John Gotti did NOT live in Ozone Park, ever.
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Still a great neighborhood . I've lived in the area my whole life ,49 years .I went to St Stanislaus on 101 ave . My son went to Gate of Heaven on 104 street . Seen the changes . Some for the better & some not so much . Still a great place to live .
I'm now over by Elizabeth Blackwell JHS 210 on 101 Ave . Which also wasn't mentioned . It's getting a bit crowded & dirty in sections . Feast or famine with the parking . Looking to bring homeless shelters to the area . I believe there is 1 on 102 & Atlantic Ave .
Location is great ,easy commute anywhere you want to go . I think it will be a great neighborhood for a long time coming .
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I currently live in Ozone Park. I raised my three children here. It is a wonderful community. The article mentioned many highlights of the neighborhood. Living less than 10 minutes from JFK and about 15 minutes from Rockaway Beach is also a huge plus. Goddard High School and CTEA High School are relatively new and have excellent reputations. The diverse community is so symbolic of the melting pot that is NYC. People respect each other and are welcoming. It's it a great place to live. Thank you to the NY Times for focusing on this hard-working middle class neighborhood that I am proud to call home!
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My grandfather built the original Milk Farm (it was called Circle S, one of several branches opened back when bottled milk was a thing!) supermarket - originally it was the milk farm & a liquor store before we closed the store and sold the business to the folks who bought the milk store. They planned to enlarge the milk farm as you see now!
I lived in nearby Howard Beach & worked in both the milk farm and liquor store & went to Godard JHS 202 and John Adams HS (omitted here, probably zoning; Franklin K Lane closed) & the airplanes coming into JFK might have been *slightly* bearable in OZ but possibly only up on Liberty Ave because of the El train drowning out the sound. It would be very noisy with airplanes down in Tudor Village, absolutely! The planes are TOTALLY ABOUT TO BE ON THE RUNWAY!! But the convenience to JFK? Awesome. And it’s otherwise secluded, quiet, etc.
John Gotti did not live in Ozone Park, his club was on 101st Avenue, the Bergen Hunt & Fish Club. Every year he had the big 4th of July party there for the neighborhood- perhaps that’s why it seems why he lived there. Gotti lived where I did, in Howard Beach. One of his kids was in my catechism class at St Helen in Howard Beach - you attended where you lived.
Aldo’s was incredible & is technically in City Line which we didn’t consider Ozone Park, I’m not sure if it’s officially its own neighborhood or a part of OZ like Centreville or Tudor Village cause that’s kinda already Bklyn. Try Gino’s in HB.
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@Colleen-As my post said, I lived at 86st/Atlantic Ave and went to St. Elizabeth grammar school. My sister went to OLWA catholic HS. Remember the bowling alley on crossbar blvd. before Russo's and the old wooden bridge between crossbar blvd and Howard beach? It must have been build by native Americans it looked so old!
Joe Torre the famous baseball player's sister was a nun at the catholic school on liberty ave. Carol Heiss, the olympic figure skater and Brian Hyland (polka dot bikini fame) lived a few blocks from me. We use to visit his house. Jack Ker.the famous beat poet like on top of the pastry shop? on crossbay blvd. Mae West lived for a while on my block but it was many yrs. before me.
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@Colleen
Gottis Uncle lived two doors down from our house on 88st. Our street 88, never had a crime problem!
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What, no mention of John Adams High School? Can’t imagine how the reporter missed one of the biggest (structurally) and worst (academically and crime) high schools in America! Are the people spending $700,000 for a home sending their kids to Adams?
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@Mick- yes..if your parents were rich enough to send you to a private HS or you were smart enough to get into Bklyn Tech. or went to a religious school, you were stuck with either Adams, Richmond Hills or Franklin K Lane public HSs.
My best friend slugged a teacher at Aviation HS and was exiled to Lane.
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@Paul: Yep! If you, for whatever reason, couldn't hack it in private parochial school, you'd end up at John Adams, AKA "St. John's On The Boulevard."
I was born in Ozone Park and lived there from 1948-1965.
It was mostly Western European. There were no blacks, hispanics, jews or Asians (except for a few restaurants).
I did not meet any of the above groups unlike I went to Bklyn Tech HS that had all of them. It was amazing to see that other people lived in NYC.
You mentioned Halloween. When I was a kid, there was one guy who gave all the kids a quarter. That was big money in those days. We would change costumes two to three times and go back to the guys' house until he ran out of quarters.
They had many local "itch" theaters. The Haven, Roosevelt, Willard, Crossbay, Earl were some of them.
Every month of so we took the bus to Jamaica to see a flick in the Valencia Theater, on of the "five wonders" of the movie house world.
To us kids, it was like visiting the Taj Mahal.
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@Paul
There were plenty of us kids of color, Hispanic, and Jewish. You just choose not to associate with us. It was very typical of the people who lived in the area at that time. FYI....Cyndi Lauper also lived in Ozone Park and even attended John Adams High School and Bernadette Peters also came from OP as did the astronaut Charles Camarda.
In addition to the countless churches in Ozone Park, there were 2 Jewish synagogues. One might still be standing, The Ozone Park Jewish Center on CrossBay Blvd. and other other, long probably since gone, was very close to "City Line" off of 101st Avenue.
So yes, "other" people lived in Ozone Park during 1949 -1965.
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