Time: around 3:40 PM
Date: 3/5/201
Melissa, Alice, and I arrived in Astoria around 3:40 PM. We got off the N train at the 30th Avenue station, and began walking around the neighborhood. We were originally going to eat falafel (not a surprise) at Duzan, but none of us were hungry after eating a late brunch. Our first concern was finding a business with a bathroom, because Melissa needed one after our long trip. After stumbling into many businesses to no avail, we found one in a Chinese restaurant.
While we wandering the neighborhood, I noticed many things about Astoria. The people out and about on the streets and sidewalks were mostly the elderly or people in their 20s or 30s. There were many people carrying groceries, which makes sense since we arrived in the late afternoon. We appeared to be the only teenagers in the area. Additionally, there were fewer kids on the streets, but there were more children in the playground and basketball court, as we later explored P.S. 17 and the playground surrounding the school.
I also noticed how many of the businesses had “Astoria” in their names – Astoria Bank, Astoria Pediatric Center, Astoria Funeral Home, Astoria Accident & Injury Treatment Center, Astoria Good, Astoria Wireless, Astoria Brewhouse, and many others. I found this interesting because in my neighborhood, Bensonhurst, you won’t see many businesses with “Bensonhurst” in their names. When I’m out in Bensonhurst, I notice more businesses that have “Bath Beach” in their names, which is a neighborhood bordering Bensonhurst. This contrast with Astoria businesses having the neighborhood in their names shows a greater sense of community, and perhaps even that Astoria might be a more popular neighborhood, since it wasn’t just one or two businesses with Astoria in their names.
The diversity of Astoria was well-represented in our first trip. In Athens Square Park (adjacent to P.S. 17), we saw many Greek statues and both the American and Greek national flags. Astoria is known to be a prominently Greek neighborhood, and this shows just that. However, there were also many murals painted on the walls of the school, showing maps of the world and flags of different countries. As a result, diversity seemed to be a common theme of the park and the neighboring area of the school, which I thought was pretty neat.
Overall, our first trip in the neighborhood was relatively quiet. Of course, there were the sounds of trains passing by, as the terminal stops of the N and Q trains are located in Astoria. When we first arrived in Astoria, we also heard contemporary pop music from a neighborhood market. The sounds we heard were mainly cars passing by, which were much louder towards the end of our trip when we reached the Grand Central Parkway, where there was heavier traffic. We also sometimes heard phone conversations of people passing by, which were in different languages, including Arabic and Russian. This relates back to Astoria being a very diverse neighborhood.
The smells we detected changed as we wandered from place to place in the neighborhood. When we first got off the train and walked underneath the train passage, the smells from halal carts were very distinct, but that changed as we progressed into the areas with more businesses. In Athens Square Park, we smelled like something was being grilled, which seemed like a mix between halal meats and barbecue (to me at least). After we left the park, we wandered the streets with businesses once again, and we smelled the laundry from a couple taking their laundry to a laundromat across the street.
