The Mills of New York City
When New York City had a more rural character a couple of centuries ago, grist mills, in which grain is ground into flour, were primary engines of commerce. Though none are left within the five boroughs, maps nonetheless are stocked with lanes and roads called Mill, some major, some minor—Manhattan (one), Brooklyn (five), Bronx (one) and Staten Island (three) all have Mills or Old Mills in them, and all likely led, at one time, to actual mills—most are near the water.
I was recently ambling down car-choked Cropsey Ave. in Bath Beach, Brooklyn when I happened upon a time machine that brought me back to the rural Kings County of the mid-1800s. This 1873 Beers atlas plate shows the villages of Unionville and Guntherville that year. The present location is the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, along Cropsey Ave. between about 25th and 28th Aves., none of which was mapped out at the time.
In 1810 Gravesend village contained 20 houses, the Reformed Dutch Church and a schoolhouse. A lighthouse was erected at Coney Island. There were two tidemills. The taxable property was valued at $178,477. The population was 520, which rose to 810 in 1840. The settlement in Sheepshead Bay was originally known as “The Cove” and later as Sheepshead Bay. Other neighborhoods were Unionville and Guntherville, on Gravesend Bay, South Greenfield on the King’s Highway, and on the head of Gerrettsen’s Creek, extending over the Flatlands line.
The map shows Mill Rd. issuing southeast from the right of way of the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad (it’s the road just south of the hatched line designating the railroad). The BB&CI was the first steam railroad in Kings County and was organized by Charles G. Gunther, the mayor of NYC (which then encompassed Manhattan only) from 1864-1866. The railroad originated at 5th Ave. and 25th St.—then as now the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery—and ran southwest, south and southeast to Coney Island. Gunther was forced to build a roundabout route to avoid landowners’ (mostly farmers at the time) opposition. A second steam RR to Canarsie was founded in 1865, and Andrew N. Culver’s straighter, and more successful, steam railroad, was founded in 1875. All three of these steam railroad lines, with some changes in routes, were succeeded by elevated and subway lines.
Gunther owned property in the area (note the “C.G. Gunther” south of Mill Rd. in the center of the map). The name was favored for only a few years, however, and the town was absorbed into Bath Beach after a landfill joined it to the rest of the area.
Two blocks of Mill Rd. are navigable by auto today, and remaining sections are weed-choked. The above shows Mill Rd. at its southern end at 27th Ave. The Department of Transportation has rules, and one of them is that streets that are not on the city’s official maps do not get street signs. There are two handmade Mill Rd. signs along its length, likely by local residents.
I found Brooklyn’s Old Mill Rd. in the late-1970s, on one of my many bicycling trips from Bay Ridge way out east, to New Lots, Ozone Park or even further. The longest round trip I made was Bay Ridge to Valley Stream and back. Modest by the standards of other bicyclists I’ve known, but I prided myself on making that round trip in five hours.
One of my favorite routes was down Cozine Ave., to escape the mean streets of East New York further north; this was the blackout–Son of Sam era. Attaining Fountain Ave., I noticed a dirt road just south of Cozine running east to Crescent St.. It was unpaved and there must’ve been a black and white street sign indicating “Old Mill Road” then. The city doesn’t deign to mark it now, though there’s a single streetlamp. There appear to be two or three ancient homes fronting the road, which explains its survival. In 2024, it remains unpaved.
All NYC boroughs have a Mill Street, Lane, Road of some kind, and all of them are near the water and mark the locations of former mills. Crescent St. used to run down to Jamaica Bay and was the location of Van Wicklen’s Mill. As The East New York Project reports: “Located at the foot of Crescent St. by Jamaica Bay, the Old Mill was not known to my generation. From Good Old East New York: ‘The Old Mill was established on the Bull Creek, about 1770 by one Van Brunt, at the same time as the Red Mill, just across the Flatlands town line, was built. Until 1810 the Bull Creek Mill stood at the second floodgate about a half mile south of the present site. In that year the mill was taken down and the present structure was built from the timbers of the original mill, at the foot of Crescent St. The mill was owned by L. Van Wicklen and known to many as Van Wicklen’s Mill.’”
The photo, also from the site, pictures the mill in 1900. It was demolished in 1934, after having stood since 1810. Sometimes, dirt roads unknown by most are the keys to the historic past.
In the early-1990s I was bicycling in the northeast section of Jackson Heights known as East Elmhurst when I noticed, at Astoria Blvd. and 97th St., a rutted old road trailing off into the distance. Sniffing a discovery, I made two excellent finds. Modern maps show two roads called Jackson Mill Rd. in the area. One runs roughly east-west, from 32nd Ave. and 93rd St. east to 97th St., and the other, shorter section running between 24th Ave. and 94th St. in a rough north-south direction. However, the maps didn’t show a lengthier extension of Jackson Mill Rd. running south of 24th Ave. and extending southeast to Astoria Blvd. and 97th St., which is what I found that day.
I consulted old maps, which showed a road meandering around Trains Meadow in the 1800s corresponding to this one. The two sections were at one time connected, before the area was built up beginning in the late-1910s. There was, at one time, a mill at North Beach, now LaGuardia Airport, that ground corn and wheat that went by a variety of names until “Jackson’s Mill” was settled on, probably after Jackson Ave. toll road was built through the area. The mill closed about 1870, according to Queens historian Vincent Seyfried.
At the same time I located the unmapped section of Jackson Mill Rd., I also noted two sets of tracks embedded in what little pavement remained. As Seyfried explains in his book Brooklyn Rapid Transit Lines in Queens, the meandering road had been the only road in the area when the trolley line to North Beach was built in 1893, and in lieu of building an expensive right of way, the line was simply built on the road. As streets were cut through, the road was allowed to remain because of the trolley. Even after LaGuardia Airport was constructed at North Beach, the trolley line remained, but service ended in the 1940s.
Nonetheless, the diagonal right-of-way was preserved, and the city marked it with street signs as Jackson Mill Rd., even though part of it disappeared from official maps.
By 2001, the southern section of the trolley tracks between Astoria Blvd. and 25th Ave. west of 97th St. had disappeared as new residential housing was constructed on top of the old route. The section of track between 24th and 25th Aves. is still visible, but for how much longer is open to conjecture. The stretch is still the longest section of exposed trolley track still visible in New York City.
—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).