Hallets Point

Okay, let’s get back to looking back at some of my older posts – but let’s look back while simultaneously staying in the present.  Despite its ominous name, the treacherous body of water known as Hell Gate actually took its moniker from the Dutch word “helleget,” which means beautiful passage, and it looks like that interpretation is coming back into vogue today, with two major developments slated to go up along Hell Gate’s shores, on Hallets Point.  It’s a little hard to keep the two of them straight, which is which, (and anyway that’s what Curbed is for right?) though at the same time it’s kind of fascinating to try.  I mean, this is what the “real world” is all about right?  Really complicated legal and financial arrangements that require a boatload of money and legal representation and political connections to bring to fruition?  Though have you noticed how it’s always the people that have boatloads of money and legal representation and political connections that want to tell you how that’s the real world – something the rest of us couldn’t possible understand?  Well, sorry to tell you, but everythings the real world people!

Anyway, whatever.  The two developments are known as Hallets Point and Astoria Cove.  The Hallets Point development was conceived by Lincoln Equities, though the Durst Organization recently bought a 90% stake in the project, so it seems like they’re in charge now.  The development will include some 2,404 new units (483 of them “affordable”), plus all the requisite public trade offs like open space and public schools (since, you know, government isn’t allowed to build those kinds of things anymore) and has already been approved by the City Council.  Astoria Cove is an Alma Realty project totaling some 1,723 units.  There was some hope among its critics that the City Planning Commission would reject the Astoria Cove project unless it included more than 20% affordable housing, but that didn’t come to pass.  When I started writing this it was still up in the air whether the City Council would approve, as the local councilman (Costa Constantinides) was opposed, and the City Council tends to (though not always) follow the lead of the local councilperson in these matters.  But it turns out just yesterday the Council’s Land Use Committee approved the project, with Constantinides’ support, so it seems like it’s a done deal.  The project is amongst the first to run into the city’s new rules regarding new developments in medium to high density areas that have been up-zoned (that is, rezoned to allow for more square footage) – namely that they have to include at least 20% affordable housing, and that there will not be city subsidies to make that happen (though tax abatements, yes, are still in action).

So there’s a rendering of one of them – Astoria Cove I think – though honestly it could be Hallets Point, or any other waterfront development taking place in the city.  I know that this city is always changing, and I know I’ve said as much before, but at the same time it’s kind of my problem with developments like Astoria Cove and Hallets Point and really pretty much all the giant projects getting built these days: they all look like each other and they don’t look like New York City.  Seriously!  I mean, sure, the trees are nice.  I’ve asked this question before I think, in a less coherent way, but I wonder of the people who want to live in these developments, why do you want to live in New York City?

So anyway, whatever again.  I was thinking it would be interesting to look into these various developers who are involved: Lincoln Equities, Alma Realty, and especially the Durst Organization (as I believe they’ve been around the longest) but I’m already pretty tired from trying to look at all this “real world” stuff – so let’s look at some old history instead.  It seems so much cleaner doesn’t it?

Hallets Point takes its name from the Hallet Family – owners of a large estate along the shores of Hell Gate (in present day Astoria) from at least as early as 1655.  That date is known because it was the year their house was burned to the ground by Indians (part of the short lived Peach Tree War? who knows!).  The estate was founded by one William Hallet, an Englishman (born in 1616) who emigrated to Bridgeport Connecticut no later than 1647 (and maybe well before) before moving to Long Island with his wife and two young sons.  After their house was burned downed they settled in Flushing, where William was appointed sheriff in 1656.  That same year he was also fined and briefly imprisoned by the New Netherland Director-General (and all around dictator) Peter Stuyvesant – who, you might recall from last time – was still fresh from his conquest of the Swedish colony of New Sweden in present day Delaware (the Swedish in Delaware! Not quite as well known as the Pilgrims right?).  William Hallet was imprisoned for allowing the Reverend William Wickenden of Rhode Island to preach in his house.  Wickenden was a Baptist, and by preaching in the colony was breaking Stuyvesant’s ban on practicing any religion in the colony outside of the Dutch Reformed Church (ooh, I wonder how the Dutch Reformed Church differs from Presbyterianism, aka the Reformed Church).  And I thought the Dutch were supposed to be known for their religious freedom.

