How a Large House Leads to a Large History Lesson

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – This blog is part of a program from Amy Johnson Crow to encourage writing about our ancestors via a weekly writing prompt.  This week’s writing prompt is “large.”

Below is a photo of my paternal grandparents’ large house in Flushing, New York.  Flushing is in Queens County on Long Island, about in the middle of the county, with Brooklyn to the south and Nassau to the east.   Travel about 10 miles to the west and you will hit the East River and then Manhattan itself.  The house began life with one address and ended its life with a completely different address.

My grandparents' house at 146-25 Cherry Avenue, Flushing, as it was in 1940. 

The homeowners were Thomas Lawrence Clark (1883-1975) and his wife Agnes Rose Healy (1890-1979).  I have many vivid memories of this house, visiting my grandparents every Sunday for years and years.  I can still hear the heavy, wooden front door creak in my mind as it opens, and after opening the door you were greeted with a large foyer and an imposing wood staircase which was decorated with stained glass windows above it.  The house was deeper than it was wide, and the first floor consisted of a giant living room/dining room area, and then a spacious kitchen in the left back corner.  Our Sunday visit ritual included a mid-morning snack of cinnamon toast in the kitchen, my childhood vivid memory intact.  Bedrooms were on the second floor and I think there were more bedrooms on the third floor but I didn’t go up there much for some reason.  The house had an enormous, shady backyard and lots of space between it and the adjoining homes. 

An Irish immigrant from Mt. Bellew, County Galway, Celia Crehan Clark raised two boys in East Harlem, Manhattan, after her husband died when the boys were small.  She worked for Consolidated Edison, the electrical company, until her early death in 1898 at the age of 39.

Thomas and Agnes had a rough start in life.  At 14, Thomas lost his widowed mother Celia Crehan Clark in 1898 and went out to earn his own living in New York.  Agnes’ father, John E. Healy, died in 1892 and her mother, Kate Carlin, the following year; she was raised by her grandmother Bridget Bird Carlin.  Thomas and Agnes married in 1917 and Thomas shipped out to France on the USS Lapland with the U.S. Army Signal Corps on Christmas Eve 1917.  Pregnant with their first child, I often think how difficult this time must have been on the newlywed Agnes, to be alone so much in her young life, just married, and then losing her new husband to the war uncertainty.  My father was born in 1918 at 227 Cypress Avenue, a house owned by Agnes’ aunt and uncle down the block from the house she was to own.

Wedding photo of Thomas Lawrence Clark and Agnes Rose Healy in the fall of 1917 at St. Anastasia’s Church in Douglaston, NY.  Just a few weeks later on Christmas Eve, Thomas shipped out on the USS Lapland for France and “The Great War.”

Following the war and military postings in Texas and Illinois, Thomas and Agnes returned to Flushing, now with three adult children, and purchased this house at 146-25 Cherry Avenue in 1946.  The house began its life as 216 Cypress Avenue.  I’ve had to do some research to understand the changing street name and address, as the two addresses turned up on different documents depending on the time frame.  The changing street names marked the end of sleepy, independent Queens County as it was absorbed into New York City.

Queens was incorporated into New York City in 1898 and with that came the prickly problem of duplicate Broadways, Main Streets, which would impede not only mail service but also public safety (which house is on fire – the one in Manhattan or Queens?).  The large and extensive remedy was to create a new system of street names and addresses for Queens, which took years to devise and implement.  Thus, the old street name of Cypress Avenue was jettisoned in favor of Cherry Avenue and the house numbers were changed to a hybrid number where the first digits represented the nearest numerical cross street and the “house number” followed the hyphen.  This happened throughout Queens and internet articles indicate the change was not swiftly embraced by most Queens residents.  Unhappy suburban residents could not stop the annexation but they could refuse to use the new address!

The photograph of the house was obtained through the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) through a special program.  Through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) around 1940, photos of all buildings in New York City (all five boroughs) were obtained for tax assessment purposes.  The photos are available for purchase through the NYC DORIS website here  https://www1.nyc.gov/doittshoppingcart/photoform.htm