The Greater Astoria Historical Society(GAHS), chartered in 1985, is a non-profit cultural and community oriented organization dedicated to preserving the past and promoting Long Island City's future. The Society hosts field trips, walking tours, slide presentations, and guest lectures to schools and the public.

GAHS, known throughout New York for its vigorous efforts in community preservation, imaginative programming, and numerous articles on local history, has created two unique pictorial history books of Long Island City, “The East River” and “Long Island City”.

East River Book:

The East River captures the history of New York’s premier waterway. The river, a source of life for Native Americans, spawned communities from Brooklyn to Harlem. Its shipyards and docks projected American enterprise around the world. The waterfront, an industrial and commercial dynamo, forged a continent. The dreams of immigrants who arrived and lived on its banks created this nation. The river’s strong currents guarded prisons and hospital quarantines while keeping secret legends of gold on its bottom. The sinews of a great city are knitted by more than a score of its tunnels and bridges. Today, a renaissance draws people to this river, the heart of New York.

Erik Baard, an award-winning freelance writer and founder of the LIC Community Boathouse, joins trustees Thomas Jackson and Richard Melnick to create this defining book about the East River.

Long Island City Book:

Long Island City captures the unique flavor of a former city (1870-1898) nestled between Manhattan and Queens that retains its identity to this day. Created by consolidating Old Astoria Village, Steinway, Ravenswood, Dutch Kills, Blissville, Sunnyside and the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Hunters Point, it has been an industrial dynamo since the Civil War. It is home to creative people and innovative ideas, the Steinway piano factory, the movie industry, the Information Age, and a growing list of museums and galleries. Minutes from midtown Manhattan, it is again a magnet for new generations seeking the charms of a small town with the advantages of a great city.

Board members Thomas Jackson and Richard Melnick successfully create the defining book on “New York’s Other City.”

Please visit the GAHS website for more information, and to purchase these books.