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Photo Gallery: Woodhaven Blvd |
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Woodhaven always seems to be on
the border of things; never in the middle. Take every neighborhood
that Woodhaven Blvd touches, and that's all it ever does; touch.
All the way from Elmhurst, Woodhaven and Cross Bay snake along
the borderlines of Maspeth, Middle Village, Rego Park, Forest
Hills, Glendale, Richmond Hill, Cypress Hills, (I guess Richmond
had only one solitary Hill; It does often seem a flatlanded area,
but I'm digressing.) Ozone Park and Lindenwood. It's as if none
of these neighborhoods really want it within their midst, trying
as hard as they can to fob it off on their neighbors. Even Pizza
City wants to make sure you know that they're two blocks away
from it. The Dr. Woodhaven - Mister CrossBay Boulevard finally
finds a true home in Howard Beach and Broad Channel, but even
in those locales, where it is obviously the main drag, it finds
itself backed against borders, for despite being the center of
attention in Howard Beach, it barely manages one full bi-directional
intersection, cut off on its eastern banks by Shellbank Basin,
whereas its status on Broad Channel is rather dubious considering
there are no other north-south arteries on the captive island. Getting back to Pizza City, for reasons only my imagination can fathom, this aging coupe has got to be a bonafide neighborhood landmark by now. I'm sure it has been sitting here for at least a decade or more, pointing people to the nearest available slice, a veritable Pizza Pimp! Looking south beyond the PizzaMobile, we watch as Woodhaven attempts superhighwaydom as it vaults bravely over a set of little regarded, but still quite active railroad tracks that have the rare privilege of running freight trains every now and then across Forest Park onto the mainline tracks of the Long Island Railroad a couple of miles further east. In the incestuous family that is the railroad gridwork of Long Island, these tracks hook up in the west with both the Conrail lines that run up towards Hellgate, and the Bay Ridge Line, which could have, but obviously never did become the Cross Brooklyn Expressway. |
| Shifting focus somewhat, we see the newest citizen of the Rego Park, Forest Hills, Glendale borderland; good old hazard-heavy Home Depot. Yeah, I know you can get run over by hi-los in the aisles, but I can easily spend hours roaming around a store like that. In fact, as long as the visit doesn't involve waiting on lines, it can even prove relaxing in a perverse kind of way. Traffic appears quite polarized here, like Democrats versus Republicans; if one shows up for the party, the other stays home. Above, only southbounders abound, while here, nearly everyone is northbound. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman.
