Published Daily Star 5/9/32 • The old farm buildings on what is slated to be part of the Eliot Avenue opening between Sixty-ninth Place and Sixty-ninth Street, Maspeth are to be sold and torn down to expedite the widening.
This will remove two of the few remaining dairy farms in this part of Queens, Jacob Beyers and Herman Schwartz have been dairying there for a great many years. A year ago their farm buildings were acquired by the city and since then they have been tenants. Now they have their notice to move out and the buildings are to be sold.
Many Maspeth residents, reading the preliminary notice in the Daily Star, thought the farm buildings to be sold were those of Carl Beyers on Fifty-seventh Avenue, just south of Grand Avenue. As far back as most of them can remember, local residents riding or walking on Grand Avenue have seen the cows browsing on the fields adjoining the Beyers Dairy farm.
But that one still stands although the building up of Grand Avenue now hides it from the view of people passing there. One might pass it a dozen times and not notice it now, although until a few years ago it was a local landmark.
The same development that has enclosed the old dairy farm on Fifty-seventh Avenue has drained the streams which once flowed through the neighborhood or forced them underground.
Queens is said to be honeycombed with such underground rivers. But the main concern just now of old-time residents of Maspeth is that two landmarks are doomed to go, although it is said a portion of one of the farms may be able to continue operation on land not acquired by the city for the Eliot Avenue widening.