Forest Hills has two clashing street grids separated by a boulevard, and a series of crescents to the west, not to mention Forest Hills Gardens, which has winding and bendy streets with no evidence that the creators of the street plan had any sanity whatsoever.
The streets of Forest Hills Gardens is privately owned. The neighborhood was deliberately designed with meandering streets to suggest a European village. Numbering of streets is verboten. Even where 71st Avenue plows directly through in a straight line, it reverts to its pre-numbering name, Continental Avenue.
In Forest Hills, the building addresses on Austin Street correspond to the avenues it is crossing, while on parallel Queens Blvd one block away they correspond to the streets intersecting on the opposite side. On my corner [at onr time] in Forest Hills, Austin, with its numbered cross-street addressing has a precisely perpendicular intersection with Lefferts Blvd, which has the same addressing scheme, as if they were parallel. My wife and I were once walking with a friend up 83rd Avenue, a section where the streets are charmingly haywire, to get to a restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue, when our frirnd asked "which way are we going?" He apparently expected a compass direction, although having lived several years in Boston he should have known better. My wife matter-of-factly answrred "toward Metropolitan Avenue", to which I added "ask a silly question ...."
I seriously question who was even made responsible for numbering the all the numbered streets in Queens, it’s a literal freaking mess. Staten Island actually has a part with numbered streets but at least it’s only one neighborhood that tries to number streets and not the whole Borough. Honestly the streets in Queens should have been all named instead of trying to put numbered streets everywhere.
I just got to say, you try numbering it. I've looked at the map and considered the numbers quite a bit and really there's very little that could be done different. The underlying fact is the numbering of the streets was retroactively applied to different grids, grids that meet at odd angles or have different spacing or both. Any system you come up with is going to be a compromise, with grids either repeating numbers in one area or skipping them in another so that they stay relatively consistent with each other where they touch. And I have enormous respect for the people who actually made pretty good decisions at this in the 1920s, working entirely from paper maps as sources and no computers or databases to look things up easily. They did it all in a relatively short time and their work still holds up really well.
Queens streets were formerly named. For example 23rd Street was Ely Avenue ( hence why the station there is signed as "23rd Street - Ely Avenue ). 30th, 36th, and 39th Avenues on the Astoria Line were formerly Grand, Washington, and Beebe Avenues respectively. Remnants of this can still be seen on the Flushing Line with 33rd-Rawson, 40th-Lowery, 46th-Bliss, 52nd-Lincoln, and 69th-Fisk ( Av instead of St ). It's also why the stations on the Fulton St Line are signed as 111th-Greenwood, 104th-Oxford, 88th-Boyd, and 80th-Hudson. Other old examples being 71-Continental and 75-Puritan on the QBL. Also related to the boulevards in Queens, most if not all of them where named with avenue ( Like Astoria, Ditmars, Lefferts, and Junction ).
They (the city gov't in the early 1930's) got rid of the named streets because too many streets had the same names but weren't connected (i.e. 15 "Washington" streets, in 10 different neighborhoods, or 17 streets named "Lincon" or "Adams" or "Smith" in neighborhoods scattered around the boro
I didn’t know the LIRR used to run through Kissena Park from Willets Point to Babylon. I’ve rode all the bus lines that pass through it and Flushing Meadows Park and I’ve also rode my bike on the bike lanes/walk lanes where the railroad used to be.
The bus lines used to be trolleys and the train passed through the park, I suspect largely on a trestle of some nature with the first horse drawn trolleys beneath the crossing with the train(s). The Q25 and Q34 used to be an electric tracked railway. There is a street that comes off of 164th and another off of Parsons Blvd in Jamaica where the car barn(s) stood. Queens/Steinway Transit along with the North-shore Bus Company ran the trolleys into the early 1940s when they were replaced with GM Coach Division’s “New Look” Omnibuses similar to the one Ralph Cramden chauffeur for the Fifth Avenue Bus Company.
@@WalterKowsh Wow that must’ve been a scenic ride on the LIRR with the view of Kissena Pond. Was the Q65 also a trolley line along with the Q25 and Q34? I wish I could ride the trolleys back then, seems more exciting than the buses.
