Urban Archive

In the late 19th centruy, a group of Irish immigrants and their allies founded the Greater New York Irish Athletic Association, a progressive alternative to the exclusive New York Athletic Club. In 1898 they purchased farmland near Calvary Cemetery and built Celtic Park, a sprawling athletic complex that for the next three decades was home to some of the world’s best athletes.

Renamed the Irish-American Athletic Club, it quickly gained fame not just for its champions but for its inclusivity. In an era when many athletic organizations barred Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans, Celtic Park welcomed them. Its members went on to win more than fifty Olympic medals. Among them were Joseph Flanagan, the first Irish athlete to win gold for the U.S.; Myer Prinstein, the first Jewish-American Olympic champion; and Dr. John Baxter Taylor Jr., the first African-American to claim gold for the U.S.

By the 1930s, Celtic Park's glory days were behind it. After a brief stint as a greyhound track, an unwelcome development for the rapidly growing residential neighborhood, the land was sold off to developers.

Today, the former oval track is home to two blocks of apartment buildings and a massive solar-roofed parking lot. The half-block-long diagonal street, Celtic Ave, is the only evidence of the storied facility.

The Neighborhoods

Sunnyside

Sunnyside in Queens, between the Sunnyside Rail Yard and the LIE/BQE interchange, is bisected by Queens Boulevard, with the great, curving vaults of the elevated train tracks running above. To the south, the buildings are a mix of five- and six-story co-ops and freestanding homes, while the north is dominated by the historic district of Sunnyside Gardens, a leafy enclave of red-brick Colonial Revival homes and apartment buildings. The neighborhood's eastern border is made up of Woodside and Calvary Cemetery, while its western border is (by most accounts) 39th Street. Not to be confused with 39th Place, which, in true Queens fashion, runs one block parallel. The neighborhood got its name from the Broucard family, French Huguenots who arrived in the U.S. in 1675 aboard the Gilded Otter. Bourgon Broucard initially settled in Bushwick, but, perhaps growing weary of all the bespoke cooperages and farm-to-table johnnycake pop-ups, he bought a large estate in what is now Sunnyside from the fantastically named Burger Jorizz. In 1713, Broucard, or one of his sons, named their estate "Sunnyside Hill." One of the homes that Bourgon built stood for over 200 years before it was finally torn down around 1900. By then the farmland was giving way to the city: the Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and the IRT Flushing Line, connecting Queens with Manhattan, was finished by 1915.