William Hallet didn’t stay imprisoned for long at least; at some point later in his life he moved back to an estate along Hell Gate – dividing it between his two sons – William Jr. and Samuel – in 1688.  William Jr. went on to have ten children himself and presumably divided his land between some of them.  The eldest, William Hallet III, had his own estate in the area when he was murdered in 1708 – along with his wife and their five children – by two of his slaves (back when slaves made up about 18% of New York City’s population).  The murders were apparently in retaliation for Hallet not allowing his slaves to “go abroad on the Sabbath day,” though I’m sure the fact that they were, you know, slaves probably had something to do with it.  The culprits were caught and executed after being “put to all the torment possible for a terror to others.”  That didn’t stop a full on slave rebellion from taking place some 4 years later in Manhattan however, in 1712, when nine (white) people where killed in the uprising – leading to the execution of over 20 slaves in response.

So anyway, just some cheery thoughts as you’re moving into your new development.  Enjoy the trees!

U Thant Island

Remember Gardiners Island?  (Of course you don’t! Hehe.)  Located off the eastern end of Long Island, it’s one of the largest privately owned islands in the United States, having been owned by the Gardiner family for close to 400 years.  That makes it, by the way, the only piece of American real estate still intact as part of an original royal grant from the English crown (the English crown!) – and if you’re like me that just completely blew your mind right now.  It popped back in my head the other day as I was riding over the Queensboro Bridge and I remembered how I’d wanted to look at some other islands, you know, like Island by Island style.  But hey, we’ve got a lot of islands in NYC don’t we?  In fact you could basically think of us as a city built on an archipelago.  I know, I know, it’s hard to feel that when basically it just feels like the center of the world.  But it’s true!  So let’s look at one of those.

In fact, let’s look at an island that’s almost the total opposite of Gardiners Island: U Thant Island (officially Belmont Island), which is publicly owned, man-made, and amongst the smallest islands in NYC.  U Thant lies off the southern tip of Roosevelt Island and almost directly above the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.  At just half an acre it’s easy to miss – though it helps that there’s a 57 foot tall metal Coast Guard beckon sticking off its southern end.  The island didn’t even exist until the early 1900s, only coming about because of the creation of the Steinway Tunnels running under the East River.  The Steinway Tunnels, as you might guess, were built by William Steinway (of the Steinway piano family) to connect his company-town of Steinway (in Queens) with Manhattan.  The fairly self-contained town of Steinway included its own trolley line and it was this that William Steinway envisioned connecting to the city.  Work began on the tunnels in 1892 but due to a number of technical problems and some high-profile deaths by dynamite the work was halted and boarded up just one year later.  Steinway himself would die in 1896 without having seen the work completed.

It was Steinway’s friend, and all around rapid transit big-wig, August Belmont Jr. who would ultimately see the tunnels finished.  Belmont was (amongst other things) the founder of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) – the operator of New York City’s first subway line, opening in 1904 (running at that time from City Hall to 145th Street, with further extensions on the way).  One year later, in 1905, Belmont renewed construction on the Steinway Tunnels, finishing them just 26 months later.  It was during this construction phase that a shaft was built through what was known as Man-O-War Reef, a granite outcropping in the middle of the East River – the debris it created was piled on top to become New York’s newest island: Belmont Island.  Despite the rapid pace of construction however the tunnels would ultimately lay idle for another 8 years, for reasons I won’t really go into because they’re confusing and convoluted as all hell (there are literally guys who just specialize in New York City transit history – and yes they make a ton of money and sleep with a lot of women).  Suffice to say, for the first 40 years of subway history it was a constant battle and question as to city versus private ownership and operation – and in terms  of the Steinway Tunnels, Belmont lost.  Well he lost in the ownership sense at least; in 1913, as part of what were known as the Dual Contracts – which entailed the largest subway expansion in New York City history – Belmont sold the Steinway Tunnels to the city in exchange for a $3 million credit to the IRT as well as the tunnels being placed under IRT operation (today’s 7 Train).  So before he owned the tunnels but couldn’t operate anything on them; now he didn’t own the tunnels but could operate the subway line.  Convoluted yes?

