You are currently browsing the stories about the “Queens” neighborhood.
I try to call my Great Aunt Doris every day. She's ninety-years old and lives alone. I love her desperately and as she gets older, especially of late as she becomes more feeble, my love seems to be picking up velocity, overwhelming me almost, tinged as it is with panic -- I'm so afraid of losing her. I usually call [...]
I was born in Brooklyn and to my understanding it was a fait accompli that I would be a Mets fan. I was taught that all Brooklyn residents had been Dodgers fans and four years after the Dodgers sold their souls and moved to Los Angeles we became New York Mets fans. As a child raised in a non-denominational home, [...]
Since I wrote my piece about Fresh Meadows a year ago, the sleepy little Klein Farm has exploded into public prominence. In late 2001, word spread that the elder Klein, now happily ensconced out in Jericho, had indeed decided to sell the no-longer profitable farm, despite the younger Klein’s desire to continue the enterprise. ("It’s the only job I’ve had," [...]
Peggy Darlington has always loved the New York City subway. As a little girl, she rode the trains frequently, and when she wasn’t on a train, she played “train” in her bedroom. One day, Darlington’s parents ordered her to play with dolls. After finding that she had put the dolls on pieces of cardboard to shuttle them around, they finally [...]
Last Friday the weather beckoned for some ice cream. I got a scoop (caveat: I am a messy eater. Caveat: I hate the word caveat) and walked down Ditmars, taking in the sights and sounds of my part of Queens. There were a lot of men out in muscle tee's talkin' tough and gesturing wildly w/their hands. Machismo overflowed like [...]
Across the street from the MOMA’s big, new, blue home is The Factory, a mall/office space building unremarkable for its commerce—but more than remarkable for its sculpture. The 5,000 square feet of floor, wall, and ceiling were, until recently, covered in a dense and quirky collage, made from fifty tons of recycled industrial garbage: bathtubs, water pipes, rebar, boilers, cogs [...]
Some people around here watched the towers collapse from their rooftops. I didn't even think to go up to the roof. Like baseball, I preferred it on TV. Hell, I'm an American. When the second tower I fell I took a walk outside with my friend. We both live in Astoria and we both work at home (well, he's a [...]
In 1949 I arrived, aged seven, at the threshold of P.S. 26 in Fresh Meadows (Queens), and saw there, graven in the imposing door frame above, the words: Rufus King Public School. Who, I wondered, was Rufus King? It was quite likely my first historical query, though I wouldn't have been able to conceptualize what I was experiencing in that [...]
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