Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Here is that magnificent old Ford ad I was talking about on the south side of Northern Boulevard east of 31st Street. You can see it out the window of a northbound N or Q. This photo is from the flickr page of rabbit571. ForgottenFan Joseph Colella: The building is the original Universal Ford dealer. The [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Queens Plaza
Walk past most police precincts in New York City, and you will notice that almost inevitably the entrances are lit by a pair of lamps mounted on each side of the door and that, also almost inevitably, the lamps feature green plastic or glass through which the light shines. Depending on the age of the [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Queens recently lost another of its classic white and blue street signs, that had been a staple between 1964 and about 1985, only to be replaced by federally mandated green signs. On a recent stumble through Hunters Point, I noticed that the pole that this sign at 2nd Street and 55th Avenue was on was [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Just as I wrote about the odd lost streets of Greenpoint in December 2012, many or all of which never existed in the first place, I also explored the usually unremarked-upon dead ends of Hunters Point, just across the mighty Newtown Creek. These streets are lined up along Jackson Avenue between its source at Vernon [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bridges Hunters Point Queens
Continuing a recent concentration on Hunters Point that I have been indulging, in the spring of 2011 I was idling in the southern end of the neighborhood near Newtown Creek and wandered down the southern bit of Vernon Boulevard, a major road that runs along the western Queens coast from Astoria south to HP. When [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
A better picture would be of a LIRR passenger train crossing these tracks, but I settled for a couple of work trains (actually two trucks mounted on the tracks and driven backward). This is one of a handful of remaining grade crossings in New York City that cross streets open to regular traffic (I believe [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
In June 2012, on a weekday afternoon (I was, and at this writing am, still paying the penance for years of unpreparedness for the modern world by being unemployed) I braved the searing, unrelenting, inhumane heat in western Queens, were vegetation and the cooling cover of large trees is nearly absent, on a walk on [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Sunnyside
My interest in subway mosaics has been re-fired again, as it is every few years. I have a new admiration for the intricate mosaics that were assembled on station walls and signage in the subways between about 1914 and 1928 (after the initial Beaux Arts terra cotta and mosaics done in original IRT stations from [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
On Sunday, October 16, 2011 I agreed to meet up with a Open House New York-sponsored Newtown Creek walk led by the Newtown Pentacle‘s Mitch Waxman. Bloggers like Mitch fill in the cracks left over from more mundane and humdrum NYC chroniclers, who steer crowds toward the King of All Buildings and Lady Liberty, which [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
The former Blue Sky Diner, 49th Avenue and 21st Street, Hunters Point, has been mostly empty beginning in the 1990s, but in 2010-2011 it took a star turn as the upscale M(agasin). Wells Restaurant, featuring haute cuisine and snobby service. In the summer of 2011, M. Wells’ owners announced they were moving out (seeking another space [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: diners Hunters Point Queens
Between about 1964 and 1985 all street signs in Queens looked like this, with an off-white background and blue lettering. In 1964 the city installed large vinyl and metal street signs around town, replacing smaller enamel and metal signs that preceded them. The city had started color coding signs in a haphazard fashion before 1964, [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City
The latest ForgottenTour, 47th in a series that goes back to June 1, 1999, met at 10:30AM on Saturday, August 13th in Hunters Point, narrated by your webmaster and the Greater Astoria Historical Society‘s Rich Melnick. It was the most successful ForgottenTour of the 2011 season to date as over 40 ForgottenFans signed on for 3 hours [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Saturday, April 16th marked the first tour of the semi-ambitious FNY Second Saturdays tour events in which Forgotten New York, in association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, will present one tour per month — all over town, not just in Astoria — on the second Saturday of each month through October. (Yes, April 16th was the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Woodside
The Forgotten NY Book of Street Necrology is a thick, dusty, ancient tome, encrusted with the grime of centuries, its lock rusting and the last flecks of gilt flaking off the bindery. Unlike the recent flimsy editions of the AIA Guide to New York City (whose pages separate from the glue binding soon after first [...]
