finest Negro colonies of the state.”14

There was, needless to say, considerable white resistance to black homeownership in South Jamaica, but this did little to stop its growth. By 1925 the New York Amsterdam News was reporting “an exodus of white residents from certain streets in Jamaica has started because of what they term ‘an invasion’ by colored people purchasing homes.”15 The next year a close observer of black South Jamaica wrote that “as was the case in Harlem many streets formerly closed to Negroes are opening up. One family quietly buys on the block, the neighbors become alarmed and begin advertising for ‘colored buyers.’”16 As this dynamic gathered force, in 1926 the Amsterdam News rhapsodized that South Jamaica had become “the poor colored man’s Mecca, in that today he can purchase a home for $500 to $1000 down.”17 In 1930 writing of South Jamaica the same paper claimed that it, not Harlem, was the “fastest growing Negro community in the world.”18 By 1932, there were 12,000 to 15,000 blacks in the Jamaica area.19

Middle-class black South Jamaica soon sprouted an active organizational life. Homeowners formed the South Jamaica Property Owners Association in late 1926 to address their concerns.20 A few months later, at a meeting at Allen AME church, the Jamaica branch of the NAACP was founded.21 It would grow rapidly, gaining almost five hundred members in its first year, and several thousand within a few years.22 To the left of the NAACP, by the mid-1930s an active chapter of the Communist Party sprouted, as did the Committee for Equal Opportunity, with similar politics, originally organized to get Jamaica Hospital to hire black physicians and dentists.23

These organizations fought to eliminate the barriers, social and legal, placed in the way of black homeownership. In many instances it required considerable bravery to be the first black family on a block, with white response ranging from acts of vandalism (red paint splattered on walls; windshields broken in driveways), to death threats, as one family found in 1927, in the form of a flaming cross on their front lawn. The struggle for black homeownership, against illegal and still quite legal means of discrimination (such as restrictive covenants) continued into the 1960s.24 The fight for full black equality in Jamaica and South Jamaica was waged on many fronts in the 1930s and mid-1940s, often with interracial support. In 1946 the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP convinced the Gertz Department Store, the flagship store on Jamaica Avenue, to hire blacks in the sales department for the first time.25 (This particular battle would have to be fought again.) In 1945, when the notoriously racist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo called a local Italian woman “my dear dago,” there were joint rallies of blacks, Jews, and Italians in Jamaica calling for his impeachment.26 There were also fights against segregation at local restaurants and theaters, and against the casual racism of the day, as when, in 1941, the NAACP persuaded the local A&P supermarket to discontinue stocking “Nigger Head Stove Polish.”27

In the late 1920s and 1930s black South Jamaica also did battle, figuratively and sometimes in the flesh, with the Ku Klux Klan, which had its most visible chapter in New York City in Jamaica, with its epicenter in St. Albans, an area that in an ironic twist by the 1950s, would become synonymous with middle-class black suburbanism, but that in the 1920s was still entirely white. In 1927, during their late 1920s heyday, 1,400 Klansmen and -women marched in a Memorial Day parade on Jamaica and Hillside Avenues, despite much jeering and occasional confrontations with the crowd. There were allegations by Klansmen of police brutality, and no doubt the heavily Irish police force were not sympathetic to the Klan’s militant anti-Catholicism.28 The next year, a Klan rally on the Fourth of July brought out between 3,000 and 5,000 participants to St. Albans, to hear speakers denouncing Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith, Negroes, and other perceived social ills. The evening was topped off by the burning of a forty-foot cross, to be followed, the next week, by the burning of a ninety-foot cross on nearby Rockaway Boulevard, which local Klansmen proudly claimed as a “Klan’s world record.”29 (At about the same time a Klan spokesman announced plans, never realized, for an elaborate Jamaica “Klubhouse.”)30 The Klan would sharply decline in Jamaica and elsewhere in the North as a major political force shortly thereafter, but the racist sentiments that had engendered them remained. There were cross burnings on Hillside Avenue in 1936, and again in 1940.31 There were enough memories of the Klan that in 1946, when blacks started moving into St. Albans, some found notices on their doors from the “Ku Klux Klan District of St. Albans.”32

