By Patricia Demchak
After a one-year hiatus, the Central Queens Historical Association restarted its annual tour and symposium season with a free walking tour of downtown Forest Hills Sunday.
The association’s 10th annual walking tour of Forest Hills, led by association president and local history guru Jeff Gottlieb, drew a crowd of about 26 from the throngs of people enjoying the Forest Hills Festival of the Arts on Austin Street.
Gottlieb led curious residents and history buffs on a two-hour meander from Austin Street and Continental Avenue, up Ascan Avenue and along Queens Boulevard, highlighting architectural aspects, historical anecdotes and famous names in the neighborhood.
“He’s a fountain of information,” marveled George Feldman, 83, who lived in Queens as a child but said he did not know many of the details described by Gottlieb. “He knows everything about the whole borough. I’ve never seen anyone like him.”
Gottlieb, who taught high school history for 35 years before turning to politics and other interests, said he began researching local history about 20 years ago and compiled enough material to found the historical association by 1989.
He leads each of the association’s various walking tours and when “other concerns” forced him to give up the hobby last year, the popular tours came to a halt. Several of the participants on Sunday’s walk said they had been on previous tours and have enjoyed learning a wealth of things about their own neighborhoods that they had never known.
“I‘ve been on one of his other tours, and with the way he explains architecture, I have a whole new understanding of the architecture in the neighborhood,” said Flushing resident Joel Young during the Forest Hills tour. “I used to see buildings. Now I see architecture styles.”
On Sunday’s tour, Gottlieb narrated the origin and growth of Forest Hills beginning with a Long Island Rail Road extension in the late 1800s that drew increased settlement to the former farming area. When the subway system opened in 1936, the five-cent accessibility of mass transit created an apartment housing boom in Forest Hills, Gottlieb said.
The rest, as they say, is history, which Gottlieb proceeded to explain with a detailed eye on the characteristics peculiar to each decade’s architectural styles. For example, one can identify Forest Hill’s earliest structures by their Tudor elements: pitched tile roofs, brick chimneys and a “half timber” combination of wooden beams and stucco-coated brickwork.
The association’s next event is a historical symposium and slide show in Forest Hills Gardens on Sunday, April 28, at 4:30 p.m. Gottlieb also plans to lead three more walking tours this spring: of Kew Gardens Hills on May 19, Queens College on May 25 and Forest Hills Gardens on June 1.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call Gottlieb at 896-4416.
