Frederick Victor
Most people today think of Jamaica as a transit hub — the place you pass through on the way to JFK or the Long Island Rail Road. In the 1920s, Jamaica was a destination. It was the largest commercial center in Queens, the county seat, and one of the fastest-growing communities in the entire New York metropolitan area. The decade transformed it from a mid-sized town with a small-city feel into a fully urban neighborhood, dense with commerce, crowded with new residents, and connected to Manhattan by rail lines that ran every few minutes during rush hour.
Queens became a borough of New York City in 1898, when the five boroughs were consolidated, but Jamaica’s identity as the center of Queens predated that by centuries. The town had been the seat of Queens County government since the colonial era. Its courthouse sat on Jamaica Avenue, its commercial strip ran along the same road, and the Long Island Rail Road had made it a rail junction since the 1830s. By the time the 1920s arrived, Jamaica already had the bones of a real downtown. The decade put meat on those bones fast.
Jamaica Avenue — The Main Street of Queens
Jamaica Avenue in the 1920s was a real shopping street, not a strip of bodegas and discount stores. Gertz Department Store anchored the block between 161st and 162nd Streets and drew shoppers from as far as the Rockaways and the South Shore of Long Island. Gertz competed directly with the big Manhattan stores — it had multiple floors, a full range of merchandise, and sales staff who knew their customers by name. Women from Hollis, St. Albans, and Richmond Hill came to Gertz the way women from Queens today go to the mall, except Gertz was better. Macy’s and Gimbels had the Manhattan trade. Gertz had Jamaica.
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The elevated subway line — the IND’s Jamaica line — had extended service to the neighborhood, and the Long Island Rail Road’s Jamaica station was one of the busiest suburban rail stops in the country. That combination of rail access made Jamaica Avenue commercially viable in a way that few outer-borough shopping streets could match. A merchant on Jamaica Avenue in 1924 had access to customers from a dozen surrounding neighborhoods, all of whom could reach the avenue easily by rail or by the new bus lines that were beginning to replace the old trolley routes.
Movie theaters lined Jamaica Avenue and the side streets nearby. The Valencia Theatre, which opened in 1929 at 165-11 Jamaica Avenue, was one of the grandest movie palaces in the entire borough — a lavish Spanish-Baroque interior with a ceiling painted to look like an open sky, seating over 3,000 people. It was built as a Loew’s house and competed directly with the picture palaces of Manhattan. A family in Jamaica in 1929 did not need to take the train to Times Square to see a first-run film in a magnificent building. The Valencia gave them that experience six blocks from their apartment.
The Jamaica Racetrack
The Jamaica Race Course sat on a large plot of land bounded by what are now Sutphin Boulevard, Parsons Boulevard, and the streets of the South Jamaica neighborhood. It had been operating since 1903, and by the 1920s it was one of the premier thoroughbred racing venues in the Northeast. On a major racing day — the Jamaica Handicap, the Paumonok Stakes — the track drew crowds of 20,000 and more, arriving by Long Island Rail Road trains that stopped at a dedicated track station. Bookmakers worked the crowds openly, as off-track betting had not yet been regulated out of existence. The track brought money into the Jamaica economy on race days in a way nothing else could match.
The racing crowd was a cross-section of the city. Businessmen from Manhattan who followed the thoroughbred circuit came out for the stakes races. Working men from Brooklyn and the Bronx who had a few dollars to put on a horse took the train. Gamblers who ran numbers in their home neighborhoods were regulars. The racetrack operated in a social world of its own, adjacent to but separate from the residential Jamaica that was growing up around it.
The Building Boom
Queens grew faster in the 1920s than any other borough in New York City. The population more than doubled between 1920 and 1930, from 469,000 to over a million. Jamaica and its surrounding neighborhoods — St. Albans, Hollis, South Jamaica, Jamaica Estates — absorbed a large share of that growth. The land that had been truck farms and potato fields in 1910 was being platted into building lots and sold to developers who put up two-family houses, small apartment buildings, and attached row houses at a pace that reshaped the landscape year by year.
The buyers were largely white working-class and middle-class families moving out of crowded Brooklyn and Manhattan tenements. Irish, Jewish, and Italian families who had saved enough for a down payment on a house in Queens saw Jamaica Estates or Hollis as the first step into something that looked and felt like the American suburb — a private house, a small yard, a garage for the new car. The house on the tree-lined street in Queens was the goal, and the 1920s put that goal within reach for a class of New Yorkers who had never had access to it before.
St. Albans and the Color Line
The residential boom in Jamaica and its surrounding neighborhoods operated under strict racial boundaries. Real estate agents, developers, and neighborhood associations worked together to keep Black families out of the new housing developments in St. Albans, Hollis, and Jamaica Estates. Restrictive covenants — legal clauses written into property deeds that prohibited sale to Black buyers — were standard practice across the new developments. Banks refused mortgages to Black applicants for properties in these areas regardless of creditworthiness. The booming Queens of the 1920s was being built as an explicitly white suburb.
South Jamaica, by contrast, had an established African American community that predated the borough consolidation. Black families who had lived in the area for generations were concentrated in South Jamaica’s blocks, largely cut off from the prosperity being built on the other side of the neighborhood’s informal boundaries. The same decade that brought Gertz Department Store and the Valencia Theatre to Jamaica Avenue brought systematic exclusion to the Black residents living a mile away.
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