A family gathers for a photo in Broad Channel in 1911. Photo courtesy Broad Channel Historical Society
Walking into the Broad Chanel library, it could, at first, be easy to miss – a cart stacked with mostly white binders perched to the side of a more, comparatively speaking, imposing bookshelf.
But, a cursory glance through one of the binders and never again will one – history buff or history layman – obliviously walk by these glimpses into years long gone. The books, part of a collection launched by the Broad Channel Historical Society in the mid-1990s, are filled with everything from ornately drawn dance pamphlets, which accompanied many a social gathering in Broad Channel from the turn of the 20th century through the roaring 1920s, to countless photos through which the life of this South Queens neighborhood plays out: Its beginnings around 1875, when fishermen set up shacks just before the railroad came into town, the elegantly dressed residents who made the trek from Manhattan to Broad Channel for the summers, or just for Sunday dinners, around the turn of the century, children smiling mischieviously as they ran around the beach in the 1940s – and, really, in any decade, through just a little more than a year and a half ago, when Hurricane Sandy devastated the tight-knit neighborhood.
They are pieces of history that have been painstakingly collected, and saved, over the past two decades – but they are fragile, and the arrival of
A dance program from a 1909 social gathering in Broad Channel.
Sandy made that all too obvious. While the historical society, founded by Broad Channel Civic Association President Dan Mundy in 1994, managed to save most of its collection despite the storm, its members are hoping to digitize most, if not all, of its items, which people from across the country have sent in – and Society President Barbara Toborg said she and her organization are hoping to secure a grant to do so.
“Broad Channel is a unique place with a unique history, and it should be documented and saved,” Toborg said as she flipped through pages of a binder filled with menus from the famous Weiss’ Restaurant – a beloved eatery that began in the 1930s and went strong for decades before shutting its doors.
Toborg said the group is hoping to find a grant worth about $20,000, which would allow them to digitize their entire collection. Pieces of it have been digitized – for example, the Queens Historical Society did so with four binders about Broad Channel residents’ fight to to keep their land from the city’s prying hands, including those of former Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who wanted to build a park on the island. Still, the entire project is far too large for any one person or area organization to help with, the historical society president said.
Whatever happens with the digital project, Toborg said she is more than happy to know that pieces of Broad Channel’s history will keep coming in – photos from attics and basements throughout the neighborhood, old sports uniforms from residents who moved across the country decades ago, the food menus from delis long ago shuttered to the journal entries penned in script no longer taught in schools. They will keep arriving, Toborg knows, because Broad Channel has long elicited a sense of togetherness from those who have been fortunate enough to call it home.
For more information about the organization, visit www.
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