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Photo Gallery: Woodhaven Blvd |
| We are now in at the northern tip of the inhabited section of Broad Channel Island; the human inhabited anyway. The northern half of this appendage shaped strip of land is reserved for the birds, lots of birds, all kind of birds. It is the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, surrounded by a host of totally humanless islets with names like Little Egg, Yellow Bar Hassock and Silver Mole...and there are those multimasted utilities again! For an island dedicated to avian wildlife, you'd think they would deep six these monstrous looking things for fear that they'd scare the birds off. Note the bike lane with the diamond painted on it. It runs all the way up over the Broad Channel Bridge. Think they'll ever have the audacity to place those bike lanes on Death Boulevard? |
| Looking south, at least one skater is sticking to the shoulder rather than risk collision with a bike or worse. This is roughly adjacent to 5th Road E, which in another lifetime long ago and far away was once called 191st Avenue. All the twig-like cross streets of Broad Channel used to bear numbers in sequence with the Avenue system in the rest of Queens County, extending up the number scale from where Howard Beach left off. Sometime in the last twenty or so years (these scenes were shot late June 2000 and this is written February 2001) the Broad Channel Avenues were renumbered with their own sequence as Roads. There are 20 in all, collect the whole set. Those to the left of here have E's appended to them ostensibly for East, but my map does not show W's attached to the West side. It's kind of hard to imagine a 2-block wide island even having an East or West side. What can I say? Haven't I said the Cross Bay corridor is wierd to the max? |
| Broad Channel is far more conservative than many Queens neighborhoods and I suppose that's natural for any relatively isolated community. Conservativism is not all bad. I'm a fairly right wing individual. This Veteran memorial is a nice peaceful place to sit, rest and think. Perhaps if the jackasses who ran a parade float here, mocking the torture and dragging to death murder of a man in Texas, had spent more time reflecting over this memorial, they might have recognized what really matters in life and thought better of their imbecilic display. |
| Our roller blader is back, this time braving the bike lane while a red light somewhere further south holds back the scant traffic coming north from Rockaway. The Veterans memorial is a block to the south, on the left. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman.
