Leaving New Calvary today when someone who had spotted me earlier taking pictures rolled down his car window and shouted “OLD CALVARY IS BETTER!” I laughed and shouted back “I AGREE!” Then I added “THANKS!” He made my afternoon. I should have given him my card with my web site URL and told him to dig around a bit to find my Old and New Calvary pictures. I had time to do that, even though he was in his car and preparing to exit on to Queens Boulevard. But I did not think of it until I had turned away and he had driven off. I am not smooth like that. It even took me a few seconds to conclude he was talking to me, though no one else was present.
I assume he was referring to the relative photographic merits of the different cemeteries, and not their merits when it comes to places of eternal rest. Old Calvary is easily the better of the two for photos, with the latter (comprising three separate cemeteries) looking like a parking lot by comparison. New Calvary is flatter than Old, though there are some slight hills and valleys.
Old and New Calvary are physically separated by a spaghetti soup of highway and bridge overpasses and a mostly industrial stretch of West Maspeth. Depending which route you take the path from Old to New either rugged or relatively placid. Today I took the more rugged path.
Exiting through the Laurel Hill Blvd gate I noticed a banner advertising Calvary’s first-ever Columbarium, in Section 43 of 2nd Calvary.
Among towering cranes and a curiously concentrated army of portalets stand a small number of houses, but most of that small area is a blight-lover’s delight. Typically there is a lot of noise and vehicular traffic. Today there was no activity to speak of on account of the holiday weekend. The construction of the new Kosciuszko Bridge has been a thing of awe any time I’ve been able to check in on it.
A lot of illegal dumping goes on along 54th Avenue, which I noticed last year appears to be a rare clone street. Two 54th Avenues run parallel to each other between 48th Street and 50th Street in West Maspeth. As anyone who spends any time studying it should know the Queens street grid is an imperfect thing, littered with mistakes and weird vagaries. You just have to accept that or else it will drive you crazy.
41st Avenue is one of those weirdnesses. Starting from Queeensbridge Houses it runs from west to east until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. For some reason it takes a left and merges with 29th Street and then makes a sharp right, continuing along a northwest piece of road, diagonally connecting to Northern Boulevard whence it resumes its eastward path. 29th Street also follows a jagged path, connecting the former Academy Street, Buchanan Place, and Singer Street. I know those off the top of my head because I live on 29th Street. I don’t know offhand what disparate streets 41st Avenue took over. A lot of queens streets run along jagged, non-contiguous paths. I don’t know how unusual that is compared to other cities.
I remember noticing in Philadelphia last year how their building numbering system seemed similar to that of Queens, save for the fact that they do not seem to use the dash in the bulding addresses. I was pleased with myself for reading last week, then, that Queens actually copied Philadelphia’s street address system. They keep the original street names, though, while Queens switched to mostly numbered streets in the 1920s. The historic district of Sunnyside allows for both old and new names as do (I think) certain parts of Forest Hills. It is not done in Astoria, where vestiges of the old street names are mainly found in apartment buildings which were named after the streets they were on. Graham Court is on 34th Avenue, which used to be Graham Avenue. The only other vestiges of the old street names are in business names and a few lingering street signs which are embedded into buildings. Grand Avenue, now 30th Ave., is probably the retired street name with the most enduring presence in business names along that street.
Crap, it is almost 6:00 6:30. I could write more about this but my head hurts, and the beautiful woman sitting next to me just left. More and more these days when I consume alcohol I can taste its poison. I drank last night after a few days off, and the toxins stung, even just from beer. It didn’t really used to be like that.