The Kissena Greenway continues on to the Queens/Nassau border via a portion of the Long Island Motor Parkway, the first (or second depending on how you define things) grade-separated controlled-access highway.
You forgot that the numbered streets were once and still are named streets. The numbered streets came about because of the Queens Borough President’s adoption of the “Philadelphia numbering system”. If you go to the Topographical Bureau in Queens Borough Hall, 120-55 Queens Boulevard, Kew Gardens, NY 11415 or the Long Island Room of the Queens Library’s Central Branch on Merrick Blvd in Jamaica, NY you may view the original street layout set forth by the Queens Topographical Bureau. The Philadelphia numbering system brought a degree of rationality to the consolidated Queens street system once Town government was sadly done away with.
I was literally just looking at a map of Queens a few days ago and getting frustrated trying to find a viable north south route for a subway because of the convoluted street grid.
@@Demopans5990 Yes, especially in eastern Queens. It might be worth the MTA studying a subway connection between Queens and the Bronx via the Whitestone or Throgs Neck bridge.
One nice feature in amongst the mess is that the first part of the street number (before the hyphen) indicates the closest (lower) street/avenue number. e.g. a (hypothetical) 70-12 50th Street address is close to (~25 meters from?) 70th Avenue.
I always knew The Rockaways was part of the Town of Hempstead for a while It's mostly cuz the Rockaways' Power Grid is not connected to the rest of the city
I wonder what Queens would look like if Queens kept ALL of their original trail roads and built more roads around them and connecting to them instead of replacing them with new street grids
It would look like Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties. Not until the Asian influx beginning in the 1960s did real estate prices exceed those in the suburban counties. Life in the burbs was far superior to those in the Borough’s with the exception of the Fire Services which in the burbs remains largely volunteer in nature.
Not sure what you're getting at as that's pretty much what happened. Could you clarify? Things only really get messy where town grids bump into one-another, within each town they're usually pretty sane.
@ a lot of the organic roads were removed for these mix of grids, i just like to speculate what Queens would look like if those grids weren't the primary layout for land development
@@harrykatsos Yea, I see what you're getting at. As I recall that's especially the case in Brooklyn (e.g. along Flatbush Avenue) where there were large farms, etc. whose roads followed the topography; once the grid was developed those old roads were erased. This can be seen in e.g. Sanborn maps [seeing if I can locate an example (I have one in mind)].
@@harrykatsos Found it, the place I was thinking of is actually in the Bronx, namely the area within 500 meters or so of the intersection of Soundview and Randall Avenues. It's interesting to compare the 1908 Sanborn map (Volume A, maps 51 and 52), the 1924 aerial imagery, and what exists today. Many of the farms had fairly sizeable private roads that weren't incorporated into the modern street layout. What's interesting though is that the routes of many of the old roads (and streams) can be seen in modern property lines and building locations. Another example (visible on the 1924 aerial map) is between Flatlands Avenue and Quentin Road, Ryder Street and Coleman Street; the north end is still extant as Lotts Lane, the south end is lost but the route is clearly visible on modern aerial imagery.
@@theporgwholived9606 A lot of why things have been moving so slow is due to opposition from established business interests, largely via the proposal and promotion of shiny competing paper projects. e.g. Hyperloop was meant to stymie California's high-speed rail project (so as to not compete with car sales), the Boring Company was designed to scupper urban mass transit development (so as to not compete with car sales), etc. I'm sensing a pattern here.
Queens street grid is intresting. Queens is mostly numbered but its different than Manhattan and bronx grid. Brooklyn's numbered grid is weird to around kings hwy
Ik the plan is to have a subway AND trail, but i feel like the a trail inclusion is a cop out. The existing tracks should serve Queens trains. Tunnel boring underneath will just create the same problems the first SAS phase had, leading to a price tag higher than what case studies concluded. Even tho we have LIRR as a superexpress, the Queens bypass subway should be reproposed and constructed from Queensbridge to Forest Hills to justify reactivating Rockaway Beach branch.
