Ozone Park is a neighborhood in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Queens, New York, United States. It is next to the Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, a popular spot for Thoroughbred racing and home to the Resorts World Casino & Hotel. Home to a large Italian-American population, Ozone Park has also grown in recent decades to have many residents of Caribbean, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds.Lasky, Julie. "Ozone Park, Queens: A Congenial Area Welcomes a New Wave of Residents; In the past decade, the neighborhood has seen a 'tremendous transformation,' with new developments and an increasingly diverse population.", The New York Times, October 10, 2018. Accessed September 26, 2021. "In recent decades, Ozone Park has attracted Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans. Stoop talk is in a mixed bouquet of languages, and the homemade signs tacked to utility poles are as likely to be in Bengali as English."
While New York City neighborhoods do not have formal boundaries, Ozone Park is considered to have a northern border at Atlantic Avenue; the southern border is North Conduit Avenue, the western border is the Brooklyn/Queens border line; and the eastern border is up to 108th Street and Aqueduct Racetrack.
Ozone Park is in two community districts, divided by Liberty and 103rd Avenues. The southern half of the neighborhood is in Queens Community District 10, which is covered by New York City Police Department's 106th Precinct, while the northern half is in Queens Community District 9 and covered by the NYPD's 102nd Precinct. Its ZIP Codes are 11416 and 11417.Queens Boards, New York City. Accessed January 26, 2024.
Etymology The name "Ozone Park" was chosen for the development to "lure buyers with the idea of refreshing breezes blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean to a park-like community".Shaman, Diana. "If You're Thinking of Living In/Ozone Park; Changing Faces, Enduring Values", The New York Times, October 5, 2003. Accessed August 30, 2018. "Housing development dates to the late 19th century, when two partners, Benjamin W. Hitchcock and Charles C. Denton, began carving farmland into building lots after the New York, Woodhaven & Rockaway Rail Road opened service in 1880 from Long Island City to Howard Beach. The developers chose the name Ozone Park to lure buyers with the idea of refreshing breezes blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean to a parklike community." At the time, ozone, now known to be a harmful pollutant at ground level, was popularly thought to be a healthful component of fresh air such as mountain or sea breezes. "Ozone has been extolled as the active health-giving agent in mountain and sea air, its virtues have been vaunted as a therapeutic agent, until these have, by mere reiteration, become part and parcel of common belief; and yet exact physiological evidence in favour of its good effects has been hitherto almost entirely wanting."Pollak, Michael. "F.Y.I.: Real Money Men", The New York Times, May 29, 2009. Accessed August 30, 2018. "The name sprang from the fancy of two 19th-century developers, Benjamin W. Hitchcock and Charles C. Denton, who bought farmland and created building lots after a railroad opened in 1880 from Long Island City to Howard Beach. They decided to call their development Ozone Park to promote the idea of cool, clean breezes blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. Fresh air is one of the meanings of ozone."
History
Early history
An area now part of Ozone Park that pre-dated that community was called "Centreville". It was founded in the 1840s and was centered around Centreville Street and the Centreville Community Church. Part of Ozone Park is still called "Centreville".Centreville Forgotten New York
In the 1870s, two immigrants from France named Charles Lalance and Florian Grosjean established a factory in Woodhaven where they manufactured cooking materials and porcelain enamelware. It burned down in 1876. Lalance and Grosjean built a second factory, as well as a hundred houses for workers, at Atlantic Avenue and 92nd Street in modern-day Ozone Park.
During the 1870s, an economic depression caused residents of New York City to look for better housing opportunities in the suburbs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where housing would be cheaper. In 1880, the New York, Woodhaven & Rockaway Railroad began service on the Montauk Branch and Rockaway Beach Branch from Long Island City to Howard Beach, Queens. Two years later, two wealthy partners named Benjamin W. Hitchcock and Charles C. Denton bought plots of land around what would later become the Woodhaven Junction station. The Rockaway Beach Branch's Ozone Park station opened in 1883.
Advertisements for Ozone Park proclaimed that the development had "pure air" and "no malaria". Ozone Park was called "the Harlem of Brooklyn" because at the time, as Harlem was a thriving Jewish and Italian neighborhood. Hitchcock and Denton chose the "Ozone Park" name because in the 1880s, ozone was associated with breezes from the sea, and the Atlantic Ocean was located nearby.
Development
The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company's Fulton Street elevated railroad line above Liberty Avenue opened in 1915, with a station at Lefferts Avenue (now Lefferts Boulevard). The elevated train system only charged a 5-cent fare. The nickel fare has been cited as a contributing factor in the development of Ozone Park, as residents could travel across the entire elevated and subway system for 5 cents. After the opening of the elevated line, real estate developers began buying up all the lots on either side of Liberty Avenue in hopes the new station would attract more people to want to live in Ozone Park.
Extensive housing construction occurred in the 1920s. The houses featured enclosed front porches, open back porches and stained-glass windows in the living rooms. Most of the houses were single family detached or semi-detached (sharing a common wall, often called a twin or a semi) built to roughly the same plan, with the living room, dining room and kitchen all in line and three bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The stairs were usually in the dining room.
