The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  In Flushing, the First Baptist Church conducts Sunday services in Chinese and Spanish, as well as in English, and a small supermarket is booming because it specializes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean foods.

  And in Elmhurst, where some portions have become shabby, newly arrived Hispanic people pouring into the area are forming political clubs and becoming increasingly active in the economic life of the community.

  One Borough, Many Flags

  By SETH KUGEL | December 9, 2007

  Roosevelt Avenue in the heart of another multi-ethnic neighborhood, Elmhurst, Queens.

  A LOT OF FOREIGN TOURISTS—AND THAT includes Europeans, Californians and Manhattanites—have had occasion to stick their toe into the borough of Queens. Perhaps it was a trip to the Museum of Modern Art, during its temporary relocation to Long Island City. Maybe a sari and samosa shopping trip to 74th Street in Jackson Heights. Or a pilgrimage to Sripraphai, the Thai restaurant in Woodside with legendary status among crowds that speak in phrases like “best fried watercress salad in the city.”

  But few put it all together and make Queens a destination. Part of the problem: Queens doesn’t necessarily consider itself one destination, either. It was cobbled together in 1898 from different towns—Newtown, Flushing and Jamaica, for instance—and those towns still exist in postal addresses or residents’ minds. And, though the diversity of its 2.2 million people (Uzbeks! Indonesians! Serbs!) is exhilarating, it can make the borough feel Balkanized, even in parts where nobody is from the Balkans.

  It’s getting there, though. As more Manhattanites snap up the relatively low-end real estate just across the East River, Queens is drawing visitors from Manhattan and out of town who suddenly realize that it is as close to Midtown as Brooklyn is to downtown.

  The Modern went back to Manhattan three years ago, but Long Island City still maintains its identity as Queens’s arts center. There’s P.S. 1, the contemporary art museum affiliated with the Modern, two subway stops from the Modern, and included with your Modern ticket. Also in Long Island City, the peaceful Noguchi Museum and the Socrates Sculpture Park (fully outdoors, with views of Manhattan).

  Another center of cultural gravity is near the end of the 7 line, in soccer-crazy Flushing Meadows Park. There, on what were the grounds of two World’s Fairs, you’ll find the Queens Museum of Art, whose signature exhibition is the Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of the entire city. But the museum also includes the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, as well as exhibitions that reflect the international vibe of the borough. Those tugging along kids might opt for the New York Hall of Science instead; it’s more hands on.

  A Slice of Europe Near The East River

  By DEBORAH BALDWIN | June 22, 2008

  A cluster of row houses on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens.

  JUDITH KLEIN CAME FOR THE FOOD AND stayed for the kitchen.

  A blogger by moonlight under the name Foodista, Ms. Klein was born in Slovakia and says that living in the culturally diverse Ditmars-Steinway area—near the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden—makes her feel “very at home.” Also nice: being able to gather provisions in this food-obsessed swath of Astoria and cook in a kitchen bigger than a bread box. “My friends who live in Manhattan are surprised it’s so large,” she said.

  Matt Mahoney, another young commuter, described the area as “cheaper than Park Slope—and closer.” After boarding the elevated N line—which starts on 31st Street, above Rosario’s Italian deli and Choo-Choo’s Chicken ’n Crepes—he gets to his office on West 57th Street in 20 minutes.

  “Best food in the entire world, and every ethnicity is within a two-block radius,” said Peter Vallone Jr., a councilman and third-generation resident.

  Ditmars-Steinway is about 60 percent white, 20 percent Hispanic, 9.8 percent Asian and 1.4 percent black—and 45 percent foreign-born, according to a Queens College compilation of 2000 census data. Greeks colonized the area from the 1920’s to the ’60s, joining Italian, Irish and German immigrants. Today, “the schools record 118 nationalities,” said George Delis, a former district manager for Community Board 1.

  Despite an influx of “yuppies by the bushel,” as the Greek-born Mr. Delis put it, the neighborhood is largely working class.

