How the LIC Courthouse intertwines with the creation of New York City

The Long Island City Courthouse. Eagle file photo by Walter Karling

By Prameet Kumar

One of the most well-known areas of Long Island City is Court Square. There’s a major subway stop in the area, and One Court Square, the building that formerly housed Citigroup, peaking out along Queens’ skyline.

But few people know that the court referenced in the area’s name refers to the historic Long Island City Courthouse.

The courthouse was constructed in the late nineteenth century and still stands today at 25-10 Court Square, situated right behind the aptly named Court Square Park.

The park’s scenic fountain, lampposts and tall birch trees frame a neo-English Renaissance courthouse built in 1908 to replace the original 1874 building that was destroyed in a fire. The original two-and-a-half-story building was constructed in the French Second Empire architectural style that was sweeping the United States in the late nineteenth century.

A little more than a century after its construction, the courthouse was designated a New York City Landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which wrote in its findings in 1976 that, “when completed, the Long Island City Courthouse was one of the most important and prestigious civic structures on the Island.”

Now dwarfed by the high-rise office buildings and condos that surround it in Hunters Point, the Long Island City Courthouse may seem little out of place in the neighborhood. But its construction played a vital role in the consolidation of New York City and the founding of Nassau County. Its legacy continues to have major ramifications today.

Long Island City in the late nineteenth century

Several years ago, Long Island City made national news after Amazon outlined plans to move one of its headquarters there. The online retail giant eyed the Queens neighborhood for several reasons – its central location within New York City, its growing housing market and its access to mass transit.

Long Island City’s central location has long been its draw, even as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. When Brooklyn residents grew wary of the Long Island Rail Road running through their communities, the company moved its new train depot to Hunters Point in 1860.

Between the railroad, multiple ferry routes to Manhattan, multiple turnpikes linking Long Island City to Brooklyn and Flushing, horsecars and a trolley network, Long Island City was extremely well connected to the surrounding areas.

“These steps made Long Island City not only the heart of Long Island’s rail system, but the nucleus of New York’s transportation network,” Thomas Jackson and Richard Melnick of the Greater Astoria Historical Society wrote in a history of the neighborhood.

It was that connectedness that left Hunters Point with the “largest concentration of industry in the United States” at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1869, Long Island City was officially incorporated, including Hunters Point and Astoria to the north. As its transit links grew, so too did its population – increasing from about 17,000 in 1880 to more than 30,000 just 10 years later, with much of this growth fueled by immigrant families flocking to find industrial jobs in Queens.

While Long Island City was growing, a political movement was gaining hold throughout the New York City area to consolidate New York – which was then just Manhattan – with surrounding areas to create a City of Greater New York. The fear was that another American city would overtake New York in population and, subsequently, in stature. A publication called The Real Estate Record wrote that “New York would undoubtedly lose a great deal in prestige the world over – and in actual dollars and cents, too – should Chicago or any other city on the continent count a larger population.”

Immigration alone wouldn’t be able to keep New York’s population rising at the pace required. The obvious solution was the annexation of surrounding areas, including Brooklyn and Queens.

But even while civic leaders were pushing toward a future of further urbanization and growth of New York City, there was a countervailing suburban population shift from the city sprawling eastward across Long Island. By the turn of the century, New York City had more suburbs surrounding it than did any other city in the world.

Diarist George Templeton Strong evoked the feelings of many suburbanites when he referred to New York City residents as “the civic scum,” moaning that areas outside the city, newly accessible from urban areas via new transportation links such as the Long Island Railroad “are overrun by the vermin that hot weather roasts out of its homes in towns.”

In his seminal 1985 work on suburbanization, Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson got at what was at the heart of the divide.

In the eyes of the eastern towns, “the cry for efficiency was a mask for the desire to exploit and to control,” he wrote. The urban-suburban divide was over control, with the urban areas wanting to exert as much influence on surrounding regions as possible, in a way that Jackson called “urban imperialism.” The desire of the eastern towns to oppose consolidation and to form their own county was a method of self-preservation, as Jackson called consolidation “the New York threat.”

“In the 1870s and again in the 1890s, New York City expanded into the county, gobbling up once-quiet villages and transforming them into wards of a massive city,” he wrote. “The village had become an alternative to urban growth rather than its precursor, a method by which suburbs could protect their reputation, status, and independence.”

Less existentially, the quarrel between the eastern and western towns had all the classic trappings of the urban-suburban divide in areas such as politics, crime, and taxation. Secession-minded farmers in eastern Queens had grown suspicious of urban Democrats in western Queens.

“They reap their richest harvests in large and overgrown counties, and will make a desperate fight to keep the taxpayers of the three eastern towns in a condition where they can compel them to pay tribute in the way of large salaries, and for schemes of local aggrandizement,” wrote The Glen Cove Gazette.

Construction of the Long Island City courthouse

It was within this push-and-pull context that the construction of the Long Island City Courthouse took place in 1874. But even a century earlier, residents had been debating exactly where a new courthouse should stand after they determined in 1784 that the Presbyterian church could no longer be used for that purpose.

“The eastern people petitioned the Legislature to have it set at the west end of Hempstead Plains; the western people prayed that any future building might be at or near the old site in Jamaica,” according to an 1882 history of Queens. The Legislature decided to split the difference and build the church in the geographical center of these two areas, locating it near Mineola along the southern border of North Hempstead.

This eighteenth-century courthouse was quite the scene.

