Tax Accountant in Ozone Park, NY.

An area now part of Ozone Park that pre-dated that community was called “Centreville”. It was founded in the 1840s and was centered around Centreville Street and the Centreville Community Church. Part of Ozone Park is still called “Centreville”.

In the 1870s, two immigrants from France named Charles Lalance and Florian Grosjean developed a factory in Woodhaven. The factory manufactured cooking materials and porcelain enamelware, but burned down in 1876. Lalance and Grosjean built a second factory, as well as a hundred houses for workers, at Atlantic Avenue and 92nd Street in modern-day Ozone Park.

During the 1870s, an economic depression caused residents of New York City to look for better housing opportunities in the suburbs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where housing would be cheaper. In 1880, the New York, Woodhaven & Rockaway Railroad began service on the Montauk Branch and Rockaway Beach Branch from Long Island City to Howard Beach, Queens. Two years later, two wealthy partners named Benjamin W. Hitchcock and Charles C. Denton bought plots of land around what would later become the Woodhaven Junction station. The Rockaway Beach Branch’s Ozone Park station opened in 1883. Advertisements for Ozone Park proclaimed that the development had “pure air” and “no malaria”. Ozone Park was called “the Harlem of Brooklyn” because at the time, the borough of Queens did not yet exist, and Harlem was a thriving Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Manhattan. Hitchcock and Denton chose the “Ozone Park” name because in the 1880s, ozone was associated with breezes from the sea, and the Atlantic Ocean was located nearby.