6. There Was Once a Thriving Neighborhood Between Calvary Cemetery and Newtown Creek

Image via Wikimedia Commons from Greater Astoria Historical Society

Blissville, a tiny neighborhood located between Calvary Cemetery, the Long Island Expressway and Newtown Creek, is named after Neziah Bliss, a steam engine developer and apprentice of Robert Fulton, who owned the majority of the surrounding land in the 1830s and 1840s.

Until 1848, the year the Calvary Cemetery officially opened its gates, Blissville was nothing more than an outpost. The neighborhood, however, flourished back to life as people traveled to the area from Manhattan to bury their dead. Soon enough, it became known as the gangway for deceased New Yorkers to reach the afterlife.

Today, not much of the neighborhood remains aside from a single residential block of pre-WWII era family homes. Nearby, warehouses and auto body shops line the streets.