Thursday, March 5, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (14)

Between 1960 and 1962, when I was active in my local Boy Scout troop, I used to hike through "the pit" from time to time with other members of my Boy Scout patrol, on the way to hiking on the various nature trails in Alley Pond Park, whose forests were only a few miles away from the Beech Hills garden apartment development in which I then lived.

But between 1962 and the early 1970s, some real estate developers had apparently purchased all the land in "the pit" in order to replace the nature scenery and wildlife there with a development of plastic-looking private homes, a big parking lot and construction there of a the big Korvette's discount department store in which I was now working at during the Christmas shopping season. So by the 1970s, few people in Queens seemed to remember that "the pit" had ever been there in the 1950's and early 1960's.