Why Are There Two 54th Avenues in West Maspeth? And What Was Muscle Island?

I enjoy getting to the bottom of an inconsistency, or analyzing a specific place or time to find something about it that makes no sense. It’s like searching for the chaos that ultimately surrounds us, however calm and orderly things might appear.

To this end it has puzzled me to find that there are two 54th Avenues in a fairly isolated corner of West Maspeth, Queens. The intersection, or intersections, of 54th Avenue and 50th Street made no damn sense.

50th Street bordering New Calvary Cemetery’s St. Domitilla Division is a strip of road with no side of street parking rules. On account of that every type of vehicle from minivan to large trucks are free to park here indefinitely. And they do. The road also serves as something of an ersatz chop shop, where mechanics can be seen working on cars and trucks of all sizes.

Online maps, as in the above example, do not indicate whether the two 54th Avenues are one- or two-way streets. I thought that if they were both one-way streets then it created the possibility that one of them could be called 54th Avenue North and the other 54th Avenue South. Nope. They are both two-way streets. 54th Avenue is indeed a clone street.

There are no street-facing structures on 54th Avenue North, sidestepping the possibility of address conflicts. There would little chance of that problem since there is really no room to build any kind of addressable structure on that little arc of street. Should decisions one day be made to tear down the modest houses on 54th Avenue South and build structures facing both the North and South 54th Avenues then a street renaming would be in order.

To make matters more confusing one pair of street signs at the intersection of 54th Avenue North is completely borked. This sign makes it look like 50th Street is where 54th Avenue North is, and vice-versa. This photo does not illustrate the problem but these signs really are facing the wrong way and should be swapped.

The street address for Calvary Cemetery, printed on the entry gates, also is confusing: 53-09 50th Street. That only makes sense if the gate existed within a proximity to 53rd Avenue. I could not figure out from old maps if such proximity ever existed, but it probably did.

Another possibility is that 54th Avenue North should actually be 53rd Avenue, but that does not seem to make any sense. 53rd Avenue merges into an entry ramp for the Long Island Expressway, while 54th Avenue crosses 48th Street and logically connects to 54th Avenue North. It is 54th Avenue South that seems to be the odd man out of this puzzle, but that is the street that actually has buildings with addresses. Changing is street name would cause problems for residents of that short piece of road.

And as I discovered, the physical signage at the intersection and a general preponderance of evidence seem to prove that one of these roads has been misnamed.

Even if the road leading in to New Calvary is actually 53rd Avenue then it seems like the cemetery’s address should be 53-01, not 53-09.

I have attempted to report things like misplaced street signs to 311 but the effort virtually always proves futile. I don’t take the time anymore. And of course, it really doesn’t matter. The Queens street grid is an imperfect beast, but errors like this one are not particularly dangerous.

Maybe 54th Avenue North was previously considered a driveway or something similar leading in to 4th Calvary? It seems like too short a piece of road for this much mental machination but digging in to things like this is fun, and it keeps me writing, which is what I am trying to do more of these days. It becomes like analyzing the Zapruder film, you can find so many inconsistencies and entropical chaos in a single moment in time, or a place. And this is more fun because there is not an exploding executive cranium to deal with.

There is almost always a bunch of junk dumped on this street. Last year I spotted a memorable safe that had been gutted open and emptied of its contents. This time around I spotted more conventional dumpage, including a couch, a bunch of particle board furniture, and other crap.

Nearby, at the intersection of 54th Avenues and 48th Street (which also seems to exist in tandem with itself) I noticed a nearby green space called TRIANGLE FIFTY FOUR. I imagined that name had been assigned to this area because it is plagued with inexplicable street naming mysteries in the same spirit as the Bermuda Triangle had its supposed unexplained disappearances.

MUSCLE ISLAND?

While looking into the mystery of the dual 54th Avenues I happened to spot something I thought was odd on an old map of Queens.

According to this map at the NYPL a land mass called MUSCLE ISLAND used to exist in Newtown Creek, at the fork in the stream where it branches off into Maspeth Creek. I imagined this place once was home to a 19th century body building colony, or perhaps a weightlifting school. I was also intrigued by the fact that no such island exists on that spot today. Maybe there was an Atlantis-themed underwater body building school under Newtown Creek!

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/632461fe-bb96-97e3-e040-e00a18063f5b

Alas, it is no mystery. According to Webster’s 1828 Dictionary MUSCLE used to be an acceptable alternative spelling for MUSSEL. It no longer seems to be, and until now I cannot remember ever seeing MUSSELs referred to as MUSCLEs.

The fate of Mussel Island is no mystery. It was obliterated on account of the obstruction it posed to large ships maneuvering through that channel. Discussion of its removal started as early as 1919 but official proceedings to have the island removed did not start until 1922. Mussel Island was finally removed in 1929.

There must be more history connected to this island beyond its status as a historical footnote. It was at one time owned by Peter Cooper, the glue manufacturer. He petitioned to have a drawbridge built between the island, which was in Queens County, and neighboring Kings County. It does not appear this bridge was ever built.

Cooper’s name was still associated with the island as late as 1907, when the above-mentioned ATLAS OF THE BOROUGH OF QUEENS [1907-1908] showed the island with his name on it. The 1922 reference above refers to the island as being owned by a Bryce estate.

Mussel Island survives today in somewhat eerie imagery of the land mass in 1924 NYC aerial satellite photos of New York City.

http://maps.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/?z=8&p=1004812,202500&c=GIS1924