Queens Noir

Introduction Queens has attitude

Queens is New York City’s biggest borough, with the most parks and cemeteries, both major airports, Shea Stadium, the city’s only racetrack, and 150 languages spoken by more foreign-born residents than live anywhere else in the U.S. No wonder Queens has attitude. And plenty of noir to go around. That’s the premise of Queens Noir. I chose these nineteen authors for their solid connections to the borough, not to mention their skewed worldviews. This introduction is organized as a tour of the neighborhoods. It begins at the point where a traveler from Manhattan touches down in Queens.

Leave Manhattan (a.k.a., New York City to Outlanders) and drive over the Queensboro Bridge (a.k.a., the 59th Street Bridge) that spans the East River. Take the outer roadbed; on your descent, mark the Citicorp Building (Queens’ only skyscraper) looming on your right; then, close in, the Silvercup Studios sign big and in your face as you touch down in Long Island City. Overhead is the rotting steel skeleton of beams and girders that support the elevated tracks for the N, W, and 7 subway lines, all converging at the Queensboro Plaza station. The 7 line is sometimes called the Orient Express: Of the 2.2 million souls in Queens, forty-eight percent are foreign-born, the majority Asian.

Look around this commercial hub. Seedy Queens Central. Note City Scapes and the other two “gentlemen’s clubs” within three blocks. At night, the strip joints are lit in neon; prostitutes work the johns on Queens Plaza South and across the roadway on Queens Plaza North; all-night donut shops give sustenance; the bus from the Rikers Island jails disgorges discharged inmates at the bus stop at 3 a.m. every weekday. Yet Queens politicians are talking a bright future for Queensboro Plaza, involving $1.2 billion to be invested in development here and on the Long Island City waterfront across the river from Manhattan. And Silvercup — formerly a baker of bread, now a purveyor of illusions — is leading the pack. Here, in Queens Noir, you can visit the movie lots and TV studios with actress-writer Kim Sykes’s Josephine, a security guard in “Arrivederci, Aldo.”

Continue up Queens Plaza South till it intersects with Queens Plaza, Northern Boulevard, and Jackson Avenue. As you turn right onto Jackson, catch in your rearview mirror the clock-face tower of the Bridge Plaza Tech Center, previously named the Brewster Building — built in 1910 to make horse-drawn carriages — looming above and behind the elevated train tracks (it’s our cover photo). Proceed a ways down the avenue to the core of old Long Island City with its fine Italian-American restaurants, wood-frame aluminum-sided homes, and factories chockablock with the ateliers of the arrivistes. Make a left onto the Pulaski drawbridge over the Newtown Creek into Polish Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Take a left at the foot of the bridge onto Greenpoint Avenue, then you’re riding alongside the creek but it’s hidden from view by the huge wastewater treatment plant, which may or may not be making a difference. Note the stink. (Greenpoint has always stunk.) Continue over the Greenpoint Avenue drawbridge — a hop, skip, and a jump — into Blissville, Queens.

Blissville is a four-square-block neighborhood bounded by Van Dam Street to the west, the Long Island Expressway to the north and east, and First Calvary Cemetery to the south. First Calvary was opened by St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1846 to take in the poor Irish who had become too many to be laid down in Manhattan. “There are more dead in Queens than alive.” (This classically noir line is Ellen Freudenheim’s in her fine guidebook, Queens — told me things I didn’t know and reminded me of what I’d forgotten.) Having spent my first forty-four years across the waters in Greenpoint and having worked one summer digging graves in First Calvary (a much sought-after position), I was led to write my story in this volume about the ghosts that can haunt even a very young life, shadowed by the high stone walls of First Calvary.

