The Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square (Part 3)
In part one of this story, we looked at the location of Whiting Square, then explored its origins in part two. You might read them first. In part three, we take a closer look at the earliest days of Whiting Memorial Hall and meet a family at the center of the VFW post in Woodhaven in the 1920s.
In January 1927 when they bought the building soon to be christened Whiting Memorial Hall, the new home of the Clinton L. Whiting Post No. 59, VFW, the arrangements were made by Arthur English—Big Artie, as he was known.
Artie always made the arrangements, it seems. One of the first members of the Whiting Post, in May 1919 he was named by Commander William Dineen to the Pensions, Law and Legislation Committee. Over the next few years, he also served on the Entertainment Committee, planning events, or the Arrangements Committee, making things happen. Artie was known for that. He was there when they started meeting at the Republican Club at Woodhaven and Jamaica Avenue and when the post became a tenant at Hillside Temple on 96th street. He was there when the Woodhaven Memorial Hall Association brought together leaders from several organizations in the neighborhood to create a public meeting space in the neighborhood. He was there when that effort fizzled and the dream of a VFW clubhouse was born. But finding the property, raising the money, and making the arrangements took several years before they were able to “make it happen.” As the men elected Artie Commander in December 1926, it seemed like everything was coming together for the veterans of the Whiting Post.
A veteran of the Spanish-American War, Arthur English was 45 when he was elected Commander at that December meeting at Hillside Temple. That night, in his capacity as the chair of the building committee, he addressed the men about plans to secure the double lot at 80-34 90th Road. At some point before then, likely a year or more before, English had been elected president of the Whiting Memorial Hall, Inc., a separate entity organized for the purpose of purchasing and then maintaining the building. At that December meeting he announced the purchase of the building and he set a fundraising goal of $3500 to go to renovations of the property. The men of the post were divided into groups, each group given a goal to meet.
Arthur English was familiar with the Union Course location of Whiting Hall, having lived in the area since he arrived in Woodhaven sometime in the early ’teens. In the space of a few years, English moved moved his family from an upstairs flat on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn to a rented home on Oxford Avenue in Woodhaven (now 104th Street in what is considered Richmond Hill). They were not there long before they moved to a new home at 811 Bigelow Avenue, known today as 91-15 92nd Street, just a few blocks east of the unusual intersection of 84th Street, 91st Avenue and 90th Road—the future Whiting Square. City property records indicate the English family home was built in 1920, but census records show they were already living there by January 3 of that year. In a curious twist, Mrs. Mary English was the census enumerator for that part of the neighborhood, and she was the one who recorded the information about each occupant of the house. In addition to herself and Mr. English, Henry and Anna Grisel, Mary’s father and mother, lived there with them and their three daughters, Kathryn, Dorothy and Martha. In any case, Oxford Avenue was somewhat more complete compared to the vacant area east of the old Union Course race track and north of the Lalance & Grosjean factory that offered up Bigelow Avenue. After Arthur English and family arrived in Woodhaven, homes filled those last empty fields which only recently had stretched for blocks. By 1920 there was very little open space left in Woodhaven.
In those early years in Queens, when everything was new, complaints piled up. Although houses sprouted up quickly—built by an army of builders, large and small—slow to come were paved streets, sewer lines and other amenities of the civilized “good life.” Such fine print was nowhere to be found on the real estate billboard advertisements seen on the routes to the city’s beaches and Long Island resorts, taunting those crowded city dwellers seeking escape—“Why Pay Rent?”
When those functional features of urbanity did come, homeowners were hit with excessive levies to pay for them. In Brooklyn, similar infrastructure projects were covered by the greater city, newly expanded just a generation before, but in Queens homeowners had to pay bills that, as it turns out, were padded with graft. The chaotic growth of Queens and its ridiculous corruption have been cited as reasons that civic associations—those pesky neighborhood based political clubs—were more of a thing in Queens than in Brooklyn. In the fall of 1927 the outrage caused by excessive sewer assessments in Queens’ Fourth Ward led to a wave of protests, building from block to block and culminating in the investigation, resignation and eventual conviction of Borough President Maurice Connolly.
