My Family's Farm

I've never thought of myself as coming from a farming family but this week, during a quick trip to NY, my family's farm was much on my mind.

My dad picked me up at Kennedy Airport, and as we turned out onto the highway I noticed a sign I'd never seen before for Farmer's Boulevard. I knew that my great grandfather had a dairy farm near where they later built the airport, and that my grandmother grew up there. (That's her in the picture, feeding the chickens sometime in the 1920's.)

The farm was where the Ozone Park neighborhood is now, near 88th Street, Sutter Avenue, and PS 63. Many years later the Balsam family, who lived across the road, acquired the land. There's a housing development there now called Balsam Village. The main street close to the farm was Old South Road, which was mostly replaced by the Belt Parkway. The farm spanned 8 acres and they had 80 cows.

In 1913, when my grandmother was 5 years old, the health department ordered farmers to put down all cows in the city limits because of an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease. I remember my grandmother describing the passive look on their faces as they were herded in to be shot. Until today I hadn't realized how young she was when it happened. Her father worked odd jobs after that until he was able to earn enough to replace his herd.

His cows weren't pastured, but rather kept in the barn. (So much for grass-fed.) Among other things, he fed them broken Nabisco crackers that he was able to acquire cheaply. This fact, in particular, fascinated me because his dairy products were kosher certified and marketed specifically to the Jewish community. I remembered not being allowed to buy Nabisco products when I was a kid because they weren't kosher. It turns out that Nabisco did obtain kosher certification for many of its products in 1997, but I doubt they were certified kosher in 1910.

There were truck farms all over Queens at that time. The land was gradually developed as roads and subways made the area more accessible to the city. Land values began to climb and commuters began to settle there. There have been similar changes here in the Seattle area during the past few decades as farmland has given way to suburbia. It's an old story.