Take Greenpoint Avenue east through small-town Sunnyside till it becomes Roosevelt Avenue, and continue on, with the 7 train overhead on the elevated tracks. Roosevelt Avenue is a main east-west road that passes through the heart of Woodside, Jackson Heights, and Corona — Queens’ version of the Casbah. Tibetans, Irish, Mexicans, Filipinos, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Koreans, Indians, Bangladeshis hawk food, clothing, jewelry, appliances, phone cards, forged or stolen drivers’ licenses, phony Social Security cards — from storefronts, pushcarts, stalls, alleyways, doorways, street corners. The denizens of the Casbah, and the 100,000 bill-paying customers of Con Edison in Astoria, Woodside, Sunnyside, and Long Island City were left in the dark when the Con Ed generators blew on July 17, 2006 during a heat wave. The blackout lasted ten days. Author Liz Martínez records the terrible consequences for one compulsive shopper in “Lights Out for Frankie.”

Detour to the north on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) to nearby Astoria and Ditmars: the Greek lands. Other settlers include Egyptians, Italians, Bangladeshis, Bosnians, and a mélange of artists and young people fleeing Manhattan rents. The Kaufman Astoria Studios at 36th Street and Thirty-Fourth Avenue have been making movies for ninety years. They were busy in the late 1920s while one block away the Irish were taking over the bars from the Germans who had preceded them. In “Only the Strong Survive,” Mary Byrne spins an old Irish morality tale with more twists and turns than an Irish country road. Moral: Bar owner is a perilous profession.

The neighborhood jewel of Ditmars is Astoria Park and its landmark pool that lets in 3,000 on a summer’s day. The park sits on the shore under the Triborough Bridge and along the Hell Gate channel, the most turbulent and deepest water in the New York Harbor. In “Last Stop, Ditmars,” Tori Carrington has situated the Acropolis Diner at the intersection of Ditmars Boulevard and 31st Street underneath the last stop on the N line. It’s a small domestic Greek tragedy: Think Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

Hop back on the BQE at Astoria Boulevard and then get off at Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street. You’re now in Jackson Heights, in the epicenter of Little India. Visit the Jackson Diner for a masala dosa, check out the gold emporiums, pick up the latest Bollywood flick at the video store. In Shailly Agnihotri’s droll tale, “Avoid Agony,” you can walk in the footsteps of Raj Kumar, who runs the only astrological readings/matrimonial investigations agency on the street. Raj, from his office above a sari shop, looks to the heavens for direction while trolling for prey on the Internet.

Continue up Roosevelt to Junction Boulevard and you cross into Corona: Colombians, Argentinians, Brazilians, Koreans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians pack the streets and the stores; the predominant sounds are dialects of Spanish and Portugese. Corona is on the doorstep of Shea Stadium, a stop or two away on the 7. K.j.a.Wishnia’s female P.I., Filomena Buscarsela, is tight with her Ecuadorian neighbors. The neighborhood is awash in Mets fever, as well as diluted antibiotics peddled from local farmacias and botánicas that have caused a boy’s death. Filomena, tracking their source, is on everybody’s case in “Viernes Loco.”

Shea Stadium is located in Flushing Meadows — Corona Park, site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. Joe Guglielmelli’s protagonist is seemingly just another subway passenger en route to a game, who falls into conversation with a Boston Red Sox fan. You never heard so much baseball talk in your life as in “Buckner’s Error”... until the final inning.

Ride the 7 for one more stop and it’s the end of the line at Roosevelt Avenue/Main Street. Main Street is packed all the way up to Kissena Boulevard with peddlers, fish markets, phone stores, fast-food shops — all the signs in Chinese characters. More Chinese live in Flushing than in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Author Victoria Eng, who knows the turf, takes us off-street to Bowne Park, a tiny oasis in a sea of commerce, for a coming-of-age story. A bad move in the park, however, and you might not get any older.

Bayside and College Point are middle- to upper-class neighborhoods in northeast Queens, off the Cross Island Parkway. In “Under the Throgs Neck Bridge,” Denis Hamill’s two jogging characters cover a lot of Bayside landscape. One, however, is unaware that it’s a race to the death.

