The Ghosts of Maspeth
I was thinking of West Maspeth, specifically the region just east of the Long Island Rail Road Montauk Branch tracks between Maspeth and Grand Aves. Until fairly recently, I could have lunch at a diner whose history went back to the 1930s, visited a church constructed in 1847, and rode a railroad train that stopped nearby; currently, all three are impossible.
The Clinton Diner, at 58th St. and Maspeth Ave., was one of a vanishing breed of roadside diners, catering to workers in an industrial area and motorists passing through. It stands next to freight tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. DeWitt Clinton’s mansion, for which the diner was named, stood nearby until 1933. A house belonging to family members of mid-19th century Maspeth mover and shaker James Maurice is across the street. Community meetings took place here, and it had been used on numerous occasions for movie and TV shoots when a scene needs authenticity. One of those was the film Goodfellas where a scene with Robert DeNiro and the late Ray Liotta was filmed; diner owners the Diamantis family renamed the Clinton Diner Goodfellas Diner in its honor.
Photo: NYC Municipal Archives
The Clinton Diner originally opened in 1935, when memories of the DeWitt Clinton Mansion were fresh. The mansion, in a precursor of the diner’s fate, burned down two years earlier in 1933. In 1964, the diner assumed its present appearance when it was remodeled to its latest appearance. The De Raffele structure resembled the Market Diner at 11th Ave. and W. 43rd St., built about the same time, and closed in 2015. It’s not every day you walk into a diner and find your website on the menu, but that happened to me in 2011 when I found Forgotten NY there. I was meandering around Newtown Creek, tripped and gashed my noggin on the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, and started bleeding when tucking into my lunch at Goodfellas and had to be hustled off to Elmhurst Hospital for some stitches, but my memories of the place remain positive. All the fun ended in June 2018 when a devastating fire gutted the diner’s interior. The diner still stands, with plywood instead of windows. After initial indications from the Diamantis family that the diner would reopen, it hasn’t happened, and another fire swept through earlier this year.
St. Savior’s Church (Episcopalian) on Rust St. and 57th Dr. had been there since 1847, designed by Richard Upjohn in what was open country in that era on land donated by James Maurice, a prominent lawyer, politician and landowner. It was torched by vandals in 1970, considerably altered after that and was later renamed and occupied by a Korean congregation. Maurice’s name was affixed to a major Queens thoroughfare running along Mount Zion Cemetery from Maspeth to Woodside, and one of his family homes still stands on Rust St. and 57th Ave.
When the Korean church moved out in 2006, Maspeth Development LLC took ownership and announced plans to raze the church. Civic groups such as the Juniper Park Civic Association, then led by current Councilman Robert Holden, and other preservationists expressed interest in saving the church, but pleas were met with stonewalling from other politicians as well as the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which held that the church was too altered from its original appearance to save. In 2008, the church was disassembled, its pieces labeled and placed into storage; it awaits reassembly. Warehouses occupy the church’s footprint today.
Built in 1925 (as indicated by a terra cotta sign at its roofline) at 55-15 Grand Ave. just west of the railroad, the handsome brick Star Corrugated Box epitomized western industrial Maspeth. In its later years it served as a truck depot. After local politicians thwarted Amazon’s plan to build office space in Hunters Point in 2019, Amazon purchased the property the following year and quickly razed the box factory and built a one million-square-foot delivery station, the bulk of which is dedicated to van storage.
Hanging on, though not, it appears, for too much longer, is the Grand Street Bridge, the oldest of the many bridges spanning the noxious and noisome Newtown Creek and its tributaries. I should do a survey of the Creek bridges while it’s still there. The bridge passed its centennial with little fanfare in 2002 (it was opened in December 1902 or February 1903, depending on what source you use) and as old as it is, two previous bridges bridged the Newtown before it. The first, constructed in 1875, became dilapidated (in a typical NYC and Brooklyn story) and was replaced in 1890, but was declared by the US War Department (which became the Department of Defense and is now the Department of War again) as a threat to navigation. Plans for a new bridge, the present one, were drawn up in 1898.
Grand St. and Grand Ave., as the road is known in Queens, together are about 120 years old. Grand Ave. was engineered in the late-19th century as an eastern extension of Williamsburg’s Grand Street, and was known as a Street in the early years of its existence before the Queens section became an Avenue, likely to differentiate it from Brooklyn. In Queens, the road’s eastern course overlapped the course of the Newtown Plank Rd., which is today’s Maspeth Ave. as far as its eastern junction with Grand and Flushing Aves. (Flushing Ave. itself is a straightened version of a colonial-era route called the Brooklyn and Newtown Turnpike.)
Plans call for it to be replaced with a modern span, which will no doubt be functional and boring, within a few years.
A personal note: December 2025 marks the 10-year-anniversary of my weekly columns in Splice Today. In the 1990s I absorbed its predecessor New York Press and the work of columnists and cartoonists Todd Seavey, Paul Lukas, Danny Hellman and Dawn Eden Goldstein, among others, which inspired me to write and who have become personal friends. Thanks to Russ and Nicky Smith for the opportunity.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)