Green Acres (Mill Brook) Community

 

 

 

Valley Stream is no stranger to street names evoking nature—we have no shortage of Ash, Beech, Birchwood, Cedar, Dogwood, Elm, Spruce, Locust, or flower-inspired roads. However, Green Acres (aka Mill Brook) the South Valley Stream community, formed in the late 1930s, is in a class by itself—the entire community is named after flowers, fields, woodland, trees, bushes, and plants! Beautifully named streets aside, the historical context connected to the street naming dates back to the first half of the twentieth century.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Greenbelt Towns Project

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, a series of relief and reform programs, providing much-needed employment for the construction industry and affordable housing for the masses, mostly from Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. The Resettlement Administration (RA) was one of those programs. The RA, a government-sponsored planned community endeavor, created the Greenbelt Towns project. Greenbelt Towns had specific design aesthetics and requirements: open land surrounding its borders (greenbelts), parks, playgrounds, cul-de-sacs, connecting footpaths, stores that could be reached on foot, and schools.

Garden City Movement

Greenbelt Towns were modeled loosely after the twentieth century Garden City Movementthat originated in London and its surrounding villages. The goal was to capture the benefits of country and city living—while avoiding the disadvantages presented by both. Abandoned airports were targeted for Greenbelt development.

Clarence Stein

Clarence Stein (1882-1975), an architect, urban planner, writer, and co-founder of the Regional Planning Association, was asked by the RA to design a Greenbelt Town on the site of the shuttered Curtiss-Wright Airport, a casualty of the Depression. (Before that, the airport was 300-acre farm owned by the Frederick Reisert family.) Stein and other progressive thinkers, it is worth noting, lobbied for the creation of the RA—he was invested in this movement from the get-go.

Stein was no stranger to the Garden City Movement. In the early 1920s, he collaborated with the architect Henry Wright, and together they designed Sunnyside Garden in Queens, NY (1924) and the Radburn community in Fair Lawn, NJ (1929). Both were Garden City Movement communities, much like their counterparts across the pond. Radburn was designed with both pedestrians and automobiles in mind. Superblocks were created four or five times the size of a standard city block. Homes that fronted on the street had a system of pedestrian paths and gardens in back. It made is possible to walk the entire development without ever crossing a road or confronting an automobile—interconnected cul-de-sacs were surrounded a road for vehicular traffic. The Rayburn housing project went bankrupt in 1934, and only a small section of the original plan was completed. It is hailed, however, as a great success, an offshoot of the Garden City Movement, and is on many Urban Studies and Architecture School curriculums.

Ethical Culture Society

Born in Rochester, New York, Stein attended Columbia University, and later, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he refined his eclectic architectural knowledge to include Beaux Arts Classicism. He was a student of the Progressive Era—a period in the early part of the century that was devoted to social activism and political reform across the nation. He immersed himself in the teachings of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, an ethical, educational, and religious movement that encourages humanist codes of behavior.

A Greenbelt Town in South Valley Stream, however, was not to be! In 1936, the New Deal program was shut down, but not before three Greenbelt communities were underway and constructed: Greenbelt, MD; Greendale, WI; and Greenhills, OH (1938).

Irwin Chanin

The now non-government project was turned over to the Chanin Corporation, an architecture and construction firm owned by Irwin S. Chanin (1891-1988). Chanin’s firm designed and built theaters, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers in New York City.

In 1936, Phase 1 began. Chanin named the new community Green Acres, a nod to the three Greenbelt Towns that managed to be built. Phase 1 took place in the northeast section of the old airport. The Old Section, built before World War II, roughly carried out Stein’s utopian image for a Garden City Movement community: blocks ending in cul-de-sacs leading to a shared park, a network of pedestrian paths, and a greenbelt on the east and south boundaries: Mill Road and Hook Creek. Stately Colonials, old-world Tudors, and charming Capes were built during this phase. There were three through streets that lead in and out of the community: Old Central Avenue, Woodland Road, and Mayfield Lane. The Woodland Road and Mayfield Lane through streets were open to the abandoned airport runway, Sunrise Highway, and eventually the Green Acres Shopping Center (aka Green Acres Mall).

