& Broadway - Elmhurst/Newtown Photo Gallery: Queens Blvd |
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![]() Even as I write this, the pins keep getting knocked down. On March 22nd, 2001, a woman was crossing, apparently against either the light or the walk signal, and was struck by a motorist turning right here from Grand onto the boulevard eastbound. The irony is that the motorist had come to a stop, yielding to the crosser, when he was rear ended by another driver and thrust into the woman, breaking her ankle. |
The two shots above look north from
Grand Avenue to Broadway. Death Boulevard, of course, is the
terminal junction of both major thoroughfares. Broadway is really
an east-west route for much of its run, only swinging south at
the last minute a couple of blocks up from here. Grand Avenue
likewise swings north on a sharp dime after a long diagonal route
through Maspeth to Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, where it changes
the Avenue designation for Street. There, it runs all the way
to the East River, where as the crow flies, it comes damn close
to continuing as the Grand Street of Manhattan's Lower East Side.
In actuality, it misses by about three blocks, and is really
directly across from Houston Street. It also misses hitting Brooklyn's
Broadway by only a few blocks, which would have made it a Broadway
to Broadway...well...way! Given that Manhattan's Grand Street
intersects with THREE Broadways, East, West and "Regular",
that would have cemented one of the oddest street-name relationships
on earth. As on the Grand Avenue side, the Broadway corner also hosts furniture dealers. A circular building on the left houses a bank. This area, considering the nearby circular department store edifice, has a strange penchant for round buildings. |
Looking west from the Broadway side.
The large dark building on the left is the Elks Lodge. I'll bet
alot of you from outside NY wouldn't think New Yorkers belong
to such lodges. The cream colored building beyond it is the Pan
American Hotel, which apparently has fared much better than its
namesake airline. It has a website, by the way, linked to on
the QB section homepage. This area was originally called New Town, or Newtown for short. Officially it is now part of Elmhurst, a name foisted upon Newtown by its civic boosters around the turn of the previous century, I'm sure in no small part because some unwary folks pronounced the old name like the cookie. Who wants to have people joke that you live in Fig Newton? Now, however, the name Elmhurst is under attack as having negative connotations, because parts of Elmhurst are kind of seedy. South Elmhurst, a few blocks southeast of here, wants to secede and join Middle Village. Meanwhile, as it is prone to doing, the Transit Authority still thinks the neighborhood is Newtown, as they include the name on the Grand Avenue subway station beneath this spot. The local high school is also called Newtown. |
![]() For a Grand Avenue, the subway station here got real ![]() ![]() The IND (The 3 letters are not legit initials as are IRT and BMT, but simply the beginning of INDependent) remains under the Boulevard of Death until Hillside Avenue, just two blocks short of the boulevard's ignominious deadending by the very Long Island Railroad that it so successfully vaults over in Sunnyside and barrels through in Woodside. Fool'em once, fool'em twice, you're the fool if you try thrice! |
Subway photos taken 6/1/2001 with digital camera. |
NEWS: 04/21/2001: Death stalks the Grand Avenue intersection again, only this time the street level isn't to blame. According to NY1 News, "Jesus Rodrigo Garcia Duque, 13, died Wednesday night when he was run over by a southbound R-train at the Grand Avenue station in Elmhurst. According to investigators, witnesses saw the boy jump into the path of the oncoming train. Police say school papers found in his knapsack led them to believe that the straight-A student committed suicide." The family disputed the suicide allegation and as of this writing, the investigation continues. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.