I loved this video but one small correction I have to make is that it wasn’t that 60th Avenue was the “intended” street and the others were added in later as likely all the streets in that area predate the street numbers entirely. The thing is the repeat numbers tend to be on shorter streets that would leave gaps in the numbering elsewhere
I’ve done many visits to Queens in my life and when walking around I was seeing stuff like Drive Place and Road in Between Streets? I was exactly correct when I was thinking that they wanted a lot from the street numbers Avenues and Streets that can never keep themselves up? Up until maybe 11th St. the number is before then or just some tiny streets that only the locals know about And the Avenues are confused and lost
With a Queens native's bias, the grid system is not weird, it was the best effort to impose reason around the factors you cited. It is also sensible that building addresses incorporate the nearest cross street. Manhattan's grid is easier, but it had to start in the undeveloped part north of the original Dutch settlement, and Broadway was the only curving path that had to be accommodated. The Bronx pattern is an extension of Manhattan's. Brooklyn has many unrelated numbered and lettered street patterns, which to me is more confusing. Loved the old maps. Fun fact regarding the Downtown Flushing map: It shows the railroad crossing Bridge St., where a station was located. To this day, the LIRR still calls its station Flushing-Main St. to distinguish it from Flushing-Bridge St., which disappeared in the 1930s.
You missed the places with named streets instead of numbers like parts of Forest Hills. And how Jackson Heights used to also have named streets. Roosevelt Avenue - and it's supposed to be ROO-sevelt like Teddy pronounced it and not RO-sevelt like his cousin said it - is the remnant of a slew of streets named for presidents.
Not just streets. Near where I used to live in Astoria was an apartment building named the Harding. Must have been built during a *very* brief window in time.
The way the street layout defines neighborhoods is especially obvious if one bicycles through Queens. There's usually only one possible/sensible route between any two locations in different towns, one that takes you through a small set of bottlenecks, effectively isolating each town from its neighbors. I wonder if this is part of why Queens residents identify so strongly with the town they're from. You'll almost never hear someone say "I live in Queens" but rather "I live in Astoria" or "I live in Flushing".
@@Demopans5990 I always use a GPS, unless I _really_ know the area well. Even then I often end up having to backtrack. Edit: that's a GPS used as a moving map, not turn-by-turn directions.
There may have been a street that cut diagonally through that street grid that used to be 36th Av.. I say this because the same is true about the Coney Island area of Brooklyn where there is no 18th Street or 26th Street either. I later found out its because 18th Street (and possibly 26th Street) were once diagonal streets that cut through the regular street grid and these street(s) were later removed from the grid.
I've thought about this a lot and while all these factors are true, the same factors were also present in Brooklyn but its streets are far less disordered. BK can be described with around 5 or 6 different grids fit together like jigsaw pieces. Queens doesn't lend itself to such simplification. The grid in BK appears to have sprung out in the 1840s perpendicular to the LIRR, yet according to you it didn't do the same in Queens because reasons? Don't get me wrong, this is a good video and well researched. You did your due diligence in diving deep, it just happens to be a topic where even researching it well doesn't quite turn up a completely satisfying answer.
I believe Brooklyn unified so early it was able to reign itself and remove a lot of curvy Native American trails and has 6 overall grids but Brownsville/Fort Green/ and Sheepshead Bay have the same axis grid just not connected besides Washington Avenue but Queens is the biggest urban agglomeration mess besides Charlotte, NC and Providence/Boston metro 🤢
@@poohoo4495 I'm aware BK unified and developed first, but that just makes it more unexpected. You'd think the older place would have more pre-modern-planning mistakes and that the place which was basically greenfield development with literal farms until recentish would be far better laid out. But actually its the opposite.
@@IIAOPSW Part of it may be down to geography/geology. Queens mostly lies on rougher/more irregular topography (north side of the Forest Park moraine, marshes around Jamaica Bay) while most of Brooklyn is plains. The latter is more conducive to a regular grid. Fun fact(?) that I just came across: The Hudson River is hypothesised to have run (pre-Ice Age, >125,000 years ago) down the Harlem River then via what is now Flushing Meadows, emptying into the Atlantic via Jamaica Bay. Soren, J. _Subsurface geology and paleogeology of Queens County, Long Island, New York._ USGS. 1977.
