The Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square (PART 1)
If you have ever visited Woodhaven, Queens, maybe you noticed the big rock at the northern tip of an awkward and narrow concrete memorial on 84th Street between 90th Road and 91st Avenue. Near the rock there is a flagpole and a New York City Parks Department sign. “Lt. Clinton L. Whiting Square,” the sign announces to those visitors who get close enough to read it.
Most people see Whiting Square from inside their cars, arriving on 91st Avenue from the east or 84th Street from busy Atlantic Avenue to the south. These routes into the interior of the neighborhood, with its cavernous rows of houses, spill into Whiting Square, where an uncanny open space reveals the rock, the trees, and the unmistakable sense that we are somewhere important. But what is this place? Unless you double-park in front of the store, or by the median under the trees, there is no place to stop—so most people in cars never really see Whiting Square.
On maps it appears a wedge in the middle of 84th street, a traffic circle punctuated by a median that extends to the south like an upside-down exclamation mark shaded by a row of seven towering trees. This is the extent of Whiting Square.
Whiting Square is a peculiar and mysterious memorial, but these little memorial pocket parks are all over New York City. There are greenstreets, where flowery plantings offer some beauty amidst the built environment. There are triangles, which make use of the unused parts of intersections. And there are squares, sometimes vestiges of another time, many of their honorees all but unknown now. The city often rises above these tiny spaces, crowding them in ways that make them hard to see. Whiting Square is located at an obscure intersection in a residential area where the imposition of the street grid on an earlier set of roadways left extra road space, an anomalous glitch revealing something about the area many do not know. You can go look at it. What do you see?
Just about each year, Whiting Square is mentioned in local newspapers, one of four locations in Woodhaven memorializing members of the armed services who perished in wars fought overseas. Once it was a location of some renown. If you’re from Woodhaven, or if you visited there back in the day, maybe you saw a Memorial Day ceremony there, even a parade. Observances now are modest, attended by small numbers of the faithful. Does anyone stop to remember Lt. Clinton L. Whiting? Does anyone know who he was?
These days, Whiting Square is usually mentioned in casual conversation as the location of “the rock”—that singularly recognizable spot for anyone who grew up in Woodhaven. Maybe it’s obvious that the rock used to be the mount for a plaque with names of those local boys who gave the ultimate sacrifice. But the plaque has been gone so long, who even notices what isn’t there anymore?
The story of Whiting Square is, in some sense, the story of what has happened everywhere. Times change, memories fade; old achievements are obscured by successive generations. If we scrape away that patina time has layered on, what can we see?
If you’re really old, or have an interest in local history, you might know there was once a field artillery weapon displayed at Whiting Square—a 20,000 pound Krupp howitzer captured in the Argonne Forest during the first World War. But you’re probably not old enough to remember it first-hand; it’s the stuff of legend, so maybe you heard about it. In the age where you can search for information about anything in a few seconds, we learn there are photographs of Whiting Square with the cannon. So, it turns out to be true.
The captured howitzer, that relic of a bloody war, stood at Whiting Square from 1928 until 1942, when on the orders of Robert Moses the Parks Department collected all but the most antique decorative weapons scattered around city parks and scrapped them, repurposing the metal for another war effort. That was eighty years ago. Ever since then, the rock has stood on the north end of Whiting Square. Beyond its symbolic value as an emblem of sacrifice and national pride, it stands for a story there is no one left to tell, and maybe has never been told. The gun may be long gone, but if you are persistent and perhaps relentless in the search, the story appears. Excavating a story that reveals a mystery with each clue, I go to my sources: clicking, saving, referencing, searching, linking… this is the story of Whiting Square.
Searching online I find that Whiting Square is a place on a map, with its own weather, a center from which other places can be measured, just as Union Course, the 19th century village in what is now the western part of Woodhaven, is also a place.
In May 1928, when Whiting Square was dedicated, the land was already there at the intersection of 84th Street, 91st Avenue and 90th Road. The little memorial park was conceived to remember those who died fighting in WWI, including Lt. Whiting. On the north end was the rock with its plaque listing the names of those lost and, for a while, that howitzer. To honor the surviving families for their warrantless losses, on the southern end of Whiting Square was a small garden, under maturing trees, constant reminders of the young men who did not return. The Gold Star Memorial, initially just a small circular garden with a path around it, in 1932 had three benches added, encouraging contemplation and remembrance. However, Whiting Square was always about more than that.
Whiting Square is a public square, the center of something. But if that’s so, what is it the center of? The west side of 84th Street used to have five storefronts. There was a small grocer, a vegetable and meat market, a cleaner/tailor and a store that sold cigars, soda, ice cream, stationery, even toys.
