DeWitt Clinton and Maspeth

Maspeth isn’t a location many associate with DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828), a founding father who served as NY State Assemblyman, NYS Senator, NYS Governor, US Senator and NYC Mayor during an illustrious career capped by his indefatigable support for the Erie Canal. Several streets around town were named for him, including Maspeth’s own Clinton Avenue, and when Green-Wood Cemetery opened in Brooklyn in 1838 his remains were later exhumed from the original burial plot in Albany, NY and moved to Brooklyn — as a tourist attraction for the nascent burial park.

NYS Governor DeWitt Clinton lived in Maspeth for several decades in this house that had stood near Newtown Creek. Judge Joseph Sackett built a two-story wood frame mansion with porches around both levels in the area behind Clinton Hall (pictured after the jump) in 1750. During the Revolutionary War the house was occupied by American physician and general, Joseph Warren, and British Gen. William Howe planned an invasion of NYC via Newtown Creek from the mansion after its capture.

Clinton, who held every important office in New York State at one time or another in the early 1800s, planned the Erie Canal from this Maspeth waterside retreat, which he had inherited in 1790 from his father-in-law, wealthy Manhattan merchant, Walter Franklin. Citizens converted the grounds of the Sackett-Clinton House into a park around 1910, and the house was divided into tenements in the 1920s, but the Clinton Mansion ultimately burned down in 1933.

A long-vanished NYS historical marker for the Clinton House stood on 58th Street near 56th Road and read:

DeWitt Clinton House 1790-1828. Stood several hundred feet north of here. Gov. Dewitt Clinton worked on plans for Erie Canal here. 

In the first half of the 20th century, Maspeth residents danced their cares away at Clinton Hall, at 58th Street and 56th Road. Its wrap-around interior balconies and grand chandelier are seared into the minds of Maspeth’s quickly vanishing older generations. It was built in the 1920s and is being used now as a laboratory and for industrial purposes. The dance hall is the Clinton Mansion’s namesake. The entire area is now covered with industry, revealing no trace of the mansion that was once there.

The Clinton Diner, at 58th Street and Maspeth Avenue, is one of a vanishing breed of roadside diners, catering to workers in an industrial area and motorists who are passing through. It stands next to freight tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The now dismantled Richard Upjohn 1847 masterpiece, St. Saviour’s Church, was just a couple of blocks south until the mid-2000s. DeWitt Clinton’s mansion, for which the diner is named, stood nearby until 1933. A house belonging to family members of mid-19th century Maspeth mover and shaker James Maurice is across 58th Street. Community meetings take place here, and it has been used on numerous occasions for movie and TV shoots when a scene needs authenticity.

Two years ago, the Clinton Diner became Goodfellas Diner, in homage to the scenes from the Scorsese mob classic where scenes that were filmed there  in 1989.