myflush


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Leaving Flushing after 14 years on Sunday, July 1 [2007]; going down the road to Little Neck, so fear not, Forgotten NY will go on. It was just time to change addresses and now I'm unquestionably in middle age, so it was time to acquire some equity so your webmaster won't wind up living over a gas station eating cat food by the light of a single light bulb, a fear of mine for some time.

Your webmaster's building, 3/28/1993-7/1/2007

This building, 43-06 159th Street, was constructed in 1921 or 1925 (I've seen varying records). It has an odd slant on its southern end (subsequently your webmaster's bedroom is slanted) that corresponds to a property line that may have followed an aboveground stream at one time.

The building used to have a pair of stone lions in front. While the lions are long gone, the pedestals are still found, scattered on the front lawn. I'm told that long ago, the building also had a doorman.

Note the arches over the doorway and corner windows on the top floor, and the contrasting brickwork on the 43rd Avenue side that is especially attractive when the setting sun glances off it.

A block away is a three-story building at 43rd Avenue and 160th Street. While 3-story construction in the area now is incongruous and may actually be zoned out of existence in the future, this building (one of the area's oldest; may go back to the 1910s) pulls it off well with moldings, lintels, an attractive paint job that is always under graffiti attack from local youth. This building has always been home to a deli of varying quality over the past 14 years.

When I left Bay Ridge for Flushing in March 1993 I did so with palpable regret; Bay Ridge is one of NYC's most beautiful neighborhoods, despite its relative inaccessibility from Midtown by mass transit. For the better part of 20 years it had no express subway, since the Manhattan Bridge's tracks were closed for repair. I moved to Flushing to be close to a job in Port Washington which I lost in 1999 and rejoined in 2006. I have worked in Manhattan and Bayside as well so proximity to the Long Island Rail Road has been paramount. My new place is just a block away from the railroad.

Your webmaster leaves Flushing, and the rent stabilized apartment in the building above left, with nearly no regret. I will miss living a couple of blocks from Kissena Park; I will miss Flushing's collection of 17th and 18th-Century historic buildings; I'll miss the Waldhiem and Broadway enclaves of beautiful architecture; and the deli next to the RR in Flushing is better than the one I will be using in Little Neck. But that's about it. I moved to a neighborhood already sullied in the 1950s and 1960s by so-called urban renewal, and have dealt with these so-called "improvements" on an accelerated level over the past five years, so that the eastern Flushing I moved into in 1993 is rapidly becoming something else in 2007, a place where the concrete mixer reigns and every week brings another work crew ripping down another building constructed along human, esthetic principles. It is a place where our elected officials from City Hall down to the local assemblypersons actively worship the principle that since we supposedly will have a million more residents in NYC by 2030, we need somewhere to put them; and our prior model of two family buildings interspersed with 20-family apartment buildings isn't cutting it, so much more massive buldings need to be built holding 6-8 families each.

If these buildings were built with an iota of the panache, style and verve that early 20th Century multifamily buildings were constructed, my objections to them would not be so strident. But the new buildings appearing in Flushing are garbage. Soul-numbing, vomit-inducing offal. They are filling Flushing gradually block by block. In 10 years the Flushing I found will be gone. So I am leaving it.

I enter a Little Neck where some of the rot has already appeared though not to a degree encountered in Flushing, and I imagine I'll have a few years before it, too, succumbs to the redevelopment plague. I may simply keep having to move further east. We'll see.


		Between 1890 and the 1920s, much of western Flushing looked like this, as streets were lined with Victorian and Beaux Arts mansions of every style. Even the one-story bungalow type buildings, example left, had pergolas over the pathways. Note the vague Japanese style on the bungalow. photos via Queens Crap


1920s: Parsons Avenue (Parsons Boulevard), left, and Amity Street (Roosevelt Avenue). An era of wide, well manicured lawns. Nancy Reagan (neé Anne Robbins) was born on Amity Street in this era. Some of Roosevelt Avenue's houses have remained but more disappear each year.

Roosevelt Relics

By 2007 virtually none of these buildings remain; but when your webmaster arrived in Flushing in 1993, a couple of them made surprising appearances...


A pair of buildings from old Flushing faced each other on Roosevelt Avenue near 147th in the mid-1990s. These were taken down and replaced by multifamily housing soon after these photos were taken. Some of Fluhsing's Victorian-era relics hang on in isolated spots on Sanford and 41st Avenues, but you have to push further east into Flushing to find housing from the 1920s. Much of it is under the gun.

SE corner 43rd Avenue and 161st. The house died a slow death as it was first stripped and then left in that condition for several months. It has been an empty lot since February 2007. Many developers and property owners rush to demolish before plans are in place for a replacement.

Because of this Flushing is riddled with empty lots surrounded by plywood fencing.