Now all that is left is a little store, a bodega some call it. A couple doors down there is a home with commercial signage offering acupuncture and herbal remedies. Across the square at 84th Street at 91st Avenue there was once a large corner storefront. Now it is permanently shuttered, offering only a parking spot and a sense of “what once was” to those who pass by. 100 years ago, there were village clusters like this outside the busy commercial corridors. But now these areas are diminished, gone or repurposed and that sense of a village center has been lost, transformed into another sense of place.
For the kids who lived near the rock, Whiting Square was always a place of play. For the characters in games of pretend, the rock was there to climb on, the flagpole rope a swing for yawping jumps. In the time before, when public streets were not only for cars, hockey was played there, football too. If you were a kid in Woodhaven it was always a place to be with other kids.
Then, like other hangouts, the Forest Park bandshell or the steps up into the park from Park Lane South, Whiting Square and its rock became a spot for teenagers and young adults to party. More darkly, the square became a home for veterans and others with no place to go and nothing but drugs to do. The benches were removed to discourage the trouble they invited. The place was off-limits for some, adding to its allure for others. Someone stole the brass memorial plaque that had been attached to the rock. The rock was covered in paint, then painted again and again as that became a thing. About ten years ago the paint was removed, revealing the natural stone and the missing plaque’s four holes, ghostly anchors for a faded rectangular stain. Did anybody notice the apparition’s missing referent?
Sometimes, there is the place where you stand, and that’s all there is. Other times, however, you can stand somewhere and there is more to it than first appears. It is possible to derive the past from the present, possible to see the layers of time in the traces that remain. Sometimes, there is just the story you heard—and a place on the map corresponding to the story. Someone told you about something that happened there, or you read it somewhere. How often do you ask yourself, is there more? And what if you could find out? Someone could tell you, or you could look it up. If it isn’t written anywhere, you can write it yourself. You cobble together some facts, a picture, an array of data points in a narrative timeline. But what if you could burrow into it further, drill down as they say, and ask, is there more?
Whiting Square occupies an unusual bit of real estate in modern Queens. As is the case throughout Queens, if a road is at an angle, it has a story to tell. Whiting Square contains traces of community history dating back two hundred years. Slow down and look closely and you will find a world that has been all but forgotten.
Woodhaven today is a residential neighborhood comprised of mostly two-story homes tightly packed together, but in the early 19th Century, there was only Union Race Course, a horse track nestled in the farmland just beyond the Brooklyn city line. The track occupied the area from Snedeker Avenue (now 78th Street) to current-day 84th Street (originally known Third Street then for a few years Digby) and from Atlantic Avenue to the south to Jamaica Avenue to the North. In the 1820s the Union Course race track was nationally renowned, holding some of the most famous horse races of its time. Union Course was also the name of the Long Island Railroad stop on the south side of the track and the name of the village that appeared around it. The hotels and saloons that sprung up in the area were a destination too, among them the Snedeker Hotel on what is now Jamaica Avenue. Among the many social halls, Neirs Tavern, then known as The Abbey, faced the track on Snedeker Avenue and at almost 200 years old it is arguably the oldest continuously operating bar in New York City.
Over time, interest in horse racing moved elsewhere, first to Centreville in what is now Ozone Park then Aqueduct and Belmont in the 20th Century. By the 1860s factories like the Lalance and Grosjean dinnerware manufacturing plant were bringing people to Woodhaven in larger numbers, starting a building boom that would rage for decades. The track was sold, then broken into lots.
The ghostly presence of the race track is encoded in the streets of Union Course, which were laid-out over successive generations even before the first lots were sold inside the track perimeter in the 1880s. The roads of the orderly village of Union Course dead-ended at the farm properties that flowed south from the Jamaica Plank Road to the north or at the edge of the old track to the east. The grid that came with the dividing of lots did not match the old farm lanes and village streets. Property outside the southeastern corner of the track belonged to factory owner Florian Grosjean and after it was subdivided into lots, houses were built in rapid succession, was eventually filled in completely, as 1924 aerial photographs reveal.
To this day, the shape of the properties along the west side of 84th Street adhere to the curved line of the old track property. The curve of the track can still be seen in the bit of Clemente Court, which partly follows the curved line of the old racetrack. An unofficial and informal alley arced north in the direction of Whiting Square until the remaining lots were built upon and it was closed off by tightly-packed homes. The arc of the track is poorly resolved by the Whiting Square intersection of five streets. But as a disruption of the planners’ soulless grid, it also contains its own history. Left over space that for more than three decades was unnamed and unadorned, it would soon have a name, a flag and, for a time, that Krupp howitzer.
Continue to Part 2 of “The Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square”
Besides the unique feature embedded in the map, the other reason Whiting Square exists where it does is because just around the corner at 80-34 90th Road was Whiting Memorial Hall, the clubhouse of the Lt. Clinton L. Whiting Post 59, Veterans of Foreign Wars. The inauguration of Whiting Memorial Hall in 1927 and the Whiting Square war memorial the following year were the projects of the Whiting Post of Woodhaven.
Thank you for very well documented history of the "Rock" and the square!