Queens has lower per capital income than most certainly Manhattan and perhaps Brooklyn or Staten Island. I’m a Queens kid born, educated, lived with the exception of 2 years in NJ in Queens, and since my family has plots in Flushing Cemetery will be buried in Queens. We were once a much greater County and Borough not because of language diversity or food but because of “manufacturing” (eg Swingline ) which stapled the world together.
@ Seems like we have some things in common. I also lived in NJ close to Dunellen for 10 years but, I was born in Queens and have lived here for the other half of my life. I also live not too far from Flushing Cemetery, maybe 5-10 minutes away on the bus. It’s too bad we don’t manufacture and build industries that much here, everything is overseas. It would definitely add jobs to the market.
Queens: My street grid is very weird!
Boston: Do you have a street grid?
I think of Queens as sort of in between the rigid grid of the rest of NYC and the non grid of Boston. You can kind of see elements of both
Forest Hills has two clashing street grids separated by a boulevard, and a series of crescents to the west, not to mention Forest Hills Gardens, which has winding and bendy streets with no evidence that the creators of the street plan had any sanity whatsoever.
The streets of Forest Hills Gardens is privately owned. The neighborhood was deliberately designed with meandering streets to suggest a European village. Numbering of streets is verboten. Even where 71st Avenue plows directly through in a straight line, it reverts to its pre-numbering name, Continental Avenue.
In Forest Hills, the building addresses on Austin Street correspond to the avenues it is crossing, while on parallel Queens Blvd one block away they correspond to the streets intersecting on the opposite side.
On my corner [at onr time] in Forest Hills, Austin, with its numbered cross-street addressing has a precisely perpendicular intersection with Lefferts Blvd, which has the same addressing scheme, as if they were parallel.
My wife and I were once walking with a friend up 83rd Avenue, a section where the streets are charmingly haywire, to get to a restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue, when our frirnd asked "which way are we going?" He apparently expected a compass direction, although having lived several years in Boston he should have known better. My wife matter-of-factly answrred "toward Metropolitan Avenue", to which I added "ask a silly question ...."
As someone that grew up, is living, and watching this video in queens this is pretty cool!
I seriously question who was even made responsible for numbering the all the numbered streets in Queens, it’s a literal freaking mess. Staten Island actually has a part with numbered streets but at least it’s only one neighborhood that tries to number streets and not the whole Borough. Honestly the streets in Queens should have been all named instead of trying to put numbered streets everywhere.
Me too like the way the addresses are assigned, wtf is 45-10 it’s 86 or 923
I just got to say, you try numbering it. I've looked at the map and considered the numbers quite a bit and really there's very little that could be done different. The underlying fact is the numbering of the streets was retroactively applied to different grids, grids that meet at odd angles or have different spacing or both. Any system you come up with is going to be a compromise, with grids either repeating numbers in one area or skipping them in another so that they stay relatively consistent with each other where they touch. And I have enormous respect for the people who actually made pretty good decisions at this in the 1920s, working entirely from paper maps as sources and no computers or databases to look things up easily. They did it all in a relatively short time and their work still holds up really well.
@@ihatelategame The addresses are made to be like it's xth house away from y street ( or vice versa ) iirc
Queens streets were formerly named. For example 23rd Street was Ely Avenue ( hence why the station there is signed as "23rd Street - Ely Avenue ). 30th, 36th, and 39th Avenues on the Astoria Line were formerly Grand, Washington, and Beebe Avenues respectively. Remnants of this can still be seen on the Flushing Line with 33rd-Rawson, 40th-Lowery, 46th-Bliss, 52nd-Lincoln, and 69th-Fisk ( Av instead of St ). It's also why the stations on the Fulton St Line are signed as 111th-Greenwood, 104th-Oxford, 88th-Boyd, and 80th-Hudson. Other old examples being 71-Continental and 75-Puritan on the QBL. Also related to the boulevards in Queens, most if not all of them where named with avenue ( Like Astoria, Ditmars, Lefferts, and Junction ).
