Man Made Lake

Around Town 2

West 26th Street, Chelsea
Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint
36th Street, Astoria
Grand Concourse, Fordham

Taste of Queens

Elevated

    New York already had an extensive elevated train network when the first subway line was built in 1904. The move to subways has consistently been seen as an improvement, and the concerns are valid: noise and light. But nobody ever took the aesthetics of riding these trains into account. Every time I look out the windows at dark tunnel walls I wonder what it would be like if I were 100 feet higher, looking down on 53rd Street or Trinity Place.

    If you're skeptical, watch this short film about the 3rd Avenue El, made just a few years before it was dismantled in 1955.

Approximately 40% of the present "subway" system is elevated, mostly deep in the outer boroughs.

Edgemere, Queens

    I had been told that New York's ocean beaches are especially eerie in the dead of winter. My advisers probably had an empty Coney Island in mind, the rides closed and the boardwalk empty. However, on a recent trip to Edgemere, a semi abandoned neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula, the effect of the weather proved redundant; Edgemere is always creepy.

Newtown Creek

    At one time Newtown Creek was a beautiful site. Full of seafood, surrounded by wooded hills, the four-mile-long estuary was a popular swimming spot with the local Mespat tribe. Dutch explorers first surveyed the creek in 1613.

    America's first modern oil refinery opened on its banks in 1867, and before long it was home base for Standard Oil. Other industries moved in and the creek was widened to accommodate bigger barges. Over the last 15 decades, 17 to 30 million gallons of oil (Exxon Valdez was 10) have spilled into Newtown Creek, a water body that is essentially stagnant. Add copper contamination from the Phelps Dodge superfund site, runoff from unsewered industrial sites and waste transfer stations, and combined-sewer overflows of human waste. Many call Newtown Creek the most polluted waterbody in North America.