Queens Is Quite Normal in Briarwood

By all accounts, Normal Road, which runs between Parsons Boulevard and 162nd Street near 85th Avenue, is quite normal indeed — occupied on both sides with one and two-family homes and tree-lined, at least in spots. But by that standard, you’d have to name most of the hundreds of miles of streets in Queens normal. What sets this street apart from the other “normal” streets in the borough?

To find out the answer, you would have to go back to late 17th-century France, where a series of schools named ecoles normales were set up as teacher training institutions. Such schools were expected to set standards, or norms, upon which other schools would model their curricula. The first such “normal school” was established in Vermont in 1823, and hundreds of such schools were established in the USA, calling themselves normal schools until the 1920s, when the term “teachers’ colleges” came into vogue.

In Briarwood, at the edge of Jamaica Hills, the Jamaica State Normal School opened in 1897 at Parsons Boulevard a few blocks to the south. According to the Long Island Farmer, “The buildings, which are surrounded by lawns, are situated in a grove of trees on the crest of hills overlooking Jamaica and facing the ocean.” After the school was razed in the early 1970s, P.S. 98 and Hillcrest High School were built on the old property. Normal Road is the only reminder the school existed.

Normal Road, as well as a couple of other obscure lanes in the area — unmarked Glenn Avenue at 164th Street and 85th Avenue, and the dead-end Burdette Place on 88th Avenue west of Parsons Boulevard — owe their existence to a former trolley line that ran from Flushing to Jamaica, mostly along 164th Street. When the trolley ended service in 1937, 164th Street became a four-lane auto speedway, while the trolley right-of-way became public streets: Glenn Avenue, now a private driveway, as well as Normal Road and Burdette Place.