They (the city gov't in the early 1930's) got rid of the named streets because too many streets had the same names but weren't connected (i.e. 15 "Washington" streets, in 10 different neighborhoods, or 17 streets named "Lincon" or "Adams" or "Smith" in neighborhoods scattered around the boro
I didn’t know the LIRR used to run through Kissena Park from Willets Point to Babylon. I’ve rode all the bus lines that pass through it and Flushing Meadows Park and I’ve also rode my bike on the bike lanes/walk lanes where the railroad used to be.
The bus lines used to be trolleys and the train passed through the park, I suspect largely on a trestle of some nature with the first horse drawn trolleys beneath the crossing with the train(s). The Q25 and Q34 used to be an electric tracked railway. There is a street that comes off of 164th and another off of Parsons Blvd in Jamaica where the car barn(s) stood. Queens/Steinway Transit along with the North-shore Bus Company ran the trolleys into the early 1940s when they were replaced with GM Coach Division’s “New Look” Omnibuses similar to the one Ralph Cramden chauffeur for the Fifth Avenue Bus Company.
@@WalterKowsh Wow that must’ve been a scenic ride on the LIRR with the view of Kissena Pond. Was the Q65 also a trolley line along with the Q25 and Q34? I wish I could ride the trolleys back then, seems more exciting than the buses.
The Kissena Greenway continues on to the Queens/Nassau border via a portion of the Long Island Motor Parkway, the first (or second depending on how you define things) grade-separated controlled-access highway.
You forgot that the numbered streets were once and still are named streets. The numbered streets came about because of the Queens Borough President’s adoption of the “Philadelphia numbering system”. If you go to the Topographical Bureau in Queens Borough Hall, 120-55 Queens Boulevard, Kew Gardens, NY 11415 or the Long Island Room of the Queens Library’s Central Branch on Merrick Blvd in Jamaica, NY you may view the original street layout set forth by the Queens Topographical Bureau. The Philadelphia numbering system brought a degree of rationality to the consolidated Queens street system once Town government was sadly done away with.
One can also look at the Sanborn fire maps, viewable online via the NYPL and Library of Congress.
I was literally just looking at a map of Queens a few days ago and getting frustrated trying to find a viable north south route for a subway because of the convoluted street grid.
QueensLink.
@@shadowmamba95 Which follows an abandoned railroad ROW, natch.
Judging by the size of Queens, 2 more N-S routes.
@@Demopans5990 Yes, especially in eastern Queens. It might be worth the MTA studying a subway connection between Queens and the Bronx via the Whitestone or Throgs Neck bridge.
One nice feature in amongst the mess is that the first part of the street number (before the hyphen) indicates the closest (lower) street/avenue number. e.g. a (hypothetical) 70-12 50th Street address is close to (~25 meters from?) 70th Avenue.
I used to live in woodside and the streets are curved so much that they formed somewhat semicircles
Very informative and interesting video.
I always knew The Rockaways was part of the Town of Hempstead for a while
It's mostly cuz the Rockaways' Power Grid is not connected to the rest of the city
I wonder what Queens would look like if Queens kept ALL of their original trail roads and built more roads around them and connecting to them instead of replacing them with new street grids
It would look like Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties. Not until the Asian influx beginning in the 1960s did real estate prices exceed those in the suburban counties. Life in the burbs was far superior to those in the Borough’s with the exception of the Fire Services which in the burbs remains largely volunteer in nature.
Not sure what you're getting at as that's pretty much what happened. Could you clarify? Things only really get messy where town grids bump into one-another, within each town they're usually pretty sane.
@ a lot of the organic roads were removed for these mix of grids, i just like to speculate what Queens would look like if those grids weren't the primary layout for land development
@@harrykatsos Yea, I see what you're getting at. As I recall that's especially the case in Brooklyn (e.g. along Flatbush Avenue) where there were large farms, etc. whose roads followed the topography; once the grid was developed those old roads were erased. This can be seen in e.g. Sanborn maps [seeing if I can locate an example (I have one in mind)].
