A Wedge of Queens

My nephew, who is also Dees Stribling though with a different rack of middle names, moved to Queens late this summer with the other members of his band, The Alexander. To be more exact – because Queens covers about 113 square miles – they live in on 48th St. in Woodside, a couple of blocks away from the intersection of 48th St. and 48th Ave. If I learned nothing else during this trip about the geography of Queens, I learned that the borough could use some streets names, as opposed to numbers.

My taxi driver from LaGuardia only had a vague idea of Queens geography too, asking me a couple of times en route, where is it [meaning the address, not Queens itself]? He was also holding another conversation in his native language, a Middle Eastern tongue, while working on the problem of where to take this odd fare who hadn’t asked for anything normal like a Midtown hotel. I made another call to the world headquarters of The Alexander (that is, my nephew’s apartment) to ask about cross streets, and before too long we got where I was going. The ride cost $15, which at least was cheaper than going to a usual-suspect Midtown hotel.

The Alexander occupy a three-bedroom flat that takes up all of the second story of one of a long row of two-story brick buildings up and down that block of 48th St. The buildings are jammed as tightly together as possible, forming a continuous façade along the block, with enough trees here and there to make crunching piles of leaves on the sidewalks this time of year. Occasional graffiti marks the walls, but not nearly as much as other places. It isn’t an ugly block, but it’s not made of the aesthetic brownstones of New York lore either.

The block is peculiar because it's within a triangle formed by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway, which meet just to the east, with the base of the triangle being the enormous New Cavalry Cemetery to the west. The view from the back window of the apartment is tombstones stretching way far away; the sound of cars and trucks zooming along is never absent all along the block.

About a half a mile away is a shopping district focused around the MTA station called 46th-Bliss St., and of all the possible parts of Queens I could have visited, I spent the most time passing to and from this area. When the B24 bus comes in a timely way near The Alexander’s apartment, it’s short ride to the train station, which is an elevated at that point, not a subway. Otherwise, it’s a 15-minute walk to the station, not bad in warm weather. All along the way it’s a small-building neighborhood, a dense mix of apartments, shops and businesses. The sort of neighborhood in which a car isn’t remotely necessary.

The neighborhood is heavily, but not completely, Hispanic, many Central Americans I understand, but I didn’t have time to investigate the demographics too closely (and especially the restaurants inspired by distant homelands). I’m sure my nephew and his friends will come to know the area in detail before they move on. How fortunate they are, to be new to such an intense urban environment.