That’s pretty much where U Thant/Belmont Island’s connection to subway history ends.  Soon after the tunnels were sold to the city the shaft under the island was filled in and sealed.  Then for 50 years or so the island just sat there – watching the skyline change, the United Nations buildings going up and what not – an unused pile of rocks.  That changed in 1977, when the island was leased by New York State to followers of the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy.  Chinmoy, who ran a meditation center in Queens (as well as some 60 other countries), had worked as a junior clerk at the United Nations at one time, and starting in 1970 began running twice-weekly meditations at the U.N. for employees and delegates.  One of the people who enjoyed them was the then U.N. Secretary General, U Thant, who served in the post from 1961-1971.  U Thant was Burmese and as per his country’s convention he only had one name, Thant; the U is basically equivalent to Mr.  He died in 1974 and so when Sri Chinmoy’s followers leased Belmont Island they unofficially changed the name in honor of Mr. (U) Thant…a name that has pretty much stuck.  They greened the surface of the island and erected a metal “oneness” arch that incorporated some of U Thant’s personal belongings.  I’m not quite certain if Sri Chinmoy’s followers still officially lease the island but regardless, by all accounts they’re not allowed to visit it as much these days.  Security around the U.N. is a little tighter than it used to be; they don’t just turn over little man-made islands in the vicinity to the care of the followers of some guru.  It’s now managed by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation as a sanctuary for migrating birds – double-crested cormorants especially.  I don’t think too much about what gurus think about, but I think that Sri Chinmoy might like that.

 

Broadway & 45th Avenue

I was looking at the different types of apples at the farmers market the other day and I came across the Newtown Pippin, named, it’s said, for the fact that it originated and was grown along the banks of the Newtown Creek.  The Newtown Creek!  The vilest waterway this side of the Ganges.  Now granted, I’m a sucker for that kind of provenance, but I mean, as long as it tastes like an apple wouldn’t you rather have an apple with a story than just an apple?  (Incidentally the apple didn’t taste so good, ha!) By the way, don’t you love it how “elite” people like to call the farmers market elitist?  As if buying food at a market from (somewhat) local farmers instead of at a giant corporate supermarket stocked with food from industrial farms – in which these “elite” people undoubtedly have some interest – represents the perversion from tradition and not the other way around? What I’m trying to say is: apples once grew along the Newtown Creek!

The first settlement in the Newtown area by the way (and apparently the first European settlement in Queens at all) was called Maspeth (or Maspat, or Mespat) and was actually settled by the English, though with a grant from the director-general of New Amsterdam Willem Kieft.  The grant was issued in 1642 to the English minister Francis Doughty, and at 6,666 (Dutch) acres it included almost all of what today makes up western Queens.  Doughty had recently been removed from his pastorate in Massachusetts for his radically liberal ideas (namely involving baptism – the hippie bastard) and was looking for a place where he could preach in freedom.  Kieft was looking for settlers – any settlers, even English ones – to help open up Long Island, and so a deal was made.  It didn’t last too long though.  In 1643, just as the initial settlement of Maspeth had been established, an attack by Indians leveled the place (the hippie bastards).  Doughty and his crew returned to New Amsterdam, though apparently he re-settled in Queens sometime later with a bit more success, before leaving the region for good in 1655 (as well as leaving a whole boat-load of tangents that we’ll have to return to some day).

By the time Doughty left New Amsterdam another attempt had been made to settle the land he’d been formerly granted, again by a group of English New Englanders.  In 1652 they established “New Town” (as opposed to the “old town” of Maspeth) around the present-day intersection of Queens Boulevard and Broadway – though just to confuse things the Dutch referred to the same settlement as Middleburgh, and the English may have also officially referred to it as Hastings at some point.  No matter; in 1661 Captain Samuel Moore built a house on the 80 acres he’d been granted in the area, supposedly in recognition of his father (Reverend John Moore’s) efforts in arranging the purchase of the entire Newtown land from the local Indians.  Although again, another account says that Newtown was formally purchased by Governor Richard Nicolls in 1666 (after the English had won control over all of the New Netherlands), and that account even mentions the 3 Indians it was purchased from by name, so ya gotta think it might be truer (those names were Rocero, Westcoe and Pomwamken by the way).  It was Samuel Moore’s brother Gershom Moore who was running the estate in the late 1600s or early 1700s when the Newtown Pippin apple was discovered on it (unless he was dead already – whatever, it was a long time ago and no body can really tell).