There is a reason why “Andrew J. McCivic,” a character created by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle cartoonist known as MEB, lives in Queens. McCivic eventually runs for office on the Tax Grievance Party line but starts out as a “civic worker,” as community activists were called in those years, for the Poorhaven Taxpayers Association. Arthur English arrived with his family during the prewar boom years and saw firsthand the expedited growth collide with the reality on the ground. Although Big Artie never ran for public office, and all teasing aside, he was a McCivic among McCivics, all of whom lived in homes just a few years old, all of whom found out just how far City Hall was from a section of the city carved out of swampy farmland that still thought of itself as part of Long Island.
As the new year 1927 arrived, Arthur English, chair of the building committee, was busy completing the purchase of the property at 80-34 90th Road. After receiving approval from Justice James A. Dunne of the Supreme Court, English and the other directors filed the certificate of incorporation of Whiting Memorial Hall, Inc. at the office of the New York Secretary of State Robert Moses, recently appointed by Governor Al Smith, and the group took title to the property the first week in February. A week before the housewarming and officer installation ceremony, there was a shower to furnish the building and the community responded with all the needed furniture, kitchen equipment and table settings, toiletries, etc. Enjoying refreshments, they spent the evening dancing to a radio someone brought for the occasion.
English, part of the informal leadership circle when he wasn’t an elected officer, was installed as Commander on February 19 at the ceremonial opening and housewarming of Whiting Memorial Hall. It would turn out to be a most auspicious year for “Big Artie” and for the Whiting Post 59 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The veterans wasted no time in making use of their new facility. As soon as it was possible they scheduled meetings and events at the new hall. So did the Ladies Auxiliary and the Union Course Civic Association, whose president Robert E. Harper was also a member of the Whiting Post. At the same time, the arrangements committee met there weekly to plan the dedication of the flagstaff and ceremonial presentation of the flag. Although the opening of the headquarters and the officer installation ceremony drew hundreds of people, the April 3 event would be one of the largest events ever held at Whiting Memorial Hall and certainly the largest event that year.
The Daily News, Chat, Brooklyn Daily Times, Long Island Daily Press in Jamaica, Richmond Hill Record, and the Leader-Observer in Woodhaven, and other newspapers, all ran announcements about the flag ceremony and most if not all carried reports about what happened.
The ceremony, speeches, and music were also broadcast live on WSOM in Woodhaven. Owned by George J. Cook, an engineer who operated his station from a house on 78th Street under the name Union Course Laboratories, WSOM, known as WJVB until late in 1926, was one of the earliest radio stations in the borough. Cook was able to obtain a license from Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had promised that any citizen who had the proper equipment should be able to obtain a license to broadcast radio. Cook sold WSOM in the summer of 1927 to the American Socialist Party. The station was then renamed WEVD after Eugene Victor Debs, the recently deceased leader whom the party wished to memorialize with a broadcast organ, one that could educate the public about the issues while at the same time offering them entertaining programming. Later that same year, a meeting was convened by the Union Course Civic Association at Whiting Hall to discuss community complaints about WEVD, which they felt offered nothing of value to the community, and which in those chaotic early days of radio had an overbearing signal that crowded out adjacent stations on the dial.
The attention paid by the news media was warranted. 1000 people marched in line to 80-34 90th Road to participate in the dedication of flag and staff. The Long Island Daily Press remarked that the occasion was reminiscent “of the parades of ten years ago” when large numbers of marchers were “staged through the principal streets of Woodhaven.” Since the creation of the larger Fourth Ward Memorial Day Parade about ten years before, local efforts were not quite the same.
After a parade through Woodhaven, the event was emceed by E. J. Gilchrist of the Richmond Hill McConnell Post No. 229, V.F.W., with Capt. Arthur Lowe taking care of the colors and Arthur Skinner on Bugle playing “To the Colors.” The 62nd Artillery Army Band from Fort Totten and a string orchestra presented and Ethel M. Jahrling sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as she sometimes did at patriotic occasions. At the closing, the pastor of St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 85th Street, the Rev. Erwin R. Jaxheimer, led in prayer, after which followed a mass singing of patriotic songs. Members of the Alfred M. Wood Post No. 368 of the Grand Army of the Republic were in attendance, as were veterans from Queens, Brooklyn, the New York City region and beyond, including national representatives from the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Former Mayor John Hylan was the featured speaker at the event and spoke briefly. In the Daily Press account he gave thanks for the opportunity and mentioned that he was the proud son of a Civil War veteran. In the account in by the Daily Times, his tone was darker. “Patriotism should be forced into the youth of today,” he was quoted as saying. “We need more patriotic bodies,” he explained, gesturing towards the large contingent of scouts in attendance, “such as the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts and Veterans of the Foreign Wars to enforce patriotic rights. At no time should our country and her flag be forgotten, and we should be ready to protect her at all times.”