“The court of Queens county is at all times the least orderly of any court I ever was in,” one resident complained to the assistant attorney general in 1799. “The entry of the court-house is lined on court days with the stalls of dram sellers and filled with drunken people, so as to be almost impassable.”

By the mid-eighteenth century, “the lack of accommodations on court days provoked great deal of dissatisfaction among the judges and lawyers,” especially when compared to places that were more conveniently accessible by railroad.

Perhaps most seriously, the courthouse could no longer even serve the basic function of keeping prisoners imprisoned. “There is not a single secure room in it, nor a single apartment in which a prisoner can with safety be confined, should the said prisoner attempt to escape, or have the smallest assistance from without,” according to an 1838 grand jury report.

When the legislature decided that a new courthouse was to be built, several Queens towns jumped at the opportunity to win both the prestige and the increased business associated with it.

“On court days there was usually considerable excitement about the house and grounds,” according to the history of Queens. “Farmers and others often made a holiday of it. Many resorted thither to transact business and meet acquaintances. Stands and booths for the sale of oysters, cake and beer, and other refreshments abounded.”

Again, Hempstead and Jamaica vied to be the site of the courthouse, with the local newspapers like The Hempstead Inquirer and The Long Island Farmer in Jamaica burnishing their respective locales’ brands and putting down their rivals’, according to a history of this fight in Newsday in 2007 by the writer Geoffrey Mohan. The Inquirer even wrote in 1833 that Hempstead would “outshine Jamaica all intents and purposes” and host “a profusion of public houses for the accommodation of the numerous people who attend.”

Meanwhile, a representative from the western town of Jamaica, criticized the eastern towns for being “quite willing to avail themselves of the excellent roads – macadamized and other – which have been made, and are maintained at the expense of the western towns, exclusively over which to transport their agricultural products to the New York markets.”

For decades, Hempstead and Jamaica tried to maneuver the state legislature into declaring their town the victor. In 1872, the Assembly passed a bill that required a board of supervisors to choose a site within three months, or else Mineola would win by default.

In August of that year, the board met in Jamaica for a vote. “Mineola advocates such as Supervisor Henry D. Remsen of North Hempstead needed only to stall as factions squabbled over Hempstead, Jamaica and the upstart Long Island City,” Mohan wrote. “Seven votes were taken, all stalemating between eastern and western choices. The board took a 15-minute break. When it returned, Remsen again voted for Mineola, but abruptly changed his mind and endorsed Long Island City – creating a 4-2 majority for that community not far from the East River.”

In a surprising turn of events, Long Island City had won – and it owed its victory perhaps most of all to its exceptional transit access, as “several railroads had made other places of more convenient access” than the towns of Eastern Queens. The Long Island City Courthouse was approved in 1872 and appropriated $150,000, given an additional $100,000 in 1875, and formally occupied by the sheriff in 1877 after a total construction cost of $276,000 – though no longer operating out of the courthouse, the New York City sheriff’s office remains in Long Island City.

Even after the Long Island City location had been chosen for the courthouse, The Hempstead Inquirer (a Republican newspaper) railed in 1893 against the decision: “If the people of the eastern towns really wish to avoid taxation for the erection of a public building upon a site which is manifestly destined to be the part of another county, they should awaken to a sense of duty and make a strenuous effort to effect a division before that expensive edifice at Long Island City has progressed much further.”

The Consolidation of New York City and the Secession of Nassau County

At the same time as the Long Island City Courthouse took hold as the seat of the Queens county court, the call for consolidation of New York City grew louder. In 1894, a referendum on consolidation was brought before voters.

Manhattan voters polled 62% in support. Staten Island voters polled 79% in support. Brooklyn voters were almost evenly split, with just 277 supporting votes making the difference out of a total of 129,211 votes. In Queens, voters polled 60% in support, “with the greatest tallies being registered in the urbanized areas closest to Manhattan,” according to historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace in “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.”

“Long Island City, in particular, was counting on reaping such benefits as a Blackwell’s Island bridge, a bevy of new streets, and the assumption by Manhattan of its substantial debt, product of both honest construction and blatant thievery. Such resistance as there was in Queens came from its sparsely settled periphery, though only Flushing failed to cast a majority in favor.” The law went into effect at the start of 1898, at which point the city was officially consolidated.

As western Queens joined New York City, eastern towns remained part of Queens County but were separate from the greater metropolis.

The eastern towns had been plotting secession as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, it was during the debate of the site of the courthouse that The Queens Sentinel, a newspaper based in Hempstead, first suggested splitting up the county to resolve the courthouse issue. “The western towns are closely united in their sympathies with the office of New York and Brooklyn and a great proportion of the crime which fills our jail, and which is on the increase, comes from this direction,” the Sentinel wrote in 1859 in an anti-urban screed.

The western towns had higher expenses and paid less in property taxes than the eastern towns, and they were responsible for “two-thirds of the paupers and criminals” in the county jail in 1875 – showing once again that the Long Island City courthouse was at the center of this whole debate.

Following the consolidation of New York in 1898, the secessionists finally found their opportunity. In January of that year, at a citizens’ meeting in Mineola, they proposed the creation of Nassau County by combining the eastern Queens towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead, and Oyster Bay that had remained separate during consolidation. After a fight in Albany, the law was made official in April, and Nassau county was born in 1899 – exactly a year after the consolidation.

The new seat of Nassau County was within a mile of the Mineola railroad station. Finally, Mineola received the courthouse that the secessionists had so desperately wanted.