Sunday, April 15, 2007

A road less traveled?

The NY Times tours Jamaica Avenue today:

A Road Not Taken, Much

A road not taken...Did they actually make it all the way to Downtown Jamaica? It's a zoo there!

The residential areas bisected by this artery are middle-class and uniformly unglamorous.

Hey NY Times, kiss Crappy's ass.

Photo from Forgotten-NY.com.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am so glad the Times reports on Queens neighborhoods as if they are places for their readers to turn their noses up at. I hope they continue to do that so that the real middle class will continue to flourish here in Queens.

Anonymous said...

I hate to break it to Anonymous there, but the sad fact is that most Queens neighborhood are fully worthy of receiving the up-turned nose. "Continue to flourish"??? Do you live in the same borough I do? Most Queens neighborhoods are full of dingy, small and ugly homes on tiny lots, with back yards reminiscent of junk yards or trailer homes in West Virginia (QC here is a chronicle of the "crap"iness of much of Queens). Most neighborhoods have no restaurants that aren't pizza, a diner, or fast foodish. There are but a handful of museums or cultural attractions of any kind in the borough. Even the parks in Queens need a facelift to come anywhere near Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

So don't be "so glad" that the Times writes snobbily of Queens. It only means that the REAL middle class, as you put it, will be ignored by the two boroughs that are ACTUALLY flourishing right next door.

Anonymous said...

JK is only looking at the houses he wants to look at. Forest Hills, Rego Park, Middle Village, Bayside, etc are beautiful neighborhoods. Of course each neighborhood has a small amount of eyesore properties, but so do the ones in Brooklyn.

Anonymous said...

There are two boroughs attached to Queens? Oh my God, which is the other one besides Brooklyn? I've missed it my entire life...

Anonymous said...

You definitely don't want the hipsters hitting queens the way they did williamsburg and even bed stuy and bushwick and making the un-affordable.

Anonymous said...

Hey guys, my roots are in West Virginia. Outsiders may have given it a bad image, but that is as close to reality as to say that outsiders made Archie Bunker truly depict Astoria.

It may be poor, but is a place that has a legendary pride in its stubborn independence. They never would accept an outsider treating them like crap.

It is a place of rare beauty whose hills are the oldest mountain chain on earth and a biodiversity second only to the tropics.

Queens? Pride and beauty are not on the top ten list here.

Anonymous said...

Pa-lese about the hipsters. What the clubhouse is bringing in to our communities is making them unlivable.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't anyone think it strange that in an entire NY Times article about Jamaica there wasn't a single mention of the Jamaica Plan's rezoning? In fact, has the NY Times ever written a story about this 368-block rezoning--one of the largest ever undertaken by the Department of City Planning?

Anonymous said...

Well the Manhattan-centric NYT reflects the same looking down at the nose attitute by the Manhattan-centric preservation community.

And if you look at our borough's shameful behavior in the landmarking affair of SSG, we give this go them on a silver platter.

And things will not change until we get new leadership in preservation as well as politics in Queens.

Anonymous said...

Bah......the New York Times is always (as usual) behind the times! They've lost their credibility in my book!

They're on a financial tightrope....having to close all their printing plants and incorporating them in their College Point expanded facility .

It's only a matter of time until this media Dinosaur goes belly up!

Anonymous said...

Julie, I said "next door" not attached. Please read what people write before you lay on the sarcasm.

And yes, Queens has many very nice neighborhoods, but let's not allow Queens pride to blind us to criticism. RP/FH/KG are three out of what, 50 neighborhoods, many many of which need some serious cleaning.

To the guy from WV, sorry about the stereotype. I didn't mean to offend. I was looking for a recognizeable image of junk on the front lawn or strewn across the back yard.

To those who don't want the hipsters coming: A, yes I very very very much DO want them coming. Nostaligia has its place when it comes to retaining that which is good and artistic and of quality in a neighborhood (like a well designed building or a park instead of a parking lot, or a nice restaurant over a fast-food place) but nostaligia can go too far and insisit that everything that wasn't already there should not be there. And I draw the line there.

And finally, if the NYT ever went belly up and left us with only those horrible tabloid rags, I don't knw what I'd do. No newspaper without foreign offices is worth being printed.

Anonymous said...

JK can take his racism and fuck himself. His complete arogance toward poverty is really disgusting. And yes now I'll be yelled at for cursing, but forgive me for believing that the "crapiness" of queens is nothing more than the cosequence of a greater problem. If you turn your nose up at queens then leave, and don't come back. We don't want people like you gentrifying our neighborhoods in the name of "improvement"