Ancient Hixtory

Jericho was settled by Europeans in the mid 17^th century. To its south, the empty plain saw no settlement for two centuries, although it was crisscrossed by many merchants and other travelers, who went back and forth between the settlements on the North and South Shores. The hooves of the travelers' horses, and the wheels of their wagons, slowly carved roads across the plain. Before one of the southbound roads got too far from Jericho, it forked in three, with each of its fork's tines heading off to a different South Shore settlement.

No one saw fit to permanently settle at the forks until the 1830s, and even then settlement came about because of a quirk - the new railroad had run out of money, and thus could not build further east. It constructed a little depot where things had stopped, and railroad president Valentine Hicks dubbed the place "Hicksville." The depot's access to New York City and its markets soon attracted people to the area, and a village took root.

Just north of that depot, the diverging of the roads to Jerusalem and South Oyster Bay (i.e., today's Wantagh and Massapequa, respectively) created a triangular plot of land. In time, this triangle would become a focal point for the village. Situated on it, or across the road from it, would be resort hotels, and the homes of some of the village's prominent families, with names like Augustin and Fassbender.

The Triangle, seen looking south from John Street; date uncertain
Like the 1939 view used at the start of this article, this image is one of
the Hicksville Public Library Digital Images at https://nyheritage.org
(digitally modified / "restored" by the author)

Eventually, the Triangle would become a venue for speeches, holiday celebrations, band concerts, and even the posting of campaign results on an election-night. On the first Memorial Day after the Great War, many hundreds of people paraded to it, in celebration of the return of those who had gone off in uniform. For each of the three men who would never return, they planted a young oak. Hicksvillians expected that for decades, perhaps even longer, while the trees grew tall and strong, they would help keep alive the memories of the sacrifices made by those three men. On the following July Fourth, the village unveiled and dedicated a war monument near those young oaks - an enduring boulder that already had withstood eons, which proudly bore a plaque with the names of all those who had served.

Depot Square, probably on July 4, 1919, when the War Monument
(behind the dais, near the flagpole) was unveiled and dedicated
Hicksville Public Library Digital Images at https://nyheritage.org
(digitally modified / "restored" by the author)
Note: The Epworth League - the women holding the banner in the
foreground - was a predecessor of Methodist Youth Fellowship.

All in all, the Triangle (including Depot Square, the name given to the open area at its southern edge) was a worthy little "town square" - but things change.

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Sic Transit etc.

Almost any town's history shows that its "social center" changed as time passed. Consider Manhattan's Union Square. When I was a student, it was at best a rundown, sketchy neighborhood. Yet, in the 19^th century it was proudly given its name because it marked the junction - the union - of Broadway and Bowery Road (now Fourth Avenue), which then were the two most prestigious avenues in Manhattan. On the site of today's Consolidated Edison offices once stood the original Academy of Music, the first successful opera house in the country. The phrase Union Square once implied elegance. Again, things do change.

Today, part of Hicksville's Triangle survives in the form of Kennedy Park - much smaller, and fatally cut in two by a swath of noisy traffic. Although well-landscaped and appealing, the place can never be the focal point for the village in the same way that the combination of Depot Square and the Triangle once was.

Although it is not surprising that the gathering place north of the tracks did not endure forever, it is notable that the old Triangle declined with such abruptness. Let's review the unstoppable forces, and one bizarre event, that accelerated its demise.

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Hicksville Once Was the Railroad's Town

The Triangle Vicinity in 1873
Atlas of Long Island, etc., Beers, Comstock & Cline, 1873 (excerpt)
digitalcollections.nypl.org

In any number of old towns in the Eastern U.S., people can point at something and lament, "It was never the same once the railroad came." It may seem disingenuous for Hicksvillians to do that - after all, the railroad was there first, and the original settlers chose to live and work right on top of it. Nonetheless, it is fair to observe that as time went by, the LIRR had to encroach - and it did encroach - on the village, and its spread critically affected things that had been established close to the tracks.

