 Jeff's
Expressways SitePhoto Gallery Flushing Avenue Photo Gallery: Secondary Roads |
| Flushing Avenue is certainly one of the more enigmatic avenues in New York. For one thing, it comes nowhere near the neighborhood for which it is named, stretching on a jagged slant from downtown Brooklyn just shy of the Manhattan Bridge, northeast into Grand Avenue just shy of the Long Island Expressway in Maspeth, Queens. Along the way, it passes continuously in between industrial areas, public housing projects and mixed zone neighborhoods where attached houses from the early part of the last century represent the typical housing stock. It was obviously a fairly ancient route, as most of the city's slanted sidestreets tend to be, and I'm sure in its blessed youth, it did indeed scoot all the way into the heart of Flushing. Before the plowing forth of both the Brooklyn Queens and Long Island Expressways, it was the primary route from Middle Queens down into the jugular heart of Brooklyn. Today, it remains an important truck route, but its rather side-streety, narrow appearance in many sections would seem to belie that fact. In some respects, it serves as the peripheral bypass on the way south to Brooklyn's Boro Hall, for those who otherwise would cruise down Grand Avenue, but wish to avoid central Williamsburg and Greenpoint. If Grand Avenue (Grand Street in Brooklyn) were an interstate, it might be I-95, in which case Flushing would be its 3-digit consort, ie: I-595. For those familiar with its meanderings, Flushing Avenue serves as a handy safety valve escape hatch from the northbound BQE to the LIE or Queens Boulevard, when that notorious highway is jammed. By far, however, the best part of Flushing Avenue is a brief interlude just north of the Queens border, where, like so many other secondary routes with bigger dreams than city planners had for them, Flushing wings out and swoops down into an open cut for a very expressway-like dash beneath a three crossroads and two railroad crossings. Of course, it is possible that at one time, city planners indeed planned to run a 4-lane expressway along Flushing's gritty right-of-way. Flushing's short turn at being one of New York's great pretenders leaves us a permanent, if brief reminder of what might well have been the nucleus of that never-built highway. |
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Intersecting Highways |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.
