Queens

I have written about stoplights before, the red, green and sometimes yellow type, especially former mounting designs whose examples I found around town in the 1990s when I began compiling…

It’s amazing, to me at least, how Queens subway stations preserve street names and family names that, in some cases, go all the way back to the colonial era. Names…

There’s only one Ireland Street in New York City, and I’m not sure it honors the Emerald Isle at all. It’s part of many groupings of streets in Queens (and…

One of the things to remember about NYC’s only commercial taxidermist, Cypress Hills Taxidermy, is that it isn’t in Cypress Hills: at least, not any more. For may years as…

During this period of fear if not panic over the coronavirus that is sickening parts of the world (in March 2020) many non-New Yorkers would be surprised to know that…

Here’s an interesting (well, to me) map of Queens prepared by Ohman Maps in 1936. It shows the entire route of the recently-shuttered Whitestone Branch of the Long Island Railroad,…

Though western Queens is well-known for its vast cemeteries, there are also a number of very small ones. A small section of Juniper Valley Park at Juniper Blvd. North and…

Continued from Part 1 To amuse myself before the football games came on, I decided to walk from my home in Little Neck all the way to 71st/Continental Avenue in…

Since I moved to Flushing in 1993 (and then Little Neck in 2007) I’ve been aware of this vintage Type F lamppost illuminating a driveway at 158th Street and 33rd…

To amuse myself before the football games came on, I decided to walk from my home in Little Neck all the way to 71st/Continental Avenue in Forest Hills. It was…

While scrolling around Facebook lately, I stumbled on a bit of Astoria history that is hiding on Newtown Road, blocks away from the place where it was originally constructed. I…

From May to December 2019 I had a high-paying (by my standards) but perplexing job at a Very Small Design Firm a couple of blocks from Columbus Circle. I was…