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Photo Gallery: Queens Blvd |
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 Planning on meeting anyone at Queens Boulevard and
58th Avenue? Good luck finding one another, because that intersection
exists only in the imagination of this sign. Then again, if we
want to nitpick, 58th Avenue should run through the center of
the Queens Center shopping mall to the left, so you could meet
up by the escalators. Between the long ago supplanted 58th Avenue
and the still trucking 59th Avenue one block east, there used
to be a small amusement park called Fairy Land. These days, with
the changing of our language and culture, it could not do business
under such a name unless its customer base was something far
different than preschool children. These days the space is filled
by Macy's mall rival JC Penney. As of this writing, 2/17/2001,
JC Penney is not doing well. It is one of several high profile
business icons and giants looking the dustbin of history in the
eye, along with Xerox, and one of my worst ever investments -
Lucent Technologies, suddenly reduced to junk status with its
CEO threatening recalcitrant lenders with default. Old, new and
in-the-middle economy stocks all, but the whims of luck and fortune
doesn't seem to discriminate these days.At the corner of 59th
stands a McDonalds. If Mad Cow Disease gets any worse, which
it certainly will, look for them to also careen into the dustheap,
along with every agri-business dependent on the livestock industry. |
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Taking in the wider view, the newer
outer lanes of the westbound Long Island Expressway pass overhead
in the background, while the express lanes of eastbound Queens
Boulevard descend into their three block stretch of limited access
highway heaven, where the killer thoroughfare escapes the pedestrians
and dreams of fulfilling its aborted aspirations of joining the
LIE as a superhighway. The already tortoisish 30 MPH is now under
heavy artillery assault and likely to go lower, due to the hue
and cry about Death Blvd's dangers. The two most typical lamppost/mastarm combos found along Death Blvd stand back to back here, the hexpole quarterloop and the classic, grooved aluminum SLECO stanchion bearing its famed bigloop mast. The two do not seem to like one another; they appear to be snubbing each other. 59th Avenue metamorphisizes into perhaps the second most dangerous boulevard in Queens as it crosses onto the brickfaced 1930's era overpass - Woodhaven Blvd, which itself becomes yet another unfortunate high profile sub-highway, Cross Bay Blvd of Howard Beach infamy, before crossing Jamaica Bay into the Rockaways. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman.
