Middle Village is a mainly residential neighborhood in the central section of the borough of Queens, New York City, bounded to the north by the Long Island Expressway, to the east by Woodhaven Boulevard, to the south by Cooper Avenue and the former LIRR Montauk Branch railroad tracks, and to the west by Mount Olivet Cemetery. A small trapezoid-shaped area bounded by Mt. Olivet Crescent to the east, Fresh Pond Road to the west, Eliot Avenue to the north, and Metropolitan Avenue to the south, is often considered Middle Village but is sometimes considered part of nearby Ridgewood.
The neighborhoods of Elmhurst border middle Village to the north, Maspeth, and Ridgewood to the west, Glendale to the south, and Rego Park to the east. Housing in the neighborhood is mainly single-family homes with many attached homes and small apartment buildings.
The area was settled around 1816 by people of English descent. It was named in the early nineteenth century for its location as the midpoint between the then-towns of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens, on the Williamsburgh and Jamaica Turnpike (now Metropolitan Avenue), which opened in 1816. It was generally sparsely populated because the large Juniper Swamp was there. In the American Revolutionary War, the swamp where the Americans hid from the British was initially circumscribed by a “Juniper Round Swamp Road.” In 1852, a Manhattan Lutheran church purchased the farmland on the western end of the hamlet.
Landmarks
Metro Mall is a shopping mall on Metropolitan Avenue just west of Queens, NYC‘s subway station. In 1920, the C.B. French Company, which made telephone booths for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (now AT&T), built a factory on the site of Metro Mall. After the C.B. French Company was acquired by the Turner-Armour Company, which was in turn acquired by the Western Electric Company, Western Electric continued to operate the plant and make telephone booths for AT&T. The plant was closed by around 1965, after which United Merchants and Manufacturers Inc. acquired the land and built a three-story mall on the site between 1972–4. In the 2010s, the Metro Mall suffered the same problem many malls around the United States did of the “retail apocalypse”; most of its tenants departed, most notably K-Mart and Toys R Us, leaving BJ’s Wholesale Club as the only remaining large store as of 2019.
The Frank T. Lang Building at Metropolitan Avenue and 69th Street was constructed in 1904. It is named after Frank Lang, who built mausoleums and monuments. The building, which sold mausoleums and monuments until 1946, also used to have an “H.C. Bohack” gas station, operated by the same man who also headed the Bohack grocery store chain. The two-story art deco building is notable for imposing gargoyles and finely chiseled faces on its roof. EZ Bed Bugs Exterminator Queens
Check out different neighborhoods like Queens Village