Categorized in: Signs Street Necrology Subways & Trains Tagged with: Astoria Hunters Point Queens Rockaway Sunnyside
In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had once been a Queens hotspot, since until 1910 it was the western end of the Long Island Rail Road (ferries carried commuters across the mighty [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: gantries Hunters Point Long Island City
On a mostly overcast, heavily muggy late summer weekend afternoon I wandered lonely as a clown through the concrete fields of western Queens. I had an appointment at a saloon in Long Island City, but purposely arrived in Woodside on the LIRR a couple of hours early so I could indulge the wandering sickness for [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City Woodside
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten New York contributor Hunters Point has been visited before quite a few times by Forgotten-NY, but like a good book, every time you read it, you always find something new in the story. With the redevelopment of Hunters Point South on the fast track to completion, we take one more look to the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
I have often marvelled at Hunter’s Point’s 45th Avenue, which is lined on both sides with fine Italianate brownstone row houses constructed from 1871-1890. 45th Avenue deserves a much more detailed treatment thann it has received in FNY to date — fortunately, the Hunters Point Historic District Landmarks Preservation Commission report, done very early in the LPC’s history [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
I find myself on Jackson Avenue quite a bit as it is the main diagonal artery from Vernon Boulevard in Hunters Point to Queens Plaza, where under the tangle of elevated trains it changes its name to Northern Boulevard and commences to run the length of Long Island. The short but busy stretch is among Queens’ [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
I don’t mind street art. That might be news to some ForgottenFans, who perhaps think that, as the all-American boy and world’s oldest Boy Scout that I have always been, not venturing far away from the straight and narrow (my life story is extraordinarily snore-inducing, incidentally; I have no ‘past’), that I should be naturally opposed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
One of the most enjoyable things I do with Forgotten New York is finding unheralded and unknown infrastructure. A light post representative of a long-lost genre … a building with a hidden history … or one of New York’s over 700 bridges that goes, in effect, from nowhere to nowhere. I first “discovered” the 21st Street Bridge [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Hunters Point is a community in Queens on the edge — in more ways than one. It sits on the extreme western edge of the borough, just across Newtown Creek from Greenpoint (mystifyingly, both pedestrian crossings to Brooklyn were severed in the middle of the 20th Century) and can be said to be on the edge [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
[Beginning in 2009, Queens Plaza, which runs along the Queensboro Bridge ramp to Queens Boulevard crossing the Sunnyside RR Yards, was given a complete renovation that wiped away most of what is shown on this FNY page that was written in 2007. Pedestrian plazas, bike lanes, and a brand new plaza at Northern Boulevard were [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Now that another Queens landmark, the 1885 Hackett Building, is about to have a premature date with the wrecking ball in the Bloombergian Era of Development, I thought I’d walk the blocks where it held forth for so long and meet its friends at the wake. Jackson Avenue between Vernon Boulevard and Queens plaza is spacious, [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
This isn’t really “23 skiddoo 2″ since we’ve actually already done “53 Skiddoo“, but you get the idea. In Queens, 23rd Street runs from Astoria to Hunters Point, and like most Queens numbered streets is quite long, but what concerns us here is the stretch of 23rd that runs underneath the #7 El: thousands of people [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
ATTENTION has been paid, and rightly so, to the NYC subway system on its 100th anniversary in 2004, but there’s an even older transit system in New York existing alongside the subways,whose stations are neglected somewhat by the agency that’s in charge of running it. Truth be told, the 171-year-old (in 2005) Long Island Rail Road, [...]
IF THE 1989 Citibank tower on Jackson Avenue is Long Island City’s most recognizable landmark, the four ebony smokestacks of the Pennsylvania Railroad Powerhouse on 2nd Street and 51st Avenue marked Hunters Point with an indelible stamp. The big building with its tall arched windows and massive granite base was built by McKim, Mead and White beginning [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
WHILE BEGINNING to prepare this week’s foray into irrelevance, I was on the horns of a slight dilemma. I had ventured into one of my favorite parts of town, Long Island City and Hunters Point, on several Sundays this past year, both with Christina as my guide and without, so I had a big backlog of both LIC [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City Queens
Picture yourself in a boat on a river…. Centuries before Robert Moses built his monuments to the automobile, New York’s first superhighways were its rivers, inlets, channels and creeks. It was so much easier to travel by boat than hack your way through a forest. Today we’re looking at Newtown Creek, which remains the longest undefended [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint Hunters Point Queens
In Queens, the Long Island Rail Road has certainly left remnants of its golden era of passenger trains. The Rockaway Branch is still there, waiting to be reactivated or converted into something worthwhile, and Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing traces the ancient LIRR connection from the main line through Creedmoor to the Port Washington branch (at about [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: abandoned rail routes Hunters Point Queens Sunnyside
Only a handful of railroad grade crossings remain in New York City. The term ‘grade’ crossing has nothing to do with school…it means anywhere a railroad crosses a main road at the street level, and crossing gates, signals and alarms are mandated. The Long Island Railroad gradually eliminated its NYC grade crossings relatively early in the 20th [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Glandale Hunters Point Little Neck Queens