@@harrykatsos Found it, the place I was thinking of is actually in the Bronx, namely the area within 500 meters or so of the intersection of Soundview and Randall Avenues. It's interesting to compare the 1908 Sanborn map (Volume A, maps 51 and 52), the 1924 aerial imagery, and what exists today.
Many of the farms had fairly sizeable private roads that weren't incorporated into the modern street layout. What's interesting though is that the routes of many of the old roads (and streams) can be seen in modern property lines and building locations. Another example (visible on the 1924 aerial map) is between Flatlands Avenue and Quentin Road, Ryder Street and Coleman Street; the north end is still extant as Lotts Lane, the south end is lost but the route is clearly visible on modern aerial imagery.
Where is part two to what can U.S. Transit can do with the military budget?
Not that it was happening before, but with the new administration the progress will be even less. Disappointing to say the least.
The Interstate Highway System. A continuation of the New Deal under Eisenhower (R!).
@@theporgwholived9606 A lot of why things have been moving so slow is due to opposition from established business interests, largely via the proposal and promotion of shiny competing paper projects. e.g. Hyperloop was meant to stymie California's high-speed rail project (so as to not compete with car sales), the Boring Company was designed to scupper urban mass transit development (so as to not compete with car sales), etc. I'm sensing a pattern here.
The Interstate Highway System; a continuation of the New Deal under Eisenhower (R!).
The Interstate Highway System.
Queens street grid is intresting. Queens is mostly numbered but its different than Manhattan and bronx grid. Brooklyn's numbered grid is weird to around kings hwy
Great video!
Ik the plan is to have a subway AND trail, but i feel like the a trail inclusion is a cop out. The existing tracks should serve Queens trains.
Tunnel boring underneath will just create the same problems the first SAS phase had, leading to a price tag higher than what case studies concluded.
Even tho we have LIRR as a superexpress, the Queens bypass subway should be reproposed and constructed from Queensbridge to Forest Hills to justify reactivating Rockaway Beach branch.
I loved this video but one small correction I have to make is that it wasn’t that 60th Avenue was the “intended” street and the others were added in later as likely all the streets in that area predate the street numbers entirely. The thing is the repeat numbers tend to be on shorter streets that would leave gaps in the numbering elsewhere
I’ve done many visits to Queens in my life and when walking around I was seeing stuff like
Drive Place and Road in Between Streets? I was exactly correct when I was thinking that they wanted a lot from the street numbers
Avenues and Streets that can never keep themselves up?
Up until maybe 11th St. the number is before then or just some tiny streets that only the locals know about
And the Avenues are confused and lost
With a Queens native's bias, the grid system is not weird, it was the best effort to impose reason around the factors you cited. It is also sensible that building addresses incorporate the nearest cross street. Manhattan's grid is easier, but it had to start in the undeveloped part north of the original Dutch settlement, and Broadway was the only curving path that had to be accommodated. The Bronx pattern is an extension of Manhattan's. Brooklyn has many unrelated numbered and lettered street patterns, which to me is more confusing.
Loved the old maps. Fun fact regarding the Downtown Flushing map: It shows the railroad crossing Bridge St., where a station was located. To this day, the LIRR still calls its station Flushing-Main St. to distinguish it from Flushing-Bridge St., which disappeared in the 1930s.
How about a video explaining Brooklyn's street grid
The insanity comes from these area being developed at different times
You missed the places with named streets instead of numbers like parts of Forest Hills. And how Jackson Heights used to also have named streets. Roosevelt Avenue - and it's supposed to be ROO-sevelt like Teddy pronounced it and not RO-sevelt like his cousin said it - is the remnant of a slew of streets named for presidents.
Not just streets. Near where I used to live in Astoria was an apartment building named the Harding. Must have been built during a *very* brief window in time.
The way the street layout defines neighborhoods is especially obvious if one bicycles through Queens. There's usually only one possible/sensible route between any two locations in different towns, one that takes you through a small set of bottlenecks, effectively isolating each town from its neighbors. I wonder if this is part of why Queens residents identify so strongly with the town they're from. You'll almost never hear someone say "I live in Queens" but rather "I live in Astoria" or "I live in Flushing".