After receiving the flag from Kae English, the daughter of the Commander and the donor of the flag, Hylan then presented it to Athur English, who received it on behalf of the post. A Boy Scout troop in attendance, Troop No. 1 from Springfield, Queens, also received a flag. Presented by Municipal Court Justice Henry Wenzel to Scoutmaster Edwin Downs, it too had been donated for that purpose by Kae English.
The moment of the presentation of the flag is captured in photographs. It is upon this scene that we pause our film, and we will be back to see it again.
The appearance of Kae English at the flag dedication ceremony was announced in the papers. At the time, she had a role in Rio Rita, the Ziegfeld hit on Broadway. Not only was Kae English going to be there, but she would be joined by castmates from the show. Given the amount of ink spilled as to her doings, her love life and her career, she was among the most well-known residents of Woodhaven. Certainly, she was successful enough to pay for a large flag for the flagstaff outside Whiting Memorial Hall.
Despite her status as a rising star on Broadway, Kae’s participation in the Whiting Hall presentation of the flag ceremony was not unique for the women of the English family. Nor was work on behalf of the V. F. W. post something Arthur undertook all on his own. It was a family affair. From the earliest years, as A. C. English rose through the ranks of the Whiting Post, so too did Mrs. English rise as a leader of the auxiliary. The English daughters, Kathryn (called Kae since her school days), Dorothy (Dot) and Martha (Marty), all volunteered in service to the organization.
Marie (Griesel) English, known as Mary, and eldest Kae were involved in the Ladies Auxiliary from nearly the beginning, accepting the obligations of membership in March 1920. According to the Standard Union newspaper in Brooklyn, thirty-five members met to receive “Mrs. A. C. English and Kathryn A. English” at the home of Mrs. Joseph Desch. At that meeting, the women made plans to participate in the dance planned by Richmond Hill’s McConnell Post Auxiliary at the Arcanum Hall on Jamaica Avenue at 116th Street in Jamaica. Mary English was installed as president of the auxiliary in January 1922, was re-elected again for 1923, thereafter serving on and off in different officer positions, including president, secretary, “patriotic instructress” and historian.
Mary’s work for the Whiting Post Auxiliary, as perhaps her civic work in general, was more public than that of her husband. In addition to participating in countless socials and public meetings, during the week of May 21-27, 1923, Mary English was the producer of a special series of radio programs called “Woodhaven Week” for WHN, a “Radiophone Broadcasting Station” in Ridgewood. Pioneering “this innovation of ‘Community Broadcasting,’” Mary was able to draw upon her civic, church and social connections as she put together a series of programs highlighting what she thought Woodhaven had to offer.
There are no recordings of the broadcasts, of course, though newspapers printed schedules for as well as accounts of the programs that aired those seven nights late in May of 1923. Kae, just seventeen and set to graduate the next month from Richmond Hill High School, was featured Monday night on violin. On Friday she conducted the orchestra from the Jagy School of Music. That first night, after an address by the current Commander of the Whiting Post, William J. Allen, the first Commander Bill Dineen spoke on “Whiting and Woodhaven.” Past Commanders Percy Foster and Phil Reilly spoke on “Veterans of Foreign Wars” and the “Military Order of the Cooties,” respectively. Also on Monday evening, Kae was joined on piano by her sister Dorothy, the Whiting Post organist. Ella Ecke, the previous organist, and Dorothy Jaxheimer, the daughter of the pastor Erwin Jaxheimer of St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran, also played piano on the first night of “Woodhaven Week” on WHN.