  Despite its small size—just under two square miles—Ditmars-Steinway packs in five power plants, generating about 75 percent of the city’s electricity. Add the planes at La Guardia and the traffic as prison employees drive on and off Rikers Island, and no wonder some call the neighborhood Asthma Alley. “It’s not fair for one community to bear that burden,” Mr. Vallone said, “and it’s only going to get worse.” Still, he says he wouldn’t raise his own children anywhere else.

  If Manhattan has high-rises and Brooklyn has brownstones, Ditmars-Steinway has one- and two-family red-brick row houses in a style that “I would characterize as nondescript,” said Gerald Caliendo, an architect who works in the area. They have small yards and often contain rental units.

  But the Victorian-era row houses on 41st Street are remnants of a village—complete with a school, church and post office—that William Steinway built in the 1870’s for his piano makers (Steinway & Sons has had a factory in the neighborhood since 1870). At the top of 41st Street, overlooking Bowery Bay, is a 27-room mid-19th-century fixer-upper that was once the Steinways’ country house. The current owner, Michael Halberian, puts it on the market periodically. He says he might part with it for $5 million.

  Newcomers Help Push Up Prices

  By JEFF VANDAM | August 21, 2005

  A house in Forest Hill Gardens, Queens.

  THE EXHAUST-RIDDEN ARTERY THAT IS Queens Boulevard slices through the neighborhood of Forest Hills. But to step into its grand homes and apartment buildings is to forget the traffic and leave behind the ideas of what city living is like.

  “You’ve got dense, populated areas if you’re into apartment houses,” said Kathleen Histon, district manager for Community Board 6 in Forest Hills. “Then you can walk a block or two and you have these lovely streets filled with beautiful Tudors.”

  And with a new luxury condominium tower rising above the neighborhood, the influx into Forest Hills from pricier parts of the city is beginning. Melanie Fox and her husband, Glenn France, married for three years, were renting in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, when they wanted their own brownstone.

  They began looking at up-and-coming areas of that borough like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, but found the competition too fierce. For one house, they were trumped by buyers bidding $200,000 over the asking price.

  So when she and Mr. France, a specialist on the American Stock Exchange, accompanied some friends to explore real estate in Forest Hills, they were surprised at how nice everything seemed. They returned later for an open house at a three-bedroom town house on Fleet Street for $740,000, and soon after, they grabbed it.

  Forest Hills is essentially split into three parts, each with its own distinct feel. The centerpiece is Forest Hills Gardens, a private community south of Queens Boulevard with security patrols, wide curving streets and stately houses, which are protected by alteration guidelines and an approval process similar to those in historic districts.

  The grand entrance to “the Gardens,” as everyone calls them, is Station Square, adjacent to the Long Island Rail Road station, which greets visitors with cobblestone streets, quaint shops and graceful archways. Continuing into the neighborhood, the confusing Queens street grid ends and is replaced by a web of shaded, pleasant roads with names like Slocum Crescent and Summer Street.

  “It’s serene,” said Anna Pinto, who is raising her two children in the Gardens and works with Mr. Ambron at Madeleine Realty. “Most people who live in the Gardens don’t want to leave the Gardens.”

  To the immediate west, the streets straighten out and take on an alphabetical order (Austin to Olcott). Row houses and stand-alone houses prevail, though on streets closer to Queens Boulevard some houses take on the grandeur of the Garden
s.

  North of Queens Boulevard, large apartment buildings dominate, the most desirable units located in prewar complexes named for George Washington, Grover Cleveland and other presidents. Between 108th Street and the Grand Central Parkway, the theme changes to single-family homes in an area some refer to as Cord Meyer, after the developer who built most of them and is also building the new Windsor tower.

