Queens
Renumbering and Street Name Changes

 

Queens, New York, especially the northern sections, underwent a number of street renumberings and renamings, mainly in the 1920s.  Because of this, it is often difficult to find a pre-1925-30 address in the correct placement on a current map, or even find the street name listed.

 

Some maps we’ve seen, however, show both the new and old street names; the 1949 Hagstrom map of Queens is one example.  Another set of examples are the 1925 maps showing the Assembly and Election Districts used to find the correct census films for the 1925 census from a given address.

 

Finding a source that shows renumbering changes is much harder.  One such source is the 1928 “Red Book” Information Guide to Queens.  It shows for many streets in Astoria and Long Island City the old street names AND corner numbers.  By transcribing those old names and numbers, and then translating the names to the current names, and the numbers to the current sequence of numbers found on the intersecting corners, we generated our tables.

 

The files here are from the Red Book street guide of 1928, the 1925 AD/ED maps (on microfiche from the Family History Library), the 1949 Hagstrom map, and the previous tables of street name changes for Queens that we generated and that are on the One Step site.  In addition a 1937 edition of the “Complete Street Guide to Queens” was also used.  The main source, the Red Book, was sometimes hard to interpret and had obvious mistakes.  Sometimes the information we wanted was missing and we tried to provide it from one of the other sources.  Expect errors of omission and commission with these tables, but as far as we know there are no comparable resources for Queens on the Internet.

 

Astoria and Long Island City were covered in detail in the Red Book.  Flushing had some entries as to corner numbers of streets.  The rest of Queens had few entries in terms of older names or numbers.  If readers want to revise these tables, or augment them with other old/new street and number pairings, we welcome their input.