But beyond the explicit problems caused by white racism, the broader and perhaps more fundamental problem that confronted South Jamaica was the growth of poverty and its attendant social ills. South Jamaica, once it became identified as an area of black settlement, attracted poor as well as middle-class blacks, and hard-won middle-class respectability existed cheek by jowl with areas of extremely distressed housing. For all the pride in black homeownership in South Jamaica, there was a steady and growing population of poorer residents, living not, for the most part, in tenements, but in poorly constructed, badly overcrowded and dilapidated frame houses.33

By 1935 South Jamaica was described as having “some of the worst slums in the city,” with many apartments “without electricity and running water,” people living in “wooden hovels,” flimsy firetraps with “housing horrors comparable to Charles Dickens’ London.” It was an area with inadequate facilities for transportation; poor roads and sewage, including many ill-marked and guarded Long Island Railroad street-level grade crossings; poor schools; a lack of recreational and shopping facilities; and rising problems with crime and gang violence.34 There were also problems with prostitution, in the red-light district near the LIRR embankment, where “lounging women [are] waiting to steer a prospect into any one of a score of side street bagnios,” notorious throughout Queens.35 By the 1940s, lawlessness was reportedly keeping South Jamaica residents shuttered in their homes at night, and the Jamaica branch of the NAACP demanded that South Jamaica receive more police protection and that Negro officers be assigned to the area.36 As in many black communities, the other side of the coin of police neglect was police bias and brutality against black suspects. These concerns were aired in 1938 when a white man was killed in a racially charged melee; seven blacks were charged with homicide, five whites were charged with disorderly conduct. The NAACP claimed the police investigations and indictments were biased and succeeded in having the charges reduced.37 Accusations of police brutality would continue into the postwar period.38

There were various efforts by the black community in South Jamaica to address the problems in their midst: social outreach programs, settlement houses, calls for increased recreational facilities, and demands for badly needed improvements to the housing and infrastructure by various civic groups. An interracial South Jamaica Community League was founded in 1935.39 The same year the Committee for Equal Opportunity opened a short-lived settlement house in South Jamaica, the South Side House, which offered after-school activities and family assistance.40 Despite these efforts, by the late 1930s many outside observers had written off South Jamaica as an area with a declining house stock, poor transportation, and a burgeoning black population. The notorious 1938 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) study, whose multicolored charts put “redlining” into the language, with red designating areas not worthy of new real estate investment, unsurprisingly gave South Jamaica an essentially failing grade, a large scarlet D.41

Without new private investment forthcoming, residents of South Jamaica looked to the government for assistance. Perhaps the most universal demand in South Jamaica in the 1930s was for slum clearance and new recreational facilities. Two playgrounds opened in South Jamaica in the late 1930s, and Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses came for their dedications.42 In 1940 South Jamaica Houses opened, representing the fairest hopes of housing progressives, one of the first projects of the New York City Housing Authority and the first to be consciously planned as interracial housing.43 (This would be somewhat controversial with the Jamaica NAACP, whose leadership felt that with the great need for minority housing, all the apartments should be reserved for blacks, though the Amsterdam News disagreed, arguing that “Negroes because they are in the majority in a certain neighborhood should no more insist on discriminating than they would want to be discriminated against.”)44

There were 9,000 applications for South Jamaica’s 447 apartments, which replaced 150 ramshackle frame houses in the most distressed area of the neighborhood. When it opened the development was 70 percent African American and 30 percent white, and was for many years widely touted as a triumph of interracial housing.45 But this would change over the course of the 1950s; South Jamaica Houses would lose almost all its white residents, and by 1960 would be almost entirely African American, prefiguring the fate of the interracial experiment beginning to unfold two miles away at Rochdale Village.

The changes in South Jamaica Houses reflected the changes in South Jamaica as a whole. If in 1940 South Jamaica was a black neighborhood, it was an interwar black neighborhood; that is, one that still retained a lot of whites. A careful 1943 survey of New York City neighborhoods concluded that South Jamaica was a neighborhood of approximately 30,000, of whom only about one-third were African American.46 (Of course, the usual caveat applies. Like all New York City neighborhoods, South Jamaica has unfixed and wandering boundaries, and any discussion of its precise extent and population is inherently squishy.) But what made South Jamaica a “black” neighborhood was the overwhelming whiteness of the surrounding area, and in the 1943 survey, the adjacent areas of southeastern Queens, Springfield, St. Albans, Laurelton-Rosedale, Howard Beach, and Jamaica proper (increasingly defined as that part of Jamaica in which blacks didn’t live) all registered black populations of 1 percent or less. But South Jamaica was genuinely racially mixed. Harold Cruse, the author of the fiery black-nationalist classic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and not one to sentimentalize interracial harmony, grew up in South Jamaica in the early 1930s, and described his neighborhood as “not a typical American neighborhood at all. It had native Americans, Irish, Poles, Jews, Germans, Italians, and blacks, who lived side by side without much visible friction. There was no separate black neighborhood in Jamaica in the 1920’s and the 1930’s.”47