College Point sits across Flushing Bay from LaGuardia Airport. You know you live in Queens if you are airplane-conscious: There’s always a flight path directly over your house. But that’s not police officer Jill Kelly’s problem; hers is an itchy trigger-finger. In “Crazy Jill Saves the Slinky,” Stephen Solomita spins an Irish domestic drama where family ties run deep — deep as a grave.

Take the Whitestone Expressway to the Grand Central Parkway south, exit at Queens Boulevard. You’re in Kew Gardens, the seat of political power in the borough. On your right is the Queens Criminal Courts building, which appears to have a piece of a flying saucer buried in its face, a silvery metallic canopy over the entrance, reminiscent of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not a surprise: Both the movie and the building are from the 1950s. Keep heading west on Queens Boulevard — a twelve-laner so hard to cross even with the light that it’s called the “Boulevard of Death” — to Forest Hills and Rego Park, high-income and alike as two peas in a pod. Typical of both these old communities is block after block of high-rise co-op and condo buildings lining both sides of the boulevard. Jews have predominated here for decades. Recent immigration has added Russian, Israeli, Middle Eastern, and Bukharan flavors. Alan Gordon opts for the traditional in “Bottom of the Sixth,” setting a tale of the Hasidim on a Little League baseball field in Rego Park. Batter up! Watch out for flying lead!

Megan Abbott returns to yesteryear, the 1970s, in “Hollywood Lanes,” set in a venerable bowling alley. The building still stands on Queens Boulevard and Sixty-Seventh Avenue — vacant like a haunted house harboring the violent passions that erupted therein on a summer’s night.

Take the Van Wyck Expressway south, exit at Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill. Before World War II, the Hill was middle-class comfortable, and its historic district is still intact with 1,000 Victorian homes. These days, the area is the center of the city’s Guyanese immigration, also home to Hindus, Sikhs, Pakistanis, and West Indians. Jillian Abbott keys us in to the emotional life and ultimate fate of a misfit al-Qaeda mole in “Jihad Sucks; or, The Conversion of the Jews.”

Take Atlantic Avenue east to the Jamaica neighborhood, with the largest African-American community in the city. It’s also the destination-of-choice of Filipinos. West Indians, Chinese, and Salvadorans also abound. Belinda Farley sets her story amidst a law-abiding Haitian family in their modest dwelling on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard and 108th Avenue in the heart of Jamaica. “The Investigation” has its roots in the “locked room” mystery.

Move south on Guy R. Brewer to Baisley Pond Park in South Jamaica, where playground basketball is king, where Glenville Lovell’s second-generation West Indian gangsta has an out-of-body experience.

Aqueduct Racetrack is due south. You can get there by the A train or drive along Rockaway Parkway. It’s 113 years old, though it has fallen on hard times; attendance is in the toilet. The real estate jackals are salivating while the governor sings that old song: Urban Renewal. But Maggie Estep (the smartest horsewoman on the planet) celebrates the breed in “Alice Fantastic,” a twisty tale of Fatal Attraction among the Usual Suspects in the clubhouse.

Head south on the Van Wyck to the end: John F. Kennedy Airport. It’s huge. Playing against the grain, Patricia King (a globe-trotter herself) takes us into the mind of an ordinary woman as she deplanes and makes her way through the terminal to collect her bags. The unexpected intervenes in “Baggage Claim,” and suddenly you’re in The Twilight Zone.

Last stop: the Rockaways, the southernmost point in Queens, a ten-mile peninsula flush against the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of beach. In 1993, a ship loaded with smuggled Chinese foundered off the coast here. A few made it to shore. “Golden Venture” is the story of one of them — well, not exactly. This is novelist Jill Eisenstadt’s comical riff on what might have happened later.

Queens! — this sprawling Babel — an ethnic stew best sampled by dipping into the stories up ahead. You can almost taste ’em...

Robert Knightly

Queens, New York City

November 2007