  THE BRONX

  Prosperity of the “North Side”

  December 17, 1899

  FROM A REAL ESTATE POINT OF VIEW THE past year has been a remarkable one in the borough of the Bronx. Values have taken fabulous jumps. Single lots have been sold for $20,000, a figure that a couple of years ago would have been considered a ridiculous valuation even by the most audacious boomer. During the early part of the year there was a great hue and cry raised against high taxes, but this had little or no effect upon the transactions and throughout the length and breadth of the borough real estate men report excellent business for the year, while fortunes have been made by builders, speculators and investors.

  Mr. Charles M. Kaeppel, one of Bronx Borough’s prominent real estate dealers, in reviewing the business of the year, said to The New York Times yesterday:

  “It is not so many years ago that this section of the city was dubbed ‘The Annexed District.’ The name alone was enough to keep investors away and give them an idea that the section north of the Harlem River was an insignificant chunk of wilderness tacked on to the City of New York in order to please the population of farmers and backswoodsmen who inhabited it. If we attempted to assert our rights as citizens of the metropolis we were good-naturedly laughed at, and if you gave your address, the question would be, ‘How far are you from Jerome Avenue?’ And later on, ‘Are you anywhere near Third Avenue?’

  Single lots have sold for $20,000.

  Today the borough is popularly alluded to as the north side, a name given to it before the Greater New York consolidation act became a law, and it is beginning to assume its proper place in the city.”

  Borough is More Than South Bronx

  By FRANCIS X. CLINES | July 6, 1978

  AS GOOD AS THE LAST WORLD SERIES SHOULD have been for the Bronx, it is remembered by the borough president for the night Howard Cosell kept showing a burning building on television.

  In a Roone Arledge age, in which news and diversion are blurring together, the burning building viewed by America from a blimp offered sociological graphics that didn’t eat up a lot of costly air time. The orange flame over a ways from the stadium’s bright dish of light was a neat segue for the attention span that nicely set up more popular events in which Reggie finally hit those home runs and established that winning is an egocentric fact, not a boroughwide one.

  “Howard Cosell,” Robert Abrams, the Bronx borough president, fairly sighs. “I can’t tell you what that picture did. It reinforced the image people have of the Bronx. It is devastating in the boardrooms of banks. And the TV kept showing it.”

  We should hasten to point out, however, that it might have been just that kind of thing that got President Carter to visit the South Bronx, for whatever that gesture may turn out to mean, and to stand there moodily as if he were Lincoln at Gettysburg.

  America is like that: One quick picture is worth a thousand documentaries. And Mr. Abrams wearily acknowledges that there is nothing like the South Bronx for a quick picture, for your standard empty building, as death’s head, for a few lines of urban thanatopsis.

  The worst effect of the South Bronx image, Mr. Abrams says, is on the people still living in the rest of the borough. “They run into old friends and keep hearing, ‘Oh my God—the Bronx? You’re still in the Bronx?’ Perception and imagery are very important in life and have a great influence on whether a person keeps a commitment to a neighborhood.”

  Yet the borough is bigger than the South Bronx or Co-op City or any of its parts, and the record should note that you can wander quietly through middle-class mile upon mile, so commonplace these real parts of the Bronx that they would look boring through a zoom lens from a blimp.

  As Maps and Memories Fade, So Do Some Boundary Lines

  By MANNY FERNANDEZ | September 16, 2006

  LLOYD ULTAN WENT LOOKING FOR A BRONX neighborhood the other day called Williamsbridge.

  He was overqualified for this seemingly simple task. Mr. Ultan, the borough historian, teaches a course at Lehman College on the history of the Bronx and has written or co-written eight books about the borough. He even wrote the 182-word entry on Williamsbridge in the Encyclopedia of New York City.

  Williamsbridge is a section of the Bronx near Woodlawn Cemetery that has a clearly defined border separating it from Wakefield, another neighborhood to the north, according to city maps and Mr. Ultan’s entry in the encyclopedia: East 233rd Street. But as Mr. Ultan stood on White Plains Road at East 228th Street in theoretical Williamsbridge, merchants and residents, asked to identify the neighborhood, called it White Plains Road or Wakefield instead.