I say discovered by the way because the Newtown Pippin is an heirloom apple – a chance seedling, or “pippin” – that grew from an apple seed somewhere in the swampy land near Newtown Creek.  I won’t go in to all the details about apple genetics because I don’t really understand them but suffice to say it’s pretty cool: the Newtown Pippin was a wild apple, not one bred by man.  People ate it and thought it tasted pretty good and so they took cuttings from the tree to propagate the apple elsewhere (and please, if there’s any sciency-type people reading this, tell me what I’m getting wrong).  The original tree died around 1805 at over 100 years of age, suffering from “excessive cutting and exhaustion,” but by then the Newtown’s fame had been assured.  It was especially popular in the Piedmont region of Virginia, where it was also known as the Ablemarle Pippin, and was both praised and grown by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (or you know, probably praised by them and grown by their slaves, but whatever).

Reverend John Moore, the originally founder of the whole Moore Newtown dynasty, was the great-great-great-grandfather of Clement Clarke Moore, the poet and theologian best known for writing “The Night Before Christmas” (originally published as “A Visit from St. Nicholas”).  Though born in New York City, in 1779, Clement spent much of his youth at the family estate in Newtown, and today the approximate site of the Moore family’s manor home is a park known as the Clement Clarke Moore Homestead (at 45th Ave. & Broadway).  Suffice to say the neighborhood looks a little different now than it used to.  Newtown Creek, named as you might imagine after the settlement of Newtown, looked a little different also – shallower and wider (wide enough to hold small islands apparently), with swamplands along its borders.  It still probably wasn’t a body of water you would have wanted to go swimming in, but for different, not quite as toxic, reasons.  Clement Clarke Moore might have witnessed some of the changes in his lifetime, as industry moved into the area and started using the creek as its dumping ground, though his death in 1863 meant that he missed the worst of it.  By the 1890s is was so bad that when real estate magnate Cord Meyer Jr. developed property in Newtown he successfully pushed the U.S. Postmaster General to have its name changed to Elmhurst, to avoid the smelly connotations.  Now that’s what you call an elitist.

Liberty Avenue & 80th Street

This one is way out there. I came across it while taking that long A train ride to Rockaway for a day at the beach. It’s in Ozone Park, right at the point where the subway comes above ground, before skirting the edge of Howard Beach, then crossing the often-magnificent Jamaica Bay. The shock this corner gave me felt particularly appropriate — there’s something about the far outer boroughs, especially here on the southern shore of Long Island, that always feels foreign to me, further away from Manhattan in attitude than it might be in miles. At this distance the designation “New York City” can feel rather arbitrary.

What I was seeing, from above, was the Bayside Acacia Cemetery. But for a second I could have sworn I was looking at New Orleans, or maybe Narnia. The crowded but maintained gravestones I saw initially quickly gave way to a riot of plant life, tall bushes and vines, until by the middle of the cemetery it was a forest: trees at least twenty feet high, canopies spread, with tiny slabs of carved stone lined up beneath them. It all seemed too symbolic. Here was an image made manifest in reality of something that resonates in all of us. Namely, that time is just going to devour you; what we’re up against is eternity. Hell yeah we are! You know, I really get excited by that kind of thing.

The Bayside Acacia Cemetery was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, making it one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in New York. At the time it opened the surrounding area was rural farmland, with the neighborhood of Ozone Park not being developed until 1882. The congregation of Shaare Zedek on the Upper West Side was responsible for maintaining Bayside Acacia, but clearly at some point their funds and desire fell off a bit. It’s been a few decades at least without any grounds-keeping. Although that’s changing now, with a major cleanup underway, sponsored by The Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries. You can see the result of some of their efforts already.

I think there was a whole school of English landscape design that followed the general principle at work in Bayside Acacia. Call it controlled chaos, or actually just chaos, vibrantly living nature as symbolic of death. In laying out the grounds of an estate, for example, you would build a ready-made ruin and let the plant life around it run wild. According to Joseph Campbell it was the ancient jungle mythologies of the world that tended to be the most violent. These people, living as they were surrounded by an explosion of life, came to see death, and more specifically murder, as the primary cause of it all – the seed from which life paradoxically begins. Werner Herzog says something along those lines in Burden of Dreams while speaking about filming in the Amazon.  “The birds do not sing; they shriek in pain.”  Living in that setting you lack any physical horizon, instead the world crowds in around you, you have to fight to keep it back, what Herzog again called “the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle.”  So that’s what we’re up against.  Now being at the beach is the exact physical opposite – it’s all horizon – although the emotion can be just the same: the malice of our certain death, each wave what Arthur Koestler called, “a shrug of eternity.”  We went body-surfing in them.

