Van Wyck Expwy South to Rockaway Boulevard - June 2001
Photo Gallery: Van Wyck Expwy.

Just past Foch, and we still can't shake this Taco guy. Now I've said that boulevards around here generally run with the numbered streets, so what is Rockaway Boulevard doing here? It is actually running on a diagonal, as do many older roadways not part of the later planned grid system, so like Queens Boulevard and Union Turnpike among others, it crosses paths with both the streets and the avenues. Here in South Jamaica and Ozone Park, it is merely a very wide, busy commercial strip. Further to the south and east, it becomes for all intent and purposes, a highway, as it runs past JFK Airport. Incidently, you're not seeing things as pertains to the apparent bulges in the Airtrain's siding. Exactly why those occasional bulges were engineered, I haven't a clue. Perhaps to provide space along the tracks every here and there for signals and such.

Unlike some of their brethren further north, these grand old, if quite filthy, stoneface brick retaining walls have been...well...retained!

The Airtrain construction has robbed motorists of the cushion that used to stand between the right lanes and the overpass walls. I assume that upon completion of the project, all lanes will be shifted back towards the center. Either that, or all these overpasses will have to come down and be rebuilt, which I would think they would have done before building the Airtrain. Then again, never let me wallow in the delusion that a government bureaucracy might do the intelligent thing.

© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.