Assuming you don't end up lost that is
@@Demopans5990 I always use a GPS, unless I _really_ know the area well. Even then I often end up having to backtrack. Edit: that's a GPS used as a moving map, not turn-by-turn directions.
Where I used to live queens there was no 36 av it jumped for 35av to 37av and distance between them is normal
There may have been a street that cut diagonally through that street grid that used to be 36th Av.. I say this because the same is true about the Coney Island area of Brooklyn where there is no 18th Street or 26th Street either.
I later found out its because 18th Street (and possibly 26th Street) were once diagonal streets that cut through the regular street grid and these street(s) were later removed from the grid.
Doing Uber eats, I affirmed that Queens grid is so interesting.
All these tracks and no train to LaGuardia.
Great video. love your content. Queens4lyfe
While I prefer Brooklyn, Queens is cool 😎 but interesting stuff!
I've thought about this a lot and while all these factors are true, the same factors were also present in Brooklyn but its streets are far less disordered. BK can be described with around 5 or 6 different grids fit together like jigsaw pieces. Queens doesn't lend itself to such simplification. The grid in BK appears to have sprung out in the 1840s perpendicular to the LIRR, yet according to you it didn't do the same in Queens because reasons? Don't get me wrong, this is a good video and well researched. You did your due diligence in diving deep, it just happens to be a topic where even researching it well doesn't quite turn up a completely satisfying answer.
I believe Brooklyn unified so early it was able to reign itself and remove a lot of curvy Native American trails and has 6 overall grids but Brownsville/Fort Green/ and Sheepshead Bay have the same axis grid just not connected besides Washington Avenue but Queens is the biggest urban agglomeration mess besides Charlotte, NC and Providence/Boston metro 🤢
@@poohoo4495 I'm aware BK unified and developed first, but that just makes it more unexpected. You'd think the older place would have more pre-modern-planning mistakes and that the place which was basically greenfield development with literal farms until recentish would be far better laid out. But actually its the opposite.
@@IIAOPSW Part of it may be down to geography/geology. Queens mostly lies on rougher/more irregular topography (north side of the Forest Park moraine, marshes around Jamaica Bay) while most of Brooklyn is plains. The latter is more conducive to a regular grid.
Fun fact(?) that I just came across: The Hudson River is hypothesised to have run (pre-Ice Age, >125,000 years ago) down the Harlem River then via what is now Flushing Meadows, emptying into the Atlantic via Jamaica Bay. Soren, J. _Subsurface geology and paleogeology of Queens County, Long Island, New York._ USGS. 1977.
So Queens is like Boston and the nearby cities and towns!
Man I love my borough 😂😂😂
I don't see the link
It should be updated. Sorry about that.
"Queens Blvd Line"
Astoria grid is perfect... except Newtown
Is Crescent where the Tsar's finger bumped the line on the planning map for the Trans-Astoria Roadway?
Best borough in the city! Most languages in the world spoken here. Queens get the money! 🗽
Queens has lower per capital income than most certainly Manhattan and perhaps Brooklyn or Staten Island. I’m a Queens kid born, educated, lived with the exception of 2 years in NJ in Queens, and since my family has plots in Flushing Cemetery will be buried in Queens. We were once a much greater County and Borough not because of language diversity or food but because of “manufacturing” (eg Swingline ) which stapled the world together.
@ Seems like we have some things in common. I also lived in NJ close to Dunellen for 10 years but, I was born in Queens and have lived here for the other half of my life. I also live not too far from Flushing Cemetery, maybe 5-10 minutes away on the bus. It’s too bad we don’t manufacture and build industries that much here, everything is overseas. It would definitely add jobs to the market.
The Queens Public Library is the largest library system in the world.
Best food too!
And places like Corona with its open air markets and prostitution are third world. No wonder Corona was the epicenter of the Coronavirus (Covid-19).
The street grid is bad
Queens has an odd street grid, but there's nothing wrong wirh grids in general