(Originally posted July 31st, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

Vernon Boulevard & 49th Avenue

I live less than a mile from the ocean. That’s true for a lot of people that I know. I live on an island, and I work on a different island. But would you ever guess it? New York isn’t exactly what you would call “island living.” Hell, half the population doesn’t even wear shorts. And yet it’s summertime, and every little while you’ll catch that certain lull, that pause in forward momentum, as all the leaves heave up and sigh back down, the shadows shift a few inches to the right, and you’re left standing undeniably inside the present. Nothing seems to be happening — everything is precisely what it is. It’s a similar feeling to looking at old photographs – as if no body ever had to move.

So yeah, you find that thing from time to time, within the summer. I found it on Vernon Boulevard and 49th Avenue the other day, in Hunters Point in Queens. Hunters Point seems particularly conducive to the emotion. Maybe it’s just my own connotation of a neighborhood under a bridge, nestled down as if against some city wall or mountaintop. The houses on 49th Avenue are squat two-story brick. They look like 19th century single family homes that still remain as single family homes, the perfect size for living. They can’t be broken up because they were the right space to begin with. Something has passed them by here, and something else is coming, but these buildings stand. You look at them and are reminded that each moment is the moment, eternal before gone. Which is to say, this is right now, over and then over again.

Hunters Point takes its name from the British sea captain George Hunter, who owned an estate in the area by 1825. Before that the spit of land sticking out into the East River had been known as Dominie’s Hook, after Everardus Bogardus, who purchased it in 1643. Bogardus was the second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam; dominie is Dutch for minister. The community was rural farmland until a little after 1861. That was the year the Long Island Railroad moved its principal terminal into the neighborhood, after local protests had driven it off of Atlantic  Avenue in Brooklyn. Rail travelers to Manhattan had to disembark at Hunters Point and catch the newly created 34th Street ferry across the East River to arrive at their destination. A number of inns and taverns sprang up to accommodate the crowds, and with easy access to the city now insured, urbanization followed soon after. The opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, and an underground rail tunnel to Penn. Station in 1910, caused industry to grow significantly. Most of that is gone now, with large residential towers moving in behind them, or more aptly, over their remains.

It’s the newest development in Hunters Point in a long while. Due to the neighborhoods proximity to the East River the area was treated much more as the actual road to progress and prosperity than as the destination itself. The Queensboro Bridge above and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel below literally passed over (and under) Hunters Point, bringing populations and change to more inland parts of Queens. It’s what lends the neighborhood its particular feel of stillness. The new towers are up already, but nothing was stirring when I wandered down the empty streets surrounding them. The ocean is only two blocks away. Because I’m walking on an island. The East River is the ocean, it doesn’t matter what it looks like; it doesn’t matter what surrounds it. It’s salt water; it flows out to the Atlantic. There are points along it where tall grasses grows, their roots standing under water that moves back and forth with the tides. This is the ocean. Honestly. It makes you pause a moment. Here comes the breeze.

(Originally posted July 17th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

Greenpoint Avenue & Gale Avenue

Where? Gale Avenue? Who’s ever heard of Gale Avenue?

Oh, it’s in Blissville. Well who’s ever heard of Blissville? I don’t know; it’s a pretty easy one to miss. We’re talking about a neighborhood that defines its boundaries by a cemetery, the Long Island Expressway, and one of the most polluted waterways in the entire world. Blissville.

Although it takes its name from its developer Neziah Bliss, not from any purported peace and happiness that might come from living there. Bliss owned most of the land that would make up this neighborhood, starting from the 1830s on. It lies in Queens, across the Newtown Creek from Greenpoint, where Bliss ran his own ship-building business along the East River.

