Brookville Park and the Ghost Train

In the colonial era, Rosedale in southeast Queens was the eastern end of the settlement known as Springfield, so called for abundant fresh water in the area. Native Americans had used it as a hunting ground for centuries prior to that. An early British settler was named John Foster, and so the area was named Foster’s Meadows, as was the Long Island Rail Road station when the railroad arrived in the late 1800s. The only road through the meadows, now an undeveloped part of Brookville Park, was known as Old Foster’s Meadow Road until it was renamed Brookville Boulevard in the 1920s. It remains the only road connecting Rosedale with Rockaway Boulevard east of Guy Brewer Boulevard and if you look at the map, that’s a lot of territory.

While Brookville Park encompasses 90 acres, the portion south of 149th Avenue, is undeveloped and wild. The cultivated section is generally between South Conduit Avenue, 147th Avenue, 232nd Street and Brookville Boulevard. A natural stream divides that section in two, punctuated by Conselyea’s Pond just north of 147th.

Conselyea’s Pond

Old route of Cedarhurst Cutoff

A long-forgotten spur of the Long Island Rail Road, known as the Cedarhurst Cutoff, once ran southeast through Rosedale. Today it is remembered only by the street pattern (a glance at the map shows Edgewood and Huxley Streets diagonally cutting through the grid for no discernible purpose; the RR once ran between the two streets). And, there’s a lengthy clearing in Brookville Park (left) corresponding to the RR’s old route.

As Bob Andersen explains at lirrhistory.com, the line connecting the main line to Cedarhurst was only in active use between 1872, when it was built, and about 1880. Yet the LIRR had high hopes for it and it was rebuilt in both 1918 and 1928, the latter an electrification, but trains never ran on the route again and by World War II, the rails had been torn up.

Sunrise Highway was begun in 1926 and has never really been finished. It’s an at-grade highway in some sections, and an elevated expressway in others. The expressway sections in Nassau and Suffolk Counties were begun in 1958 and the latest, in Oakdale in Suffolk, was finished in 1998. The highway proper is State Highway 27 (as Linden Boulevard is in Brooklyn and Queens) and carries the name Sunrise Highway as far as County Road 39 in Shinnecock Hills.

The road is a cognate of sorts of Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard, albeit much less glamorous.

But Sunrise Highway isn’t thought of as a New York City thoroughfare. Or is it?

The highway extends west into Queens, or rather proceeds from Queens east, for the better part of a mile. When the Belt System turns north along the Queens-Nassau Line, Shore Parkway becomes Laurelton Parkway and Sunset Boulevard picks up some of the Belt Parkway’s eastbound traffic. North and South Conduit Avenues transfer their allegiances here: they have accompanied Shore Parkway all the way from the Brooklyn line, and escort Sunrise Highway till they end at the city line just east of Hook Creek Boulevard.

Sunrise Highway was once mapped to run all the way west to Atlantic Avenue in Cypress Hills, but that section was quickly renamed Conduit Boulevard in Brooklyn, and after crossing into Queens, North and South Conduit Avenues, named for the conduits that once led to the now-decommissioned Ridgewood Reservoir and for which Aqueduct Raceway is named.