It didn’t start out intending to be as such but Wednesday’s intended jaunt up Northern Boulevard to check in on a favorite old abandoned payphone turned into an epic walk to 105th Street and back through a part of East Elmhurst that had me asking myself “What the hell am I doing here?” It was an area I did not recognize from anything, where dudes walk around with their pants halfway down, showing their amazing underpants. I thought that fashion was an urban legend perpetuated by a hoax video showing one of these type of people proudly strutting his stuff while only half-pantsed. I guess that video was no hoax.
I have been up Northern Blvd. to Junction Blvd., that walk occurring years ago and lasting until sunrise. I wanted a cab back but no yellow cab dri vers would take me, this because they were all returning their cars to the garage and thus only going one direction, which was not my direction. So I walked and walked, leaving home around 2am and getting back around 6.
Wednesday’s walk was not so dramatic, though I returned via 37th Avenue for a while, At around 92nd Street I had to ask myself what the hell I was doing in this particular area. It reminded me of what my friend Alan said crossed his mind when he first stepped out of the 7 train station in Long Island City during the early 1980s: “What asshole part of New York City is this?”
A map says that area is Jackson Heights but it was a Jackson Heights like none I’d ever seen before. I think the mental chaos of the moment was exacerbated by the way the roads were splitting off into diagonal 4-way intersections, as if the Queens street grid was designed with the intent of foiling invading armies from getting to Main Street.
I made a similar walk years ago, leaving my apartment at 2am and walking to Junction Boulevard and back via 34th Avenue, getting home as the sun was rising. I remember walking past Tupelo and seeing the overnight crowd alive and drinking with gusto. Tupelo was a hipster pub that gave way to Bravo Supermarket, which itself recently changed name to C-Town.
While Bravo was under construction there was some discussion about what the name of the new supermarket was going to be. I was convinced it was going to be a Food Lion. My conviction (if such a trivial matter can be assigned something so mighty as a “conviction”) came from looking at Department of Buildings permits and seeing that the names of the store owners were those of a group of people that owned a bunch of Food Lions in NYC and elsewhere. But the real icing on the cake was how the building which now houses C-Town has a bunch of cement lion heads on the frieze. It’s the Food Lion lion! So, I think that the original intent was for a Food Lion to occupy that space but for whatever reason those plans changed.
Another unexpectedly epic trek came today, with a roughly 11 mile walk to Ridgewood, Queens, via Calvary Cemetery and Rust Street, one of my favorite street names in NYC. India Road is another. Java Street. I also like that semi circle of streets in Rego Park called “Crescents”.
Today’s journey ended up at the also-pleasingly named Onderdonken Avenue which intersected with a street that looked shockingly like any number of streets in Astoria. I can’t remember the street name now but the building style was identical to a row of houses on 29th and 28th Streets between Broadway an 34th Avenue.
To make this similarity to Astoria more the beguiling I was confused as to whether Ridgewood was in Queens or Brooklyn. I thought it was in Queens but when I got there i noticed that the street addresses were not in the hyphenated format they are in most parts of Queens. Street addresses were like 181 Onderdonk Ave, or 262 Himrod Street. I now know that a few areas of Queens have that more traditional style of street address numberings. Ascan Street in Forest Hills seems to alternate between hyphenated and consecutive addresses.
The Queens street-numbering system is an endless source of intrigue to me.
I also got a glance at Linden Hill Cemetery, which could potentially have views to Manhattan that rival Calvary and Green-Wood. I did not actually enter Linden Hill today, and that’s a fortunate thing since I might have gotten locked in. After reaching Onderdonken Avenue I circled back to Linden Hill at around 4pm. The gates were already loked and one unfortunate mother/daughter combination was stuck inside, talking on the phone to somebody at “cemetery security” saying they were at the main gate.
Today’s journey was a lot of fun, relying for guidance almost entirely on bus stop road maps before finally giving in to the low road of smartphone mapping apps. The street grid really is confusing from the ground level. I ended up on a Q39 bus to Long Island City, which crunched me through the Mt. Zion and New Calvary cemetery belt. I’ve taken that bus many times but never did it feel so salvational as today. I was dead tired.