Sea of Concrete



SE corner Sanford Avenue and 161st Street. Would you rather live in the object on the left, or in its counterpart on the NE corner?

In a city that is attempting to become environmentally-friendly, this object (I won't call it a building) shatters the principle in many ways. The street trees in front of it were cut down, so full sun will shine in, requiring more energy to power the Friedrichs. Would you buy an apartment on the bottom floor? You'd have to perpetually keep shades or blinds pulled down, so thieves and peepers won't see anything. A row of trees or shrubs would have alleviated this. Instead the builders preferred a large sheet of concrete. Next door on 161st we have another Thing probably using massive AC kilowatts, and further up the street, an older building sullied by the paving over of its front garden, a tactic increasing in frequency throughout Queens. It is much easier to maintain a patch of concrete than a garden; and what better place to park the family vehicle. We require laws to stop the pavement of lawns and laws requiring green space in front of private homes.

Crocheron

Crocheron Avenue, named for a prominent 18th and 19th Century landowning family, winds up and down a hill from Northern Blvd. and 162nd St to Francis Lewis Blvd. at the border of Bayside. It predates other roads in the area save Northern and was once a main route to NE Queens and currently serves the B28 bus. Its classic homes are being removed one by one.


Once marked by its Tudor-style houses with big trees and green lawns...Crocheron Avenue is changing character...


...and becoming more like this.


As these multifamily buildings from the early 20th Century at Crocheron and 167th show, multifamily housing didn't have to be ugly. So why does it have to be now?

Good Germans

165th Street between 43rd Avenue and Flushing Cemetery has a number of interesting items.

	There's 3 nice attached brick homes with bay fronts. These are more common in western Queens, Bronx, and Brooklyn.



		Two yellow-brick apartment buildings face each other on 165th Street between 43rd and 45th Avenues (there's no 44th in these parts). Bremen Hall features an unusual entrance: a lengthy alley with two front doors on each side. The back features a forlorn planter; it gets sun only a couple hours a day, if that.


	Meanwhile Lindbergh Court, across the street, sports subtle design differences. You could probably locate them on Property Shark (your webmaster doesn't have patience with their firewalls) but the buildings likely date to the late 1920s or early 30s, after Lucky Lindy had completed his flight. (After World War I a number of Brooklyn street names with German connotations, like Hamburg, Bremen, etc) were changed; although in Suffolk County, Yaphank actually had a number of streets named for Hitler's henchmen!) [yip, yip.]

The Evolution of Crap

165th Street gives a primer in how "Queens Crap" has developed over the years.


In the beginning (the 1930s), there were homes that sheltered four families. Brick construction, 6 over 6 windows, awnings, a grassy plot in the front and a garage in the back. And it was good. (165th and 45th Avenue)		By the Fab 50s it was considered more convenient to place a drive-in garage in the basement. This necessitated a paved ramp or drive, and less green space.
		By the Everlovin' Eighties, the garage in front had evolved to its natural conclusion: attached homes built atop garages, with no grass at all in front, with the pavement a convenient place to place garbage and other detritus. The facilitation of the auto has driven Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island's housing design evolution for decades.

Fightin' 169th

The block that has been assaulted the most by rampant development and de-evolution in the past five years has been 169th between Crocheron Avenue and the Long Island Rail Road, in which every building but two is being replaced by inferior objects you can't really call buildings.



These are the only two pre-2005 buildings remaining on 169th.



The rest is laughably bad 2000s construction. Your webmaster can't see new housing devolving below this level. Or...can I?



Well, there's this and this, on 162nd between 45th and 46th Avenues.


Or this and this: Station Road and 161st, and Sanford Avenue between 162nd and 163rd.


46th Avenue and 163rd Street. Great enclosed porch in front, looking out on Flushing Cemetery. See that backhoe on the left? This place will soon look...		...like this place, at Sanford and 159th!


Bridie's on Northern Boulevard was a nice Irish pub with a roaring fireplace, melt in your mouth soda bread, and waitresses with Riverdance-type mini skirts. Changing demographics have turned it into...Duck Butt. New Flushingites, I hope you're happy with what you have.

Flushing...I will miss your sunrises. But the sun is setting on Flushing as a bastion of any kind of architectural good taste. It's going to the dogs.

My Flushing Was Gone

erpietri@earthlink.net

If you don't like what you see here, perhaps these folks will hear you out...or not...

City Councilman John Liu, State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, State Senator Frank Padavan, State Assemblymember Ellen Young, State Assemblymember Rory Lancman.

City Councilman Tony Avella, based in Bayside, has been especially vigilant on preservation and overdevelopment issues.

HISTORIC DISTRICTS COUNCIL

QUEENS CRAP, an ongoing examination of all things destructive in Queens, updated daily

VILLAGE VOICE, 4/11/06