The black population in South Jamaica expanded rapidly after 1940. St. Albans, which in the 1943 study was recorded as having a minuscule black population of 0.02 percent, soon was the object of an coordinated effort, led by real estate agent Hugo R. Heydorn, to increase black ownership in the area. If restrictive covenants were upheld for St. Albans as late as 1947, the year before they were declared unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court, by 1948 at least sixty black families lived in St. Albans. In a short time St. Albans was the home of many of the members of the black upper middle class and entertainment elite, such as Lena Horne, Count Basie, and Roy Campanella.48

Parts of South Jamaica would remain an area of pride for black residents there and elsewhere in the city. Olga Lewis remembers visiting South Jamaica while living in East New York in the 1940s and ’50s. “It was a very nice, quiet neighborhood—as a black person you felt good saying I’m going to Jamaica. You usually were going to visit someone who owned a home. They had rentals, but primarily it was homeowners; it was a proud middle-class neighborhood.”49 Many had followed the path of Hugh Williams, a longtime Rochdale resident, who moved to Jamaica around 1952. He had been raised on West 143rd Street between Seventh Avenue and Lenox, but he “didn’t like the environment; there were a lot of influences that I didn’t really like, lots of drug use. One day I was standing on Lenox Avenue, looking at a lot of people older than I, and I said to myself, when I get their age, I don’t want to be here, I could do better—my sister lived in Jamaica, she had an extra room, and I moved there.”50

But the continued growth of a black middle class was only part of the story of the transformation of the neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. During this period, while the intracity migration continued, there was a new migration of black families directly from the South, primarily from North and South Carolina, who were for the most part less well off financially than those who had come during the pre-war black migration. A North Carolina migrant, Omar Barbour, who moved to South Jamaica as a young boy, remembers living in a run-down, overcrowded, and shabby rooming house, with peeling paint on the walls, a leaky roof, and an inadequate sewage system that turned the area into a swamp after a heavy rain.51 A 1948 report concluded that South Jamaica had more substandard housing than any other area of Queens.52 The late 1950s saw a rapid departure of whites from the area, and the black population of South Jamaica was, by one estimate, 40,000 in 1955, and 100,000 by 1960.53 The population of South Jamaica became almost entirely black (or rather, contingent areas in southeastern Queens that were almost entirely black were increasingly included in an expanding “South Jamaica”). Hillside Avenue, the conventional dividing line between Jamaica and South Jamaica, would become known by the 1950s as the Mason-Dixon Line of southeastern Queens. But even as South Jamaica’s poverty increased and spread, the neighborhood remained bifurcated. As a 1966 survey commented, unlike Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where large sections of the neighborhoods were severely blighted, “poverty does not manifest itself throughout the entire community but is concentrated in small areas frequently referred to as ‘poverty pockets.’”54

By 1960 many in South Jamaica saw their hard-won middle-class respectability in danger of being engulfed by the area’s growing poverty. They did not want the area to become, because it was a black neighborhood, a dumping ground for the city’s problems. When in 1955 plans were announced for a six-hundred-unit low- and middle-income complex that would have displaced about twenty households, the community reaction was quite negative. There were complaints about the injustice of forcing black homeowners to relocate, and Louis Childs, the African American president of the Baisley Park Community League (Baisley Park was a few short blocks from where Rochdale would be built) complained (somewhat implausibly) at a hearing before the Board of Estimate that “we have no juvenile delinquency now, no burglaries and no assaults. Are these what you are bringing us now? We don’t want the housing project.”55 The project was never built. If any mood characterized the community leaders of South Jamaica in 1960 it was a general sense of caution: anger at the persistence of racism, unease at the problems the recent influx of poorer blacks were causing, and wariness toward whites bearing gifts and making promises about the future. This was the mood of South Jamaica on the eve of the building of Rochdale Village.