That week there were performances by Arthur Skinner, the army bugler from the Whiting Post, the Brooklyn Manor Fife, Bugle and Drum Corps, the Police Band, and Moonlight Six, a jazz unit from Woodhaven. Mary English also managed to bring in important local activists, such as Edward Hein, a Queens Library trustee active in Woodhaven civic affairs. There were several remarks made by other community leaders, including talks such as “Civic Welfare of Woodhaven” and “Foods and Feeding For Mothers, Babies and People in General.” The Friday night broadcast included the Martinez Dance Orchestra along with speeches by officials from the Lalance & Grosjean Company and Senator Frank Giorgio on “Betterment of Woodhaven.” The Sunday, May 27 program featured the Rev. Allison MacRury, Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church and Rev. David Fant of the First Congregational Church. The Whiting Post, Whiting Post Auxiliary, Woodhaven Post 118 of the American Legion, Union Course Civic, Woodhaven Board of Trade, the PTA of PS97, the Professional and Business League, the police, the post office, even the Sacred Hearts Council, Knights of Columbus and the orchestra of St. Elizabeth’s Convent, were among the groups included in the week-long series of broadcasts directed by Mary English.
The English daughters took part in a variety of civic activities, from the Whiting Post Auxiliary’s work to Memorial Day parades to barn dances and socials, whether as junior officers or by volunteering at events. But Kae’s talent was exceptional. As early as 1922, Kae was listed as “conductress” of the auxiliary. By the time of ceremonial flag raising at Whiting Memorial Hall in the spring of 1927, Kae had started to have some success on bigger stages and was already “giving back” in more significant ways. That year she was a celebrity, a beloved local girl who photographers snapped washing her parent’s front door window so the papers could opine that she was a good daughter mingling with neighborhood children as she came and went, children who surely looked up to and adored her.
The week before the flag ceremony, articles in the Daily News and the Daily Times ran similar stories under images of one of the shots from her session with Alfred Cheney Johnston. The articles said she had two loves, music and animals. “Marriage, she said, “is not an achievement, it’s just a last resort.”
Born in Brooklyn on October 28, 1905, young Kathryn came of age in Woodhaven at time when most people lived in houses that had just been built. After finishing at P.S. 58 in Woodhaven in 1919, she attended Richmond Hill High School, where she was an active student, quickly gaining notoriety for her talent on the violin and, according to yearbook teasing, her baby talk.
In early recitals, Kae was often accompanied by her sister Dorothy or Dorothy Jaxheimer on piano. She also performed solo or conducted others at various civic, social or religious functions and sometimes at local studios or in radio broadcasts, such as by New York Telephone & Telegraph Company’s WEAF (later WNBC and now WFAN). One of Kae’s most high profile local performances was her violin solo at the Sunday Schools Union rally at the First Congregational Church of Woodhaven in May 1924, an event that drew 800 people. The rally was associated with the Anniversary Day parades honoring the Protestant Sunday School Movement, the origin of the school holiday once known as Brooklyn-Queens Day, celebrated by students in Brooklyn and Queens, and now known as Chancellor’s Day, which is enjoyed by all.
For some perspective, Fred Trump also graduated from Richmond Hill High School in 1923, a year or so after moving out of Woodhaven to 179th Street in Hollis, and the family of Mae West, already a star whose doings were known to anyone who kept up with The Clipper’s coverage of vaudeville, lived on 88th Street a few blocks northwest of the English family.
Kae was further encouraged by Caspar Jagy, of the Jagy School of Music on Jefferson street in Brooklyn. Jagy had opened a branch of the conservatory in Richmond Hill and even in high school Kae was conducting younger students there too, as she had on WHN. The 1925 edition of The Dome, the Richmond Hill High School yearbook, says that two years after her June 1923 graduation Kae was studying music, but it does not say where. At the time, Kae performed duets at Loew’s with Teddy Joyce, including the virtuosic “Gypsy Airs,” and the two of them were featured in a vaudeville offering at the Capitol theater in August 1925 for “movie week.” Their association was interrupted when, according to a Teddy Joyce reminiscence a few years later, “Flo Ziegfeld picked her out” for the 1926 revue No Foolin’. That show opened in June 1926 at the Globe Theater and was the first of four Ziegfeld productions in which Kae English had a part. Rio Rita (1927), Show Girl (1929) and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 were the other three.