Bliss was actually instrumental in the initial development of Greenpoint as well. After marrying into the Meserole family, he had the area surveyed and in 1839 opened the hood’s first public turnpike along what is now Franklin Avenue. Industrial business soon followed, and grew even faster after Bliss helped establish regular ferry service to Manhattan by 1850. He built the Blissville Bridge in 1855, around the same time he started developing the Blissville neighborhood, to carry Greenpoint Avenue over Newton Creek to Queens. The John J. Byrne Memorial Bridge which stands there today, is the fifth such to cross that spot. Greenpoint Avenue itself was created in 1852, as a means of getting New Yorkers out to Calvary Cemetery.

Because you know what, a lot of people were dying back then, cholera epidemics being one of the leading causes. By 1852 there were an average of 50 burials a day in Calvary. The cemetery was opened in 1848, on land purchased and run by Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. It was among the first cemeteries to open after passage of the Rural Cemetery Act by the New York State Legislature. The Rural Cemetery Act authorized the construction of commercial burial grounds in rural parts of New York (which back then still meant Queens). For the first time the burial of human remains would become a money making business. Churches and land speculators moved quickly to buy large tracts of rural land in Queens, with a number of cemeteries opening by 1852. Today Queens has 29 of them in all, with a combined buried population of 5 million people outnumbering the population of the living.

Once the burial grounds were established Manhattan started the process of closing down some of its old cemeteries, disinterring the bodies, and moving them out to Queens. This was partly from fear that improper burials had led to the cholera outbreaks, but even more importantly it was to remove what would be idle land out of the path of development. These people were dead already, why should they stand in the way of tomorrow?

And speaking of tomorrow, it would find its way to Blissville soon enough. In 1870 the tiny village would be incorporated into Long Island City, along with Astoria, Sunnyside, and a number of other towns. Massive industry moved in soon after, and still dominates the area today. The residential blocks of Blissville have shrunk down smaller over the years, as both warehouses and Calvary Cemetery expanded to push them out. It seems appropriate though, to see these gravestones standing side by side with industry, chain link fences and giant rectangular metal boxes. And then scattered amongst them these artifacts of the living, these houses that continue to exist. Both industry and cemeteries need space and so they’re pushed out here to the liminal edges of our city. Liminal as in “of or relating to a sensory threshold.” I feel that when I’m out here: that I’m on the edge of something, something sensory or almost extra-sensory. There’s something that I’m not quite getting past or picking up on. Did humans know what they were doing when they made these symbols, these gravestones and these factories, and actually just made them in the real world? Just built them like they were castles, like giants who just went and died and we’re sort of slowly using the things they left behind and making up stories about them, trying to get inside before it rains. I’m standing here right now people! What is this pocket of space we’ve created? But you know, we must have understood somewhat because we made a word for it, we made a word for “liminal,” and we made it thousands of years ago, when we were children still, just picking chalk up off the earth and drawing things. We knew it, we really did. It’s just going to swallow you back up. We knew it then. When did you first show up in this place?

(Originally posted June 19th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

19th Avenue & 41st Street

I’ve always thought that the great thing about The Great Gatsby is how much of the story takes place on Long Island, just outside of New York City. It seems like such an unexciting locale for a book regarded as one of the best of the 20th century — all that time spent driving through Queens. Of course that was the whole point; these people were rich and they could have anything they wished for. Their surroundings weren’t the important thing. They created their own surroundings as they went, wherever they wanted to, with no regard to what came before or to what might come after. Someone else says Long Island’s fashionable, and so Long Island is where you go.  Money follows money. Everybody follows money. Hell, that’s still what I get paid with, how bout you? So really, everybody follows everybody else. Someone throw me a dollar.

That’s especially the story of Queen’s development, which has always been more a collection of independent towns and villages than a comprehensive city. Each village had its own start, its nucleus, its separate grid system laid out, its growth of population and of infrastructure, before finally expanding outward at its borders till it touched upon the next town over. Just looking at a map makes it apparent. It’s all a patchwork, each town voting independently in 1898 for consolidation into the city of New York, at which point they became neighborhoods. Long Island City was one of the exceptions – having incorporated itself as a city already in 1870 from the merger of several smaller villages and hamlets, including Astoria to the north. But the idea of actually becoming a city, along the lines of New York or Brooklyn, never took off – the neighborhoods remained too separated, unable to find a common center.  L.I.C. decided to join New York the same year as all the rest of Queens.  Still, its neighborhoods are official referred to as Long Island City to this day.

