User:JimWae/NYC

History
European colonization brought both Dutch and English settlers, as a part of the New Netherlands colony. First settlements occurred in 1635, with colonization at Maspeth in 1642, and Vlissingen (now Flushing) in 1643. Other early settlements included Newtown (now Elmhurst) and Jamaica. However, these towns were mostly inhabited by English settlers from New England via eastern Long Island (Suffolk County) subject to Dutch law. After the capture of the colony by the English and its renaming as New York in 1664, the area (and all of Long Island) became known as Yorkshire.

Queens was originally named after Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese-born wife of King Charles II of England. Originally, Queens County included the adjacent area now comprising Nassau County. It was an original county of New York State, one of twelve created in 1683.

Queens played a minor role in the American Revolution, as compared to Brooklyn where the Battle of Long Island was largely fought. Queens, like the rest of Long Island, fell under British occupation after the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and remained occupied throughout most of the rest of the war. Under the Quartering Act, British soldiers used the private homes of Queens residents as refuge during the war, against the will of many of the local people. The quartering of soldiers in private homes was banned by the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution largely because of this. Nathan Hale was captured by the British on the shore of Flushing Bay in Queens before being executed in Manhattan.

From 1683 until 1784, Queens County consisted of five towns: Flushing, Hempstead, Jamaica, Newtown, and Oyster Bay. On April 6, 1784, a sixth town, the Town of North Hempstead, was formed through secession by the northern portions of the Town of Hempstead.

The seat of the county government was located first in Jamaica, but was moved in 1788 to Mineola,   (now part of Nassau County). In 1870, Long Island City was incorporated as a city (consisting of what had been the Village of Astoria and some unincorporated areas in the Town of Newtown), and in 1874, the seat of county government was moved there from Mineola.

The New York City Borough of Queens was formed on January 1, 1898, after an 1894 vote on consolidation. Long Island City, the towns of Newtown, Flushing, and Jamaica, and the Rockaway Peninsula portion of the Town of Hempstead were merged to form the new borough, dissolving all former municipal governments (Long Island City, the county government, all towns and all villages) within the new borough. The areas of Queens County that were not part of the consolidation plan, consisting of the towns of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, and the major remaining portion of the Town of Hempstead, remained part of Queens County until they were constituted as the new Nassau County in 1899, thereby also making the boundaries of Queens County and the Borough of Queens coterminous. With consolidation, Jamaica once again became the county seat, though county offices have since spread beyond that neighborhood.

From 1905 to 1908, the Long Island Rail Road n Queens was electrified. Transportation to and from Manhattan, previously by ferry or via bridges in Brooklyn, opened up when the Queensboro Bridge was finished in 1909, and with railway tunnels under the East River in 1910. From 1915 onward, much of Queens was connected to the New York City subway system. With the construction of the elevated IRT subway lines between Queens and Manhattan, and the emergent expansion of the use of the automobile, the population of Queens more than doubled in the 1920s, from 469,042 in 1920 to 1,079,129 in 1930. 

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