Although not a typical “Ziegfeld girl”—she was there for her violin, after all—Kae English got a taste of the rough and tumble life of show business. Florenz Ziegfeld’s reputation for “Glorifying the American Girl” and making them into stars was superceded only by his reputation as an impresario of sex, taking American audiences up to and over an edge that unsurprisingly drew large crowds. At twenty-one, Kae was not long removed from church recitals when she posed for publicity photos and for portraits by prolific Ziegfeld photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston. Photos of her were included when Johnston donated his archive to the Library of Congress. Long gone were the days of high school baby talk.
Not long after No Foolin’ opened, Kae was among a group of about twenty blonde-haired “Ziegfeld girls” who met and voted to strike if statements attributed to Ziegfeld in the media that men preferred brunettes were not retracted. “A few blondes will do,” he was also quoted as saying. The performers were incensed, claiming their earning potential had been damaged. “Our blonde complexion is our capital,” said Paulette Goddard, the teenaged leader of the group, “and when Mr. Ziegfeld rates us below brunettes and titians, he hurts our standing. If his views are followed by other producers, as they are likely to be, it may become hard for blondes to obtain positions. Mr. Ziegfeld’s attempt to influence the public against blondes has not only hurt our feelings, but caused us to be worried about our future.” In addition to a retraction, they asked for a fifty percent salary increase to make up for the “loss of prestige.”
For her part, Kae English said that there were more blonde performers in the chorus than brunettes, by a ratio of three to one. “Mr. Ziegfeld has always preferred blondes for his chorus. We don’t understand why he should seek to cause a reaction against them now. We doubt if he succeeds. One of his statements said that he likes a few blondes for contrast. It is the other way around. He has always used a few brunettes for contrast.” Another member of the “striking blonde committee” said “We had to do something to protect ourselves. We’ll show Mr. Ziegfeld that blondes have some standing in this community.” Paulette Goddard, asked to define blonde, as some their ranks had dark eyes but lighter colored hair, said “We consider them blondes if they’re on our side. Blondeness is a state of mind.”
Their objections to being sidelined were met variously in the papers. The Reading Times in Pennsylvania mocked them when Ziegfeld agreed to make space in Rio Rita, his upcoming Spanish-themed production: “Not wishing to break the hearts of his little, pure Nordic chorus girls, Ziegfeld announced definitely that he would include an episode in his new drama where they might shimmer for a minute or two before his brunettes again cast their languishing Southern spell.” Although the Chorus Equity Association had intervened on the protest, ending their dispute, the newspaper suggested that Flo Ziegfeld had already made up his mind to give them at least some role before he met with the special committee of blonde Ziegfeld girls. “Blondes may not go with castanets,” said the Reading Times, “but they ought to go pretty well with the butter and egg men, and, besides, it would be mean to make them cry.”
Kae English was mentioned in a flashy and gratuitously illustrated article about the unusually high I.Q. scores blonde showgirls were said to have. The defiance of expectations was illustrated by Kae’s score of 168, forty points above the average male, according to the article. The piece was widely disseminated through syndication later in 1926 and then again the following year.
The discourse around blondeness continued in the international marketplace of ideas when a minister in Missouri, R.V. Loos, who claimed to have married 4,500 couples, said that based on his experience with them blondes were the dumbest. Loos’ initial hot-take was picked up by the news syndicates and was even printed widely in United Kingdom. Contacted by a reporter, Kae English and Paulette Goddard fought back. Their replies were perfect fodder for tabloidish newspapers plucking choice content from the wire services. Described as “one of the city’s leading blondes,” Kae asked “Who is the old geezer, anyway? I never even heard of him. He wasn’t at any beauty contest I ever won.” Like a veteran of the meme wars, Goddard said, “We thrashed that subject out last year after Anita’s book came out,” referring to Anita Loos’ 1925 book, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and suggesting the two were related, that he was trying to help sales of her book. They were not related.
During this time Kae’s physical appearance was emphasized more than her talent for the violin. As a model, she appeared in advertisements that were widely published in newspapers—for haircare products, for Bloomingdale’s and more. The association with Ziegfeld and his collection of showgirls drove her career and haunted it. When at one point she was said to have been married in secret, the secret revealed was one meant to be kept from her boss, who apparently did not like his girls to be married. But in the wake of the fuss over the striking blondes, rather than marginalize the nervy Kay English, Ziegfeld gave the twenty-one year-old from Woodhaven a significant role — a violin solo — in the 1927 Spanish-themed musical Rio Rita. It was a smash hit.
