Risking Fisk

Fisk Avenue/69th Street on the #7 Flushing Line has been remanded to history. It was originally named for a casketmaker.

69th Street in Woodside and Maspeth hasn’t been known as Fisk Avenue for several decades…except on the 69th Street platform of the #7 Flushing Line el, where the ancient name had been retained, these days for tradition’s sake than for any other reason. Other stops on the #7, such as Rawson (33rd), Lowery (40th), Bliss (46th) and Lincoln (52nd) also appear on platform signage. When the line opened in 1917, the Queens Topographical Bureau was at the very beginning of a borough-wide street numbering plan that wouldn’t be complete until the late 1920s, and when els and subways were built, the old names were kept so neighborhood oldtimers wouldn’t get lost. The old names stuck fast…although in other parts of town, like on the Astoria and Rockaway Lines, old street names have recently disappeared after station renovations.

The Flushing Line stations are currently undergoing renovations, with new platforms, railings, lighting and electronics…and signage. Older names on the stretch east of Woodside, like 52nd Street/Lincoln Avenue and 69th/Fisk Avenue, will not be retained.

So, Fisk Avenue was renamed 69th Street in the Roaring Twenties, taking its place between 68th and 70th Streets. But as this Dripps map excerpt from 1852 shows, Fisk Avenue has been there a long time, running between North Road (most of which is now Laurel Hill Boulevard) and Maspeth Plank Road (now Grand Avenue). The road in the center, Old Penny Bridge Road, was straightened into Maurice and Calamus Avenues.

I have circled an item at the very top of the map at North Road: Fisk Foundry. Its story begins in Oxford, Mississippi in 1844 and the decease of one William Fisk. The rest of his family lived in Chazy, New York on Lake Champlain and in the era before widespread embalming and refrigeration, there was no way to transport the remains the many hundreds of miles between the two locales. A young stove and boiler manufacturer had a solution: William Fisk’s brother, Almond. The younger Fisk brother, using his training and abilities in watertight stove manufacturing, devised a metal coffin that would prevent microbes from entering and decomposing the remains.

The new coffins were marketed at first toward the wealthy and were displayed in the US Capitol rotunda (not the present Capitol, which would be dedicated during the Lincoln Administration). The first major “customer” was the family of ex-President James Madison, which purchased one for the remains of deceased First Lady Dolley Madison. Later, the metal coffins were marketed to prevent illnesses such as cholera as well as a deterrent to grave robbing.

in 1845, Fisk and father-in-law Henry Raymond constructed a factory in an area soon to be known as Winfield, in today’s Woodside, and constructed a road south to the Maspeth Plank Road, which led to ferries to Brooklyn and Manhattan, and it still exists today as a portion of 69th Street. The firm continued to manufacture stoves as well as iron coffins and the company became quite successful, surviving the destruction by fire of the original factory in 1849. Unfortunately Almond Fisk suffered severe injuries from fighting the fire and perished at the young age of 32 in 1850; his remains returned to Chazy in one of the iron coffins his firm manufactured.

The firm was renamed W.M. Raymond and continued to build iron stoves and coffins; Abraham Lincoln was laid out in one, after his 1865 assassination. The foundry, at Fisk Avenue and Laurel Hill Boulevard, closed in 1889.

That’s not quite the end of the iron casket story. In 2011, a plot at 47-11 90th Street, near Newtown High School, was being developed when excavations revealed an iron casket with a female African American body inside. Research and census records revealed that the interred person was one Martha Peterson, who lived at the address of and was a housekeeper of William Raymond, father-in-law and business partner of Almond Fisk. The remains highlighted a heretofore unknown African American community in Newtown. The plot was once a cemetery overseen by the congregation of St. Marks AME, and is under consideration for designation by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission.

More:

A Brief History of Fisk’s Coffins [Iron Coffin Mummy]
Elmhurst’s African American Burial Ground [Juniper Park Civic]

Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)