Sunrise Drive In Theatre

In 1938, Chanin built the Sunrise Drive In Theatre, on the northwest corner of the old airport. In 1979, the Art Deco theater was torn down.

After World War II, the rest of Green Acres was developed. Mid-century modern split-levels and ranches were built during this phase. The community soon referred to the two architecturally distinct housing phases as “The Old Section” and “The New Section.”

The New Section, Phase 2, although less pronounced than Phase 1, also contained elements of the Garden City Movement. An elementary school, Forest Road, was constructed in the center of the community, making it possible for youngsters to walk to school by crossing only one primary access road such as Flower or Forest. Eight-hundred homes were built in Green Acres during the two phases.

Greenbelts

A few cul-de-sacs on the streets that bordered the Old Section were built. A generously wide path connected the elementary school to Hook Creek. A greenbelt meanders alongside the creek, which empties into Mill Pond (aka Edward Cahill Memorial Park). A park replaced the 1937 temporary sewage disposal plant at Brook Road.

By comparing the original street maps of Green Acres with modern-day maps, we can see the modifications that were made before the streets and homes were built:

• Garden Road became Forest Road
• Bitter Sweet Lane became Bittersweet Lane
• the park between Bittersweet and Dahlia lanes was never realized
• Gooseberry Lane became Garland Lane
• Alderwood Lane, a cul-de-sac; became Eastwood Lane, a through street

Although horticulturally inspired street naming was not a Garden City Movement or Greenbelt Town requirement, every street name in Green Acres, in both phases of development, pays homage to the progressive urban planning movement of the twentieth century: Ash, Birch, Catalpa, Dahlia, Elderberry, Flower, Garland, Heatherfield.

Too close for comfort

A few factors, however, were detrimental to our Greenbelt-inspired, utopian-tinged community. In 1956, the Green Acres Shopping Center was built on the property’s northern border, hugging Sunrise Highway. Although shopping that could be reached by foot was a tenet of the Greenbelt Town philosophy, the scale of the shopping center was outsized—and only served as a beacon for motorists from surrounding locales. “Outsiders” were too close for comfort for the tight-knit community that was hunkered down amidst suburban sprawl and encroaching Queens County. When the shopping center opened, Woodland and Mayfield lanes were swiftly barricaded, no longer allowing vehicular traffic into the community from the shopping center.

And, in 1958, a footbridge connecting the Green Acres community to South High School was built over Hook Creek. This, too, was counter to the Greenbelt creed of insularity and safety. (The bridge was dismantled in 2008 after dangerous bridge incidents.) Lastly, the proximity of South Valley Stream to the City Line and to JFK Airport is just too close. A Greenbelt community needs room to breathe—the buffer between city and suburbia was weakened. 

Full Circle 

Where will you go during your next visit to Green Acres? After, of course, you visit your childhood abode. The Forest Road playground? Brook Road Park? A favorite dead-end street where you once played ball? The greenbelt that traverses the Old Section? A walk down the path that leads from Forest to the dismantled bridge? A walk through the Green Acres Golden Community where once upon a time, nothing was there save the runway beneath your feet? Yes, some of us can remember that far back! Or, perhaps, if you’re so inclined, you’ll stroll along the east/west promenade, aka The Creek, that runs along the southern border. Another greenbelt! A swath of land and water that for many years lay fallow and in disrepair. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the waterfront suffered significant damage. In 2013, the NY Rising Community Reconstruction (NYRCR) Program was enacted. The program restored the shoreline, wetlands, and natural habitat back to magnificence. A sign of divine intervention, almost, as if the NYRCR channeled, curated, and executed the ethical, educational, and environment ethos of the Garden City Movement and Greenbelt Towns project. An uncanny resemblance to the lofty vision that Clarence Stein once envisioned for our neck in the woods. Have we come full circle? 

Do walk over to the empty patch of land, once slated for a park, between Columbine and Bittersweet lanes. Although Stein’s, and later Chanin’s, design for open land alongside dwellings was not fully realized, remnants of their visions still exist. History hidden in plain sight.