Time: 4pm near 30 av station, 3/5/2016
Trains rumble by. One heads deeper into Astoria, towards the terminal at Ditmars Blvd, while the other heads towards Manhattan, where it will eventually reach the terminal in Coney Island. There is a lot of traffic in and out of the area. The neighborhood is accessible by car on either the Grand Central or BQE, by train the N and Q (Q only on weekdays) or 7 at Queensboro Plz, by bus M60 SBS from Harlem, Q19 from Flushing. Cars and trucks also come over the Queensboro Bridge from 59th St in the Upper East Side.
I had to use the bathroom since we arrived from brunch in Crown Heights so I began frantically scanning local businesses trying to discern which one might have a bathroom. I entered the Trade Fair supermarket in the hopes that they might have one but they did not. The children playing basketball in the park informed me that the park bathroom was locked and that it was gross anyway. I struck gold at the Chinese restaurant down the block, although the owners did not seem happy at my failure to purchase food (sorry, I was stuffed from Tom’s Diner in Brooklyn). The mirror in the bathroom was covered in old campaign stickers dating back to the first Bush presidency and other strange paraphernalia.
It was cold outside but not to the point of extreme discomfort. Athens Sq Park across the street from the Chinese restaurant seemed like a good place to observe people. The smells of frying or grilled food from the restaurants and of exhaust from the cars emanated towards the park. The park was ringed in statues donated by various mayors of Greek cities to Mayor Bloomberg, evidence of cultural cooperation. This was also the city’s way of honoring and recognizing the Greek population of Astoria. Diversity appeared to be a major theme of the park in general as evidenced by the walls of the neighboring public school. They sported maps, geographic facts and images of passports.
Middle-school aged kids hung out in the basketball courts to shoot hoops while the younger children used the play structures. Their cries of glee were evidence of the joy they took in repeatedly going up and down slides. Parents cast a careful eye on the kids using riskier structures like monkey bars as opposed to the tamer slides.
The cold weather did not deter the constant flow of pedestrians on the streets surrounding the park. There were people everywhere-streaming in and out of the pharmacies, the 7/11 and the supermarkets. However, some people clearly did not feel like going outside; an Asian delivery man appeared to be rather busy. We watched him unchain and mount his moped on a mission to deliver take-out. Walls of local businesses were largely free of any graffiti but the Chinese restaurant had some small icons on its outer wall. One of them read “REBEL.”
The side streets were mostly residential, featuring modest one or two-family houses. There were also many laundromats, ostensibly catering to nearby apartment buildings. On the corner of a residential street there was a hospital being constructed. It was the Queens branch of Mount Sinai’s cancer center. This structure was a stark reminder of disease and mortality amidst the liveliness of the nearby streets.
