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Photo Gallery: Flushing Avenue |
| Two views above as viewed from beneath Rust Street and a little used Long Island Railroad freight line. The top faces north towards 59th Street and the second looks south towards 56th Street. On the sultry Saturday afternoon of July 14th, 2001, you can't imagine how long I had to stand in place with the camera pressed to my face just to get a few lousy vehicles into the shot. As Flushing Avenue is still a major truck route in and out of the gritty industrial borderlands of Queens and Brooklyn, I'm sure I'd have my pick of traffic tie-ups on an average workday. The wait for a freight, on the other hand, could be an exhaustive affair even on the busiest day of the most prosperous boom market. |
| One of the Long Island Railroad's best kept secrets is the unelectrified freight line stretching eastward from Hunters Point in Long Island City alongside 56th Road, through Maspeth where it ditches the mid-50s avenue series for the mid-50s streets, onward past this point, where it crosses over Flushing Avenue, running betwixt a group of industrial buildings. It then passes along the south side of Lutheran Cemetery, after which it shadows 77th Avenue until it burrows into the wilds of Forest Park just east of Woodhaven Boulevard and Union Turnpike, after which it eventually joins up with the LIRR's main line at Atlantic Avenue, just west of the Van Wyck and Jamaica Station. |
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Given the presense of Rust Street
on the other side of the blue fence on the left, the general
color scheme and condition of this scenario is rather apropo,
or is it the other way around? The surrounding commercial buildings
are typical of depression era functionalism. The bridges linking
these two over the tracks look like something out of a coal mine
movie or a documentary on shuttered midwestern steel mills. I've personally seen freight trains in action along these tracks only a couple of times, both while passing beneath them in Forest Park while on the Jackie Robinson Parkway. I've also seen the freight a couple of other times crawling along further to the east upon the main line as they passed over the Van Wyck Expressway. To look at the tracks, one might think them abandoned, but unlike their notorious Rockaway Line Dead Track cousins, I would not advise laying down between the rails just yet. Speaking of the Dead, just east of Woodhaven, the light weight freightline and the Dead Tracks actually cross paths in what has to be one of the loneliest rail junctions on earth. Just thinking about it starts The City of New Orleans playing in my head. This freight line has one more unique trait, which no doubt played a heavy role in the building of Flushing Avenue's little highway; it retains most of New York City's remaining grade crossings, until it passes beneath Woodhaven. All along its lonesome route you'll find the typical broad white X and tiny round, yellow RR crossing signs, which few will ever see elsewhere within the city. No doubt, well into the post WWII era, Flushing Avenue also crossed the tracks at grade, and during what must have been this rail line's halycon boom years, the traffic tie-ups on this major trucking artery must have been horrible, as endlessly long and tortoisely slow freight trains held equally long lines of weary drivers hostage as they crawled along their way. Little anticipating that this bane of Flushing Avenue someday, not far in their future either as it came to be, might decay to the point of near irrelevence, a massive undercrossing was undertaken to eliminate the grade crossing. The same was done for Woodhaven Boulevard, albeit probably a good many years earlier. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.