  “I never hear it called anything but White Plains Road,” said Juliet Adler, 43, who works in a hair salon and has lived nearby on East 224th Street for six years.

  In the Bronx, as Mr. Ultan has long suspected, it’s easy to find an address, but hard to find a neighborhood.

  People in parts of Williamsbridge say they live in Wakefield. Some people in Edenwald say they live in Wakefield, too, and some people in Eastchester say they live in Baychester. There are those in Longwood who say it’s Hunts Point, and those in Allerton who say it’s Pelham Parkway.

  “Borders have bled all over the Bronx,” said Mr. Ultan, 68, who, when asked where he lives, gives people a helpful yet vague sense of place rather than the name of a specific neighborhood (“south of Van Cortlandt Park,” he says).

  Perhaps the biggest area with debatable borders is the South Bronx. The Encyclopedia of New York City calls it “an imprecise term used after 1950 to designate an area of shifting boundaries in the southwestern Bronx.”

  As arson and abandonment laid waste to entire neighborhoods in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the northern border of the South Bronx kept expanding, first to the Cross Bronx Expressway, then as far north as Fordham Road.

  Today, no one is quite sure just where the South Bronx begins. You could be at the counter of an Italian deli on Arthur Avenue ordering a veal parmigiana hero—four miles from the heart of Mott Haven—and by some definitions be standing in the South Bronx.

  The label has stuck nevertheless, though now it has come to signify a syndrome of social ills, an era even, but not exactly a place. Dan Donovan, topographic engineer and urban planner in the borough president’s office, is often asked by residents and researchers to pin down the northern edge of the South Bronx. “Personally, I refrain from that completely,” he said.

  Carter Takes “Sobering” Trip To the South Bronx

  By LEE DEMBART | October 6, 1977

  IN AN EFFORT TO DEMONSTRATE A COMMITment to cities, President Carter, in New York on United Nations affairs, made a sudden and dramatic trip to the South Bronx, where he viewed some of the country’s worst urban blight.

  “Gee whiz,” said someone on the stoop, “this is really something, talking to the president of the United States on our own doorstep.”

  The presidential motorcade passed block after block of burned-out and abandoned buildings, rubble-strewn lots and open fire hydrants, and people shouting “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!”

  Twice Mr. Carter got out of his limousine, walked around and talked to people. He said the federal government should do something to help, but he made no specific commitment.

  “It was a very sobering trip for me to see the devastation that has taken place in the South Bronx in the last five years,” he said after the tour, when he returned to the United Nations Plaza Hotel. “But I’m encouraged in some ways by the strong effort of tenant groups to rebuild. I’m impressed by the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have. I think the
y still have to know we care.”

  The two stops that the president made were designed to show him one of the few hopeful projects and the much more common hopeless areas of the Bronx.

  The first stop was at 1186 Washington Avenue, between 167th and 168th Streets, where Mr. Carter visited a housing renovation project. There 40 people have converted a six-story tenement into a building boasting freshly painted hallways, 28 oak-floored apartments and solar heat collectors on the roof.

  “Gee whiz,” said someone on the stoop, “this is really something, talking to the president of the United States on our own doorstep.”

  “I feel ecstatic,” Ramon Rueda, the executive director of the People’s Development Corporation, which undertook the renovation, said later. “He seemed completely sincere, and if he was putting on a show he was certainly making a good impression. I hope he will come back when we finish the next phase of our project.”

  The next phase includes a rehabilitation of five buildings in the area backed by a $3 million federally-financed loan and funds from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to train the workers.

  Rising Property Values and Suburban Living

  By BARBARA STEWART | November 2, 1997

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON. A MIDDLE-AGED COUPLE slowly cruise up and down rows of nearly identical ranch houses on streets lined with trees. The wife looks intently at the homes on the right; the husband, at the wheel, scans the left.

  Friends had told him about a house for sale on Louis Nine Boulevard. Just what they wanted: three bedrooms on a quarter-acre lot in the right neighborhood. But when he got there, the owner said it had already been sold, for $185,000.