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Ozone Park is a neighborhood in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Queens, New York, United States. It is next to the Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, a popular spot for Thoroughbred racing and home to the Resorts World Casino & Hotel. Traditionally home to a large Italian-American population, Ozone Park has growth to have many residents of Caribbean, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds.

While New York City neighborhoods do not have formal boundaries, Ozone Park is considered to have a northern border at Atlantic Avenue the southern border is North Conduit Avenue, the western border is the Brooklyn/Queens border line and the eastern border is up to 108th Street and Aqueduct Racetrack.

Ozone Park is in two community districts, divided by Liberty and 103rd Avenues. The southern half of the neighborhood is in Queens Community District 10, which is covered by New York City Police Department's 106th Precinct, while the northern half is in Queens Community District 9 and covered by the NYPD's 102nd Precinct. Its ZIP Codes are 11416 and 11417.

Etymology

The name "Ozone Park" was chosen for the development to "lure buyers with the idea of refreshing breezes blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean to a park-like community". The "Ozone" in the neighborhood's name referred to a park-like area with cool ocean breezes, an archaic definition that is not related to the present-day definition of the alternate form of oxygen.

History

Early history

An area now part of Ozone Park that pre-dated that community was called "Centreville". It was founded in the 1840s and was centered around Centreville Street and the Centreville Community Church. Part of Ozone Park is still called "Centreville".

In the 1870s, two immigrants from France named Charles Lalance and Florian Grosjean developed a factory in Woodhaven. The factory manufactured cooking materials and porcelain enamelware, but burned down in 1876. Lalance and Grosjean built a second factory, as well as a hundred houses for workers, at Atlantic Avenue and 92nd Street in modern-day Ozone Park.

During the 1870s, an economic depression caused residents of New York City to look for better housing opportunities in the suburbs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where housing would be cheaper. In 1880, the New York, Woodhaven & Rockaway Railroad began service on the Montauk Branch and Rockaway Beach Branch from Long Island City to Howard Beach, Queens. Two years later, two wealthy partners named Benjamin W. Hitchcock and Charles C. Denton bought plots of land around what would later become the Woodhaven Junction station. The Rockaway Beach Branch's Ozone Park station opened in 1883. Advertisements for Ozone Park proclaimed that the development had "pure air" and "no malaria". Ozone Park was called "the Harlem of Brooklyn" because at the time, the borough of Queens did not yet exist, and Harlem was a thriving Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Manhattan. Hitchcock and Denton chose the "Ozone Park" name because in the 1880s, ozone was associated with breezes from the sea, and the Atlantic Ocean was located nearby.

Development

thumb|Aqueduct Racetrack, in Ozone Park

The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company's Fulton Street elevated railroad line above Liberty Avenue opened in 1915, with a station at Lefferts Avenue (now Lefferts Boulevard). The elevated train system only charged a 5-cent fare. The nickel fare was another major factor in the development of Ozone Park, as residents could travel across the entire elevated and subway system for 5 cents. After the opening of the elevated line, real estate developers began buying up all the lots on either side of Liberty Avenue in hopes the new station would attract more people to want to live in Ozone Park.

Extensive housing construction occurred in the 1920s. The houses featured enclosed front porches, open back porches and stained-glass windows in the living rooms. Most of the houses were single family detached or semi-detached (sharing a common wall - often called a twin or a semi) built to roughly the same plan, with the living room, dining room and kitchen all in line and three bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The stairs were usually in the dining room.

During the 1920s, Woodhaven Avenue was the main north–south artery in the area, though its southern terminus was at Liberty Avenue. In conjunction with the extension of Woodhaven Avenue to the Rockaway Peninsula, the avenue was widened to and renamed Woodhaven Boulevard. The extension itself, named Cross Bay Boulevard, opened to traffic in 1925.

Because Ozone Park was now more accessible by