Railroading steadily matured in the 19^th century, and the things it did got faster and a lot bigger. As longer trains ran more frequently between Jamaica and points east, each carrying more people than Valentine Hicks could ever have imagined, the towns and villages that depended on the railroad had to withstand many changes. Yet, look at the meager LIRR infrastructure (basically only track, albeit with a small depot and platform) that existed as late as the 1870s. It was nearly identical to how things had existed from the start. After 40 years, nothing built or laid out in Hicksville was closer to the railroad than in 1837.

Change was overdue. Because the Main Line between Hicksville and Jamaica had two-way traffic, but much of it was still only a single track, demand was pushing closer to capacity. Thanks to the Island's prosperity, more goods and produce were being shipped as freight, but there was little room for handling freight at Hicksville. A future rail connection to Manhattan was inevitable, and when it happened, the need for still longer passenger trains, and more of them, would increase sharply. For all these reasons, the railroad needed larger locomotives, and they would burn more fuel, and use more water - things which had to be stored not only at Jamaica, but also at key points to the east.

A view which existed for only one year: looking west from Broadway
at the 19^th century depot and the LIRR water tank.
https://nyheritage.org(source unconfirmed as of this writing)
The tank was constructed in 1908, and the depot removed in 1909.

Thus, between the 1880s and 1916, a series of projects nibbled away at the properties that adjoined the LIRR, netting these results:

• The little depot no longer stood near Broadway.
• A second track, adjacent to and north of the original, had been added to the Main Line, all the way from Jamaica.
• Immediately west of Jerusalem Avenue, a new passenger station had been erected.
• To the west of the new station, the old LIRR property line had been pushed north, far enough into the properties on Barclay Street to accommodate a yard that could hold more than 120 boxcars. It had a freight depot and a Railway Express Agency (think FedEx on rails) facility.
• With the new yard facilities in the way, Newbridge Road could no longer continue north across the tracks; it had been rerouted, so as to curve right and subsume Herzog Place.
• In the Triangle, some distance north of the tracks, there now stood a 50,000 gallon water tank, used exclusively to replenish locomotives' water supplies.

***

A Sidebar

Readers may never have paused to realize that the steam which is emitted so copiously by a steam locomotive comes from water stored in the locomotive's tender, in a tank underneath the tender's coal bunker. As locomotives usually consumed water twice as fast as they consumed fuel, stops to replenish water were common.

1954: LIRR #108 taking on water at Jerusalem Avenue
Collection of historian Art Huneke, viewed at
http://www.trainsarefun.com/lirr/hicksville/PRR-H10s-108_taking-water-Hicksville-1954_ArtHuneke.jpg
What you're seeing: With the crossing gates raised, an automobile is starting to
pass in front of the stopped locomotive. Underground pipes connect the LIRR
water tank (visible in the distance, left) to the "water column" in the foreground.
Its spigot directs water down into the filler pipe of the tender's water reservoir.

***

Meanwhile, In the Village

That probably was more than enough about railroading for you - but in a way, that was the point. The people who had to live with the changes must have got fed up, too.

As can be seen below, by 1914 there was growing demand for real estate in central Hicksville - and the LIRR was would acquire still more. To get an idea of the railroad's "thickening," look at how close the tracks were to the original part of the Grand Central Hotel in 1873 (circled on both this and the earlier map) as opposed to 1914.

Central Hicksville
1914 Belcher-Hyde Atlas of Nassau County, pages 99 and 100 (excerpt)
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-3ac2-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Other things also were working to squeeze existing real estate. The change from agrarian to suburban living had begun; there were more people, and most of them wanted to live close to the railroad station. The rise of the automobile already was creating the need for parking lots; roads had to be paved and widened, to accommodate more traffic and more parked vehicles.

For a while, the north of the Triangle looked the same (if slightly narrower once the roads were paved), but people who lived in the area noticed qualitative changes. With more potential workers living in the village, and with better rail freight services, small industry was growing. There also were new retail businesses, like car dealerships and garages. Business was penetrating further into Jerusalem Avenue, and the old, established families in the Triangle area started to think about relocating.

***

Enough finally became enough.

In the deepest hour of a December night in 1914, an extraordinary event occurred. With no warning, a structural failure caused the LIRR's water tank to spontaneously explode. 50,000 gallons of water crashed straight down into the Triangle, noisily triggering a short-lived tsunami. The sound awakened people throughout the village, but to those who lived nearby, noise was not the concern. A number of houses did not withstand the wave and were flooded, including the home of Charles Fassbender of the Bank of Hicksville.