But they have their own distinct realities. Astoria was founded in 1839 by Stephen Halsey, in a spot along the East River south of Hallet’s Cove. After a contentious debate it was named Astoria in honor of John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America at the time. Halsey was a friend of Astor’s and he hoped that having a village named after him might persuade John to invest some money in the property. Apparently he didn’t invest much, about $500 (he was worth about $20 million). And he never set foot in the neighborhood, although his summer home across the river, around present day 87th Street in Manhattan, afforded him some pretty nice views. Steinway Village (now called Ditmars Steinway), north of Astoria, although more or less considered a part of it today, was founded in 1880 as a company town for the newly built Steinway Piano Factory.  The Steinway family developed the village with their own private finances, laying out a street plan, building houses, a post office, parks, and a streetcar line.  William Steinway bought an existing house in the neighborhood, on what was a beautiful riverfront property.   The Italianate stone villa had originally been built for William Pike, a manufacturer of scientific instruments, in 1850.  Steinway used it as his summer home, spending his winters in the more fashionable Gramercy Park.

Gramercy Park is still pretty fashionable; 41st Street in Queens, not so much.  The house now stands on the very edge of an absolutely gigantic Con Edison power plant.  It sits on a hill, hidden by trees, rising above the warehouses and chain link fences that surround it.  The whole set up put me in mind of that old children’s book, The Little House. Remember that one, how the house stands in a field in the country until the city slowly creeps closer and closer to engulf it?  By the end the house is sandwiched between two skyscrapers, with an elevated train line running in front of it.  I always loved that image.  I liked seeing the little house get swallowed up, becoming a living remnant of the past.  And when we visited the Steinway house the other day it did feel like going back a ways, or at least like taking a visit to the country.  I’m talking just a lazy, quiet vibe out here.  There was a tiny camper parked on the property next door, and a bunch of junked cars.  And then best of all there was a chicken.  He came right up as if to say hello to us.  He was a tiny fella, and he even crowed a few times too.  He doesn’t know he lives in Queens.  He doesn’t know what the hell is going on.  He’s a chicken.  He’s the house chicken of an 1850s mansion in Steinway that’s in the middle of a power plant.  You know what I’m saying?  I’m saying the chicken is a metaphor!  Or else, uh, no, just wait, just wait a minute here.  Or else, you know what?  He’s not a metaphor — he’s a chicken.  The dude is just a little chicken.  Little chicken.  Hey, there’s a dog!

(Originally posted May 1st, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

Flushing Avenue & Onderdonk Avenue

February is almost over. I’ve been measuring its passage by the changing angles of afternoon sunlight in my apartment. As the sun creeps every day a little higher in the sky, its rays reach new corners of the kitchen, the living room. The other evening I had a perfect streak right across the bottom of my bed. I think it was Pip in Great Expectations who talks about those March days when it is “summer in the sun, and winter in the shade.” So all right, we’re not there quite yet. But we’re damn close. And it still puts me in the mood to go exploring — my route dictated by whatever street the sun happens to be shining on. You keep inside that glow and you’ll stay warm enough.

I’ve always equated industrial landscapes with the summertime. But maybe it would be better to say that I equate them with strong sunlight, anything that brings their solid forms cut out in sharp relief. I took a ride the other day around the southern end of Newtown Creek, crossing over into Queens. These streets are public, but I can never shake the feeling that I’m trespassing when I’m on them. It doesn’t help that every other road dead-ends, or is suddenly and irrevocably stopped short by railroad tracks. While I ride I like to keep an eye out for the first sign of residential buildings. Borders between neighborhoods are always fascinating. One block on a map might not look like much, but on the ground it’s a different story. And which direction you approach something does a lot to help make up your first impression. You can’t help but think of streets as linear, as chronological almost, point A and then point B, when actually they’re all existing everywhere around each other all at once.

