TODAY I’ll mention a street of barely any consequence that I decided to cover while I was meandering around in the neighborhood, Boyce Avenue, one of Queens’ relatively few named minor streets. Somehow, it avoided getting a number. It runs for one block only, between 208th Street and the Clearview Expressway service road south of 39th Avenue.
I have been concentrating posts in northern Queens as I slowly get back into it following surgery after months of relative inactivity. I have overlooked southern Queens throughout FNY’s existence so I intend to do a few posts highlighting South Jamaica, St. Albans, etc even if I have to rely on Street View to do so. But for the matter on hand…
As this 1949 map excerpt shows, Boyce Avenue was just one of a number of short streets mapped along the Long Island Rail Road cut. Today one block of Boyce exists. I’m not sure Bowden and McKim Avenues were ever built, as no trace of them are there today. This map also conveniently shows numbered avenues’ former names, as they were still in recent memory in 1949.
The “Boyce” the avenue is named for is lost to history; perhaps a local landowner, or maybe a surveyor. Since no one alive now would probably remember, I like to think it’s named for Tommy Boyce, one half of the songwriting/singing duo Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who rang up 1960s hits with the Monkees and on their own with “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight.” Here they are on “Bewitched”:
Sadly, Tommy Boyce, suffering from a brain aneurysm and quite understandable severe depression, was a suicide in 1994; Bobby Hart is still with us in 2024.
Around the corner on the service road is this special make of telephone pole masts installed along the Clearview and other expressways instead of the usual finned masts used elsewhere. Seems redundant to me to have special masts like this (they have carried incandescent, mercury, sodium and now LED lamp fixtures) but perhaps different agencies are responsible.
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1/15/24