Grandpa Gillen's House

Recently I received an email from my mother that my Great Grandfather's house had been torn down in 2014 to make way for a new house.  I wanted to document a little about what I knew about the house. 



My Great Grandparent's house was located at 1464 Rhode Ave.,  North Merrick, NY 11566.  Based on real estate records on the internet the house was built in 1922.  The house was a WWI army barracks. Edward Gillen bought the building in 1922 and had it was delivered via freight on the LIRR to N. Merrick and paid about $1,075 for it from the United Portable Building Manufacturer Corp.  (Based on the CPI Inflation Calculator $1075 would be about $15,217 today.)

But that's really not the beginning of the story.  In 1905 Frederick Gillen (1849-1941) purchased  4 lots on Rhode Avenue. Each lot measured 25 x 125 feet. Two were required to build a house on, so each house was on 50 x 125 foot property.  Frederick purchased the lots in the development called Merrick Manor from the Long Island Realty Company and paid $196 for them all. He paid $20 down and then $6 on the first of each month for 29 months and a final payment of $2. 

We don't really know the reason why Frederick and his wife Mary Kraher (1860-1915) purchased the property.  At the time they likely only had their two youngest children Edward and Frank (1891-1961) at home.  Their other three surviving children had left home as they were all married at the time.  Edward would have been about 17 and Frank about 14.  Since he purchased the lots on a payment plan,  it's possible that he was either purchasing the property as an investment or to move there later. 

But by 1922 Edward had purchased the property from his father as well as the lot just North of those lots from a family friend.  I believe that since a family friend had also bought property in the development that it had most likely been an investment purchase that Frederick originally did in 1905.  Since in those 17 years of owing the property, nothing had been done on the lots.

In 1922 Edward Gillen and Caroline Schmitz had been married for 12 years.  They had two young children, Anna (my grandmother) was 11 (born in 1911) and Frank was 7 (born in 1915.)  I'm not sure exactly why the family had moved from Queens, New York to Long Island.  One of the reasons may obviously have been to move out of the crowed city to the country (not yet the suburbia it is now.)  Some internet research has provided some context for the time frame:

Sunrise Highway was constructed in the 1920s as a four-to-six lane arterial highway from southern Queens east to Massapequa in Nassau County. 2

The book Memories of the Merricks asserted that “The 1920s hit Merrick like a bomb; development went up on all sides...". 2

Easter 1962 (L-R) Anna Gillen Summers, Frank Gillen, Ed Gillen, Peggy Karber Gillen, Anna's son.  Scan of original photo from the private collection of Virginia Summers Olsen.
© Edward R. Olsen 7.15.2015

The above picture also shows the two house numbers that the house had.  When the house was built it had the house number 149.  But later as the area grew there was a need to renumber the houses and the house number was changed to 1464.

Edward and Caroline bought the lots from Edward's father Frederick.  The third lot was purchased from a family friend.  They built their house on the lot to the left.   Later they gave the other two lots to their children.  Anna and Charles built their house on the middle lot and Frank (Unkie) and Peggy built their house on the lot to the right.  The garage (not seen in the picture) had actually been built on the lot that Anna and Charles built on.  Before they built their house, they had to move the garage to fit on the one lot. 

Image downloaded from Google Maps on 2.20.2015.  Image dated from October 2012.

"Funny thing, Jimmy told me the builder found horse bones on the property.  My Father told us when we were little that  Grandpa used to drive a horse and wagon to the Merrick Railroad when they moved to Merrick. It probably died of old age and he buried it in his yard." 1

I don't remember much about the inside of the house.  Even thought I visited my grandparent's house often, I can only remember being in the house once.  I do remember that the garage had a mechanic's pit so that they could work under the car easily.  That garage was the only time I ever remember seeing a mechanic's pit in a garage. 

The house was bought by one of Frank's daughters after Edward died in 1969.  And their family owned it until it was sold in 2014.  The property remained in the family for over 100 years!



1.  From email sent by Frances Curcio to Ginny Olsen dated: Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 1:43 PM.
2.  Keogan, B. (Ed.). (n.d.). History of Merrick, NY. Retrieved February 17, 2015, from http://merrickhistory.pbworks.com/w/page/26467400/History of Merrick, NY