Rio Rita opened on February 2, ten days before Kae’s father was installed as Post Commander. Soon after and for the remainder of the year, her emergent celebrity was invoked whenever possible to support the V. F. W. In almost every case, her presence was a feature of the event, and often her castmates were enlisted to join her. Sometimes the functions were smaller, like those held at Hillside Temple, for example, or when she helped sell poppies at a pop-up exhibition of war relics at a storefront on Jamaica Avenue. Other times, she and her friends from Rio Rita were were advertised in the promotion of larger V.F.W. fundraiser events, such as the “Tri-Post” Armistice Ball held on November 10 at the Triangle Ballroom in Richmond Hill. That event brought together posts from Woodhaven, Richmond Hill and Jamaica, and a large crowd. Even Mayor Walker was invited. Despite his well-known interest in showgirls, he didn’t make an appearance at the Triangle Ballroom, attending another Armistice Ball in Brooklyn the next night instead.
But none of Kae English’s work on behalf of the Whiting Post 59 while her father was Commander was more important than the role she played in the presentation of the flag ceremony on Sunday, April 3, 1927, at the new Whiting Hall on 92nd Road in Woodhaven. With paychecks signed by Florenz Ziegfeld, Kae had the means to buy flags for the post, the Boy Scout Troop No. 1 of Springfield, and whomever else she wanted. She even rented an apartment at 351 West End Avenue on Manhattan’s tony Upper West Side.
With the success came attention, lots of it. As the flagstaff dedication and presentation of the flag ceremony neared, newspapers buzzed about possible romances, her interest in animals and her negative attitude about marriage. Because of this barrage of media attention, we know too much and almost nothing at all about Kae English, exhausting what is to be known about someone who slips into obscurity just a few years later. It’s a small portrait of a young jazz age woman active during the golden era of Broadway. We have lists of productions she was in. It’s not hard to find references to her in the paper or advertisements where she is mentioned by name. Through public records searches, we can piece together what happened later—a whole life lived after this moment of the presentation of the flag, here paused in the frame.
That she was so well known turns out to be useful for us, too. Time might never yield her secrets, but it will yield some secrets. There is something you should know about her father, something you’ll never find mentioned in the papers or anywhere in any public record searches. Compared to his daughter, very little is known about Arthur English and it only takes a minute to relate what is known about him.
Arthur Chester English was born on March 27, 1881, in New York. His father was a British-born German named Christian English. His mother was Marie Augusta (Gerhold) English, a German-born woman who died in 1900. Arthur is listed as veteran of the Spanish-American War, where he spent a large percentage of his six month service in the infirmary or furloughed, as so many did. He was a patient on the hospital ship Shinnecock when it made the last trip ferrying soldiers from the conflict in Cuba to New York, all sick with typhoid, some desperately so.
After returning to Brooklyn, he married Mary in 1903. The couple lived on 56th, Seeley and then on Vanderbilt in Windsor Terrace while starting their family. According to census records, Arthur English was a stereotyper, a pressman whose job it was to make the plates for printing newspapers. On his draft card in 1917 it says he was working as a pipe fitter for Federal Shipbuilding Company in Kearny, New Jersey. After the war, he resumed work in the printing trade, listing stereotyper on census forms in 1920, 1930 and 1940.
What is significant about Arthur English is not his occupation. Nor was his involvement in civic and veterans affairs something that distinguished him. In the 1920s, there were many veterans in the Fourth Ward of Queens who were active and accomplished in civic affairs. He was a genial McCivic, and they were legion. Arthur English may have been unique—though research suggests possibly not—for another position he held: in the spring of 1924 he was elected leader, the so-called Exalted Cyclops, of the Neophytes of Comus, No. 83 of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In part four of The Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square, we will look at Artie’s year as Exalted Cyclops of the Neophytes of Comus and the storm that gathered during the first half of 1927 as the men of the Whiting Post and the community of Woodhaven welcomed the community to their new V.F.W. clubhouse and headquarters. It would be a year until Whiting Square, with its infamous rock and mythical Krupp howitzer, was unveiled in another ceremony, one that would come amidst conflict in the veterans community and as the Ku Klux Klan, no longer ruled by Big Artie, made their biggest showing in the borough yet.