That point is hammered home by the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, on the corner of Flushing Avenue and Onderdonk, in Ridgewood, Queens. This is perhaps the oldest Dutch Colonial stone house in NYC. It was built in 1709 on the site of what was once a large farm. Now it’s surrounded by cinder-block warehouses and sheet metal. Flushing Avenue is not a pretty street; it doesn’t put you in the frame of mind to expect a farm house, and at first glance you could almost mistake this one for a utility shed. It was only the few acres of green lawn and picnic benches around it that made me stop. But once I did my mind could start to construct a different picture. Ridgewood extends up the hill from Flushing Avenue, with some fine views of Manhattan, and for a moment I could picture it all swathed in grass, sown fields, and chopped down tree stumps. I can only think on something like that for a short time before I start muttering to myself with some combination of excitement and frustration. I want to know what this world looked like, when it was still this world, the planet Earth, and also something else entirely. And you can’t ever really do that. Oh well, alack the day, as some old dude once said. Here’s a picture of the house, from 1910.

The Onderdonk house and farm played a big role in the early border disputes between Brooklyn and Queens, when in 1769 a giant boulder on the property – there after known as Arbitration Rock – was established as the boundary marker between them. On one side was Kings County, and the old Dutch town of Bushwick, and on the other was Queens, and the newer English settlement of Newtown (what would become the current neighborhood of Elmhurst). The rock grew less important after both counties consolidated with the city of New York, and in 1925 the border was redrawn entirely, in a more scientific fashion. By the 1930s the rock had been completely buried under the newly graded Onderdonk Avenue. It stayed there until 2001, when it was excavated and moved next to the farmhouse. I guess even then the dispute wasn’t over, as Brooklyn officials claimed the rock was part of both counties shared heritage and should be placed somewhere they both agreed on. Queens wasn’t having it.

Because borders aside, this rock has been here about 10,000 years. And maps are just representations of reality; they change as knowledge and perception changes. But that’s also why I like them so much: maps are maps of what they’re maps of (huh?) but they’re also maps of knowledge, of the way we tell ourselves we see the world. You put it together, brick by brick, inside your mind.

(Originally posted Feb. 27th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

Hell Gate

Well that’s it New York, I’ve had enough.  So long and sayonara – I’m getting out of here.  I’ve had it with your cold streets and colder people, the casual way you knock down dreams, chew them up and spit them out onto the curb like so many empty peanut shells.  Who was I kidding here?  I’m heading up to Boston, where the chilly winds never blow and coffee runs free at every Dunkin Donuts.  Thank God.  Oh, and I’ll be back on Sunday.

I’ll be back that is, assuming I can make it over Hell Gate.  That’s right, Hell Gate, cruel cruel Hell Gate – that treacherous tidal strait in the East River, separating Astoria from Ward’s Island and its psychiatric hospital.  It’s lived up to its name over the years, with hundreds of ships finding a watery grave beneath its roiling waves.  That includes the English frigate Hussar in 1780 and its supposed $5 million cargo, still waiting at the bottom of the river.  I mean sure, I could probably make it across fine at certain points, when the waters go slack and it’s apparently as placid as a lake.  Or I could probably take a bus over the RFK/Triborough Bridge, or even ride a boxcar over the Hellgate Bridge.  But still, you never know.

You don’t find too many places now a days that are named so succinctly, and yet are so poetic.  It really cuts right to the point.  Give credit where it’s due; as with a lot of New York the Dutch are responsible for the name, originally calling it “Helleget,” which ironically enough loosely translates as “beautiful passage.”  The English heard the name and thought it sounded just right like it is.  And apparently the good people at the Parks Department have a similar inclination for the poetic – on either side of Hell Gate is Charybdis Playground, in Astoria, and Scylla Point, on Ward’s Island.  They’re named after the mythical monsters that guarded the Straits of Messina.  Charybdis was Poseidon’s daughter, turned into a monster by Zeus; she would suck water in and out of her giant mouth, creating whirlpools.  Scylla had the head of six wolves, or else they might have made up her midriff.  So you know, no big deal, either way. That old poet Homer tells us that Odysseus had to sail by Scylla and Charybdis on his long journey home from the Trojan War, opting to go closer to Scylla since her six heads could only kill six men.  And Odysseus sailed to the underworld, so you could say he’s been to the gate of hell: Hell Gate.  I’m not sure if Homer pictured it quite the way it looks in New York.  But hey, he was supposed to be blind, so who knows how he pictured things.  And also, it’s debatable if he even existed.  I don’t know anything about that.  But in 3000 years they’ll probably say the same thing about you.

(Originally posted Nov. 28th, 2008 on Takethehandle.com)