Charles E. Fassbender, Founder, Bank of Hicksville
Hicksville Public Library Digital Images at https://nyheritage.org
(digitally modified by the author)

Despite protests from some townspeople and the local press, the railroad promptly replaced the old tank with another one, constructed in precisely the same place. It did not help the railroad's image that in January, three weeks after the disaster, the hastily-built replacement sprang a leak. A thick, irregular, monolithic ice sheet covered the breadth of Jerusalem Avenue, rendering it impassable.

Those three weeks likely accelerated change in the Triangle. Long-time residents began to move. House-mover Frank Kunz had unexpected work. He moved one house to West Marie Street (a street which people now thought more fashionable), to be extensively renovated. A second structure was moved to a new address on Jerusalem Avenue, further from the water tank than before. Repairs on the Fassbender house would not begin until June, as a lawsuit for damages had to be settled first. Regardless, the Fassbenders moved a few blocks east.

Although Depot Square was still used, it now was less suitable for concerts or events that required a solemn dignity. Traffic and train noise was louder and more frequent. With more industrial properties nearby, and with fewer houses, gardens, and trees, it was less pastoral. The infamous water tank loomed over it. Furthermore, a gate tower - the lookout point for the person who remotely raised / lowered the crossing gates on Broadway and Jerusalem Avenue - had been nibbled into the Square. Today, the tower might look quaint to fans of c.1900 railroad architecture, but I'd wager that the villagers of the 1920s found little appeal in its being there.

Depot Square c.1920; at left is the tower used to control the crossing gates.
http://www.trainsarefun.com/lirr/hicksville/hicksville.htm (digitally modified)
The photographer did what s/he could to hide the unsightly water tank, but a
corner of it can be seen poking up behind the upper-right edge of the boulder.

But where else in the center of Hicksville was there a suitable public space?

Thus, during World War I, the village's Service Flag banner was proudly raised in the Square, so that everyone who came through downtown Hicksville would see how many young people the village had sent to war. Afterwards, the War Monument was put there, and the oaks were planted there, in the belief that Depot Square would always be at the village's core. Year after year, it grew less and less special. Prophetically, one of the three oak trees withered, possibly from the incessant exposure to the fumes of railroad and traffic.

By the end of World War II, everyone agreed that the Square was not the place to put the next monument. A dignified, quiet corner of the High School grounds, not very far away on Jerusalem Avenue, was chosen, and in 1947 the boulder was transported south to be with it.

Thanks to the magic of bulldozers and asphalt, Depot Square soon receded into oblivion. In its place, Hicksville got a new diner. Ironically, its damage done, the LIRR water tank soon disappeared as well: in 1955, the railroad stopped using steam locomotives, and it had the tank demolished.

***

Notes

More Info

It should not be a surprise that this topic touches upon other things which Ancient Hixtory has covered. As noted below, past articles provide more depth about several topics, and can be accessed by the links provided here:

The Distorting Lens of Time

I want to expand on a point I began to make here some months ago. Many times, the quality of the only online photograph of a given subject suffers for at least one of these reasons:

• It was created under difficult circumstances.
• It was shot without adequate awareness of film and lighting constraints.
• Inferior film or processing was used.
• The resulting picture was stored improperly.

I feel that such flaws usually detract from what the photo should communicate. And so, each month I spend a significant portion of the time I devote to Ancient Hixtory trying to negate the worst flaws in the best photographs I have found. Two examples follow:

The glorious "Hicksville Orange" of the first photograph probably resulted from using outdoor color film with indoor incandescent light. Digitally removing the hue while trying to maintain proper contrast resulted in a less crisp image.

The second photo appears to have been shot through a reflective pane of glass (likely the glass of a picture frame), using color film to capture a monotone image. Dark "fringes" in the corners indicate either a poor lens that failed to illuminate the film evenly, or an improperly-fitted lens hood. As I wanted to give readers a good idea of what Depot Square looked like, without distractions, I leveled the horizon and did some terraforming - aka faking. I digitally created land and vegetation to fill in the absent corners.

I hope that historians of the future have an easier time with today's digital pictures.

Ciao!

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