During the 1920s, Woodhaven Avenue was the main north–south artery in the area, though its southern terminus was at Liberty Avenue. In conjunction with the extension of Woodhaven Avenue to the Rockaway Peninsula, the avenue was widened to and renamed Woodhaven Boulevard. The extension itself, named Cross Bay Boulevard, opened to traffic in 1925.Staff. "Jamaica Bay Highway Ready This Month; New $7,000,000 Boulevard Will Be Open to Motorists the Week of Oct. 26.", The New York Times, October 11, 1925. accessed August 30, 2018. "The Jamaica Bay Boulevard, which will run from Liberty Avenue, Ozone Park, Queens, to Rockaway Beach, shortening the distance between the Rockaway peninsula and Manhattan and Brooklyn nearly ten miles, will be opened to public traffic late this month. When completed its cost will have been $6,935,972."
Because Ozone Park was now more accessible by car, the land became much more valuable, leading to a construction boom . Between 1921 and 1930, Ozone Park saw a population increase of over 180% from 40,000 to 112,950 people.
With this increase in population came the need for schools and sources of entertainment. In response to this demand came the construction of John Adams High School in 1930. This school was built just as the construction boom slowed down and right before the Great Depression. The 1,800-seat Cross-Bay Movie Theatre opened in December 1924, and a 2,000-seat theater at 102nd Street and Liberty Avenue was also built during this time.
One area of Ozone Park is known as "The Hole", and includes the area bounded by 75th (Ruby) Street, South Conduit Avenue, 78th Street and Linden Boulevard. It is named as such because the houses in this area were built below grade, with a ground level that is lower than the surrounding area. The area is economically distressed, and suffers from frequent flooding. In the 1930s, the city of New York decided to install sewers and sewer lines in Ozone Park to stop the flooding that had become a major problem. In order to install the sewers, the houses had to be raised almost an entire floor. Owners were given a stipend to raise their homes but some chose not to do so. The first floor in some of the non-raised homes subsequently became basements. In 2004, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection made plans to connect the neighborhood to the city's sewer system to combat the flooding by raising the land.
Later years The Centreville Community Church merged with the United Methodist Church of Ozone Park in 1957 and a new church, the Community Methodist Church of Ozone Park, was built at the Southeast corner of Sutter Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard. It was completed for Christmas 1958. The old church and the property that surrounded it were sold to Aqueduct Racetrack and the old, historic church was torn down in mid-1959.
The Lalance and Grosjean factory closed in the 1960s and was left to deteriorate over two decades. In 1981, the factory complex was designated as a New York City Landmark. What remains is now "adaptively reused" as a medical clinic. Only the factory's old clock tower remains.
In 1996, a scandal broke surrounding two Ozone Park Jewish cemeteries, Mokom Sholom Cemetery and Bayside Cemetery, which share a coterminous tract bounded by 80th and 84th Streets and Liberty and Pitkin Avenues (the adjoining Acacia Cemetery was not involved). Allegations of the re-using of graves of long-dead mostly infants and small children from the mid-to-late 19th century, for re-sale to recent Russian Jewish immigrants, were made against the owners of Mokom Sholom. In addition, Mokom Sholom and Bayside had also been damaged by a combination of vandals, grave-robbers, and self-styled necromancers, though the former was affected to a greater extent. WABC-TV reported on damage to Mokom Sholom, while damage to Bayside was repaired through philanthropic efforts, headed by the late city councilman Al C. Stabile.
Demographics Based on data from the 2010 United States census, the population of Ozone Park was 21,376, an increase of 324 (1.5%) from the 21,052 counted in 2000. Covering an area of , the neighborhood had a population density of .Table PL-P5 NTA: Total Population and Persons Per Acre — New York City Neighborhood Tabulation Areas*, 2010, Population Division — New York City Department of City Planning, February 2012. Accessed June 16, 2016.
The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 30.5% (6,511) White, 5.6% (1,188) African American, 0.4% (82) Native American, 19.4% (4,143) Asian, 0.0% (2) Pacific Islander, 2.6% (559) from other races, and 3.6% (779) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 37.9% (8,112) of the population.Table PL-P3A NTA: Total Population by Mutually Exclusive Race and Hispanic Origin — New York City Neighborhood Tabulation Areas*, 2010, Population Division — New York City Department of City Planning, March 29, 2011. Accessed June 14, 2016.
The entirety of Community Board 10, which comprises Howard Beach, southern Ozone Park (south of 103rd Avenue), and South Ozone Park, had 125,603 inhabitants as of NYC Health's 2018 Community Health Profile, with an average life expectancy of 81.7 years. This is higher than the median life expectancy of 81.2 for all New York City neighborhoods. Most inhabitants are youth and middle-aged adults: 22% are between the ages of between 0–17, 28% between 25 and 44, and 28% between 45 and 64. The ratio of college-aged and elderly residents was lower, at 9% and 13% respectively.