Turn Verein, Long Island City

After the civil war, Long Island City incorporated and became a haven for heavy industry and mechanized production in the Hunters Point, Dutch Kills, and Ravenswood neighborhoods. Astoria developed along the lines of a bedroom community, with the exception of the Steinway factory on the north side and the band of factories and mills which popped up along Jackson Avenue and the rail tracks.

The huge European populations that poured into New York during the 19th century, who served as labor in the new factories, often arrived in tsunami waves of a single ethnicity – resulting in the classic perception of “the XXX’s are taking over!,” followed by the next generation of the “XXX’s” declaring “the YYY’s are taking over!” Today, everyone goes on about Hipsters.

A teacher of mine, at college, was a genius named Will Eisner – and he did a graphic novel on this phenomena called “Dropsie Avenue” about his old block in the Bronx. Dropsie Avenue is available at Amazon, and other places.

In 1875, Astoria was a German town. Deutche was spoken on the streets, taught in schools, and the population of the area read newspapers shipped in from Vienna and Berlin. They were very much in tune with a radical new political theorem called trade-unionism, which promised to unite the workers of the world against the decaying masters of the middle ages – the aristocracy – and a new menace to the working man which was called the Industrialist. They also believed that mankind could be bettered and brought into communion with God – by exercise, good diet, and education – and abstention from the sins of the industrial world like liquor.

One must comment on what must have been going through the minds of these people — the whole world was at war, the greatest empire ever known was crumbling, and an antichrist (himself a Turner) had crowned himself the emperor of France.

And here the immigrants were, in post civil war New York City, safe as houses. So, these Germans built a Turn Verein in Long Island City, on the corner of Broadway and 14th avenue (44th Street) near Schuetzen Park, to better their community and mankind on the whole through the example of Physical Culture.

The Turn Verein structure currently serves as a catering hall for the Chian Federation, a local Greek ethnic society (hailing from island of Chios). It’s found at the corner of 44th and Broadway in Astoria, nearby the border of Sunnyside and Woodside.

The “Turners,” as they called themselves, are still around — here’s their website, and Q’Stoner is pleased to let them tell their own story.

These folks were the inheritors of a genteel middle class society of 19th century Germany, industrial workers who were considered skilled craftsmen that had already adapted to shift work and were used to a factory environment. Known world wide for their skills in working metals and wood alike, the Germans of the 19th century were recruited in large numbers to come to New York, and they were glad to leave behind the catastrophic wars and apocalyptic conditions which were in living memory of these new Americans.

So many of them came here that the stretch of Broadway between Steinway and Woodside Avenue became known as the German Settlement, and the housing stock around here still betrays their presence in its styling.

The concept of the coming “fin de siècle” weighed upon the minds of these new New Yorkers.

It’s part of the underlying reasoning that drove the 19th century religious revival movement, suffrage (New York allowed women to vote in 1917), anti-slavery, and temperance movements which were all were at their apogee in the last half of the century. The 20th century was defined by “-ism’s,” the 19th century was all “movements,” and the 21st (so far) seems to be about the “-ists.”

They left behind a crazy notion that not being drunk all the time was a good thing, these Turners, and that regular exercise has a benefit.

On a completely different note, I’ll be conducting two FREE walking tours with Newtown Creek Alliance in the near future, links below.

• Plank Road, with Newtown Creek Alliance, on April 19th.  Click here to get on the list.
• DUPBO, with Newtown Creek Alliance and MAS Janeswalk, on May 3rd. Click here for more info and ticketing.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.