 Jeff's Expressways
SitePhoto Gallery Woodhaven/Cross Bay Boulevards Photo Gallery: Secondary Roads |
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Beset with more curves than
the Miss America pageant and more hills than the Sound of Music,
Woodhaven Blvd is as close as a New York City road can come to
being an amusement park ride, though its doubtful too many drivers
find anything amusing about it. It manages to combine the worst
features of such multi-divided secondaries as Queens Blvd and
Brooklyn's Kings Hwy, with a topography better suited to SUVs
than autos or trucks. Obviously disatisfied with its status,
Woodhaven also attempts twice to soar into superhighway ranks.
Not only does it fail, but it suffers the ignimony of being the
crossover lackey for two other boulevards with aborted arterial
intentions: Queens and Conduit. Finally, unable to stand itself
any longer, it Dr. Jekylls itself into alter ego Cross Bay Blvd
for its final demented descent towards the Rockaways. Though
looking far more normal than its wierded out Woodhaven half,
the Cross Bay stretch has been like a street possessed in recent
years. It was the center stage for the infamous Howard Beach
racial attack in 1986 and more recently, on Broad Channel, it
hosted a community parade where local cops ran a float poking
fun at the Texas dragging death of a black man. On that very
same insular island in the late 1970's, a white heavy-metal type
youth poured gasoline into the Broad Channel subway station token
booth and burned the black token clerk on duty to death. Lest anyone think I'm painting these communities unfairly, there are no shortage of places in this city where white folks would be ill advised to find themselves and no shortage of incidents where they are the victims, but are treated merely as run-of-the-mill incidental victims, with no racial motives ascribed to their attacks, and therefore no media storm that turns the crime site neighborhood into a veritable verb for hate crime. Getting back to the main protagonist roadways of this section, what more can I say? They are wierd...strange, wierd and peculiar. |
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Intersecting Highways |
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Major Intersecting Streets |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.
