54-46, that's my number: the Queens thread

2 or more bedrooms

hurting are u hinting at something

These areas don't have "brooklyness", which I define as....

No bars that aren't irish pubs or mexican sports bars.

No record stores or book stores.

Not many traditional brunch places.

It's worth noting that I have a car and go to Brooklyn several times a week. Sometimes several times a day. If I was 25 and single and had no car, I'd probably still be in Boerum Hill. Or living off Cortelyou St. in Ditmas Park which has way less to offer than queens, but is still hipper.

But it's not hard to get to Brooklyn without a car. You can bike easily. Or take the 7 to the G.

And there's 1 bus that goes from sunnyside to greenpoint but they recently cut back service to no weekends or late nights.

But yeah, I'd say most people who choose queens do it because or end up feeling that it's preferable to "brooklyn-ness", either because they don't need it, they're better then it, or they're jealous of it. Or a little of all three.

yeah green space would be my #1 drawback - like when I go jogging I have some paths set out, but it's def not the same as running in central/prospect etc. flushing meadows is a super interesting place but it never feels like a park.

other possible downsides:
- the bars are all irish or spanish
- generally hard to convince manhattan/brooklyn people to visit.

(xp)

I like brooklyn and we spend a lot of time there, my #1 reason for not wanting to live there is that the western queens -> midtown commute is way better than the brooklyn -> midtown commute.

I don't think 'not many traditional brunch places' is true dan! tons of good brunch, quaint/la flor/de mole/diners everywhere/lots of stuff in astoria

I disagree. I want eggs benedict! Quaint is the only traditional brunch. La Flor is awesome, I love the quesadilla for brunch, but the other places are just breakfast. It's a subtle difference but a signifier of sorts. But brooklyn is filled with these great restaurants with awesome brunches. M Wells is great in LIC but Astoria, not so much. Sparrow does a nice brunch. I tried Locale and it was horrible. Arepas Cafe does brunch, which is good. But when I lived in brooklyn, every other storefront was a french bistro serving good brunch. I know most of those suck now, but think about the non-diner brunch options in Fort Greene, Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

On a sunday morning if I want eggs benedict and a bloody mary, Quaint is my only option. And I can't do that on a saturday because they don't serve brunch on saturday. WHY?

regarding moving here...things to note when searching.

Sunnyside is split into two parts, south side is cheaper, mostly latino food but a mix of residents and pretty pleasant. North side has the landmarked gardens and is more expensive and quite beautiful.

Woodside is a confusing mess. Technically the bottom of the south part of sunnyside IS woodside. Then there's parts like where I am which borders sunnyside. From here you can follow roosevelt until you hit Jackson Heights. It gets uglier the further east you go, but it's not a beautiful neighborhood to being with! Further south in woodside you're near Queens Blvd, which isn't great. Further north you cross Broadway and Northern and there's a whole part of Woodside that's like Astoria East. You're not near the 7 or all the good stuff, you're just near Northern Blvd, which is kinda lame. The closer you are to Roosevelt and/or Sunnyside, the better.

Jackson Heights is funny because it starts really dense in little india but the further east and north you go, you get these bigger nicer apartments which has become a common place for white people expecting children to move. The buildings are great but at some point, again you're too close to Northern and too far from the good food and the express trains and all of that.

Just some things to think about.

Even if you don't live on this street:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12575421@N08/4808629210/

it's nice to walk down it on your way home from dinner.

I was actually hoping to move to north sunnyside, cause it's great. but in retrospect south sunnyside can be a better place for day-to-day reasons, I'm a block from the 24 hr cvs and 2 blocks from 3 quite decent grocery stores. this affects me more than pretty buildings!

some storenames actually conform to the ridiculous neighborhood boundaries, like some of the south sunnyside 'technically woodside' shops have woodside in their name. I think of everything south of qb as sunnyside and everything on skillman as sunnyside.

likewise everything north of northern is astoria as far as I'm concerned

Right, but if you look for Woodside real estate you'll find tons of ads for Blvd Gardens, this huge old development that is very far from anything you'd consider Woodside.

I agree, I think living north of QB would be nice but it's more expensive. And you're within blocks.

Queens BLVD is so weird (for those who don't know, down there it's a major commercial strip, when sunnyside turns into woodside it becomes more of a highway even though there are still shops on either side all the way out through eastern queens. It's a shame because I was walking along the northside of QB the other day and noticed all these empty storefronts. There's so much potential there, if only something would open up that wasn't another irish pub.

Have you been to PJ Horgans? Really charming little place. Some chowhounders say they have a better burger than Donovans. When we moved here we were excited but there's a lot of misfires down there. Yeti of Heizen, the nepalese/japanese place gave us some really questionable stuff.

Both Turkish Grill and Mangal Kabab are good. For the money, Mangal Kabab is GREAT. And Tangra is HILARIOUS. Decent Indo-Chinese food, but the decor has to be seen.

Public space is so scarce that any semi-public piece of open asphalt is referred to as "green space." In fact, Hurting, you can help preserve what little we have now http://growapark.org so that Hurting, Jr. will have a place to play in a few years.

part of the reason there are so many empty storefronts is the rent for queens blvd is so high - have been reading up on this actually. some people think it's cause the landlords have to pay for the business improvement district which covers that particular area and puts up the 'welcome to sunnyside' signs etc. - OTOH they might just be greedy building owners hoping for more starbucks-type businesses. but yeah, it seems to come down to rent.

the girl like yeti, still haven't been to turkish or mangal. there are some new pizza places in the area though, sunnyside pizza on qb and something else just opened up on greenpoint (forgot the name...lenny's?). anyway sunnyside pizza's grandma pie is good, better than anything in woodside I think, haven't tried anything else. 'it's hard to find good pizza' is another downside, hurting.

are any of you guys *from* queens? (not a judgment thing, i am not from here either)

wow I had read about the travers park thing in passing but didn't know that much progress had been made...feel like the play street got a lot more media attention

xp haha no I'm from socal

I'm from new jersey so I deserve extra outer borough cred!

are any of you guys *from* queens?

what part'd you grow up in james?

For pizza we drive and pick up from rosa's in maspeth. Also go to nicks in forest hills. There's also a charming/greasy place across the street from kew gardens cinema we get a slice at before seeing "indie" movies

Bayside. After college lived in Manhattan for two years, then lived in Brooklyn for eons, then moved to JH four years ago.

I adore the kew gardens theater, probably my favorite place to see movies

tbh, it still irritates me a little when I hear certain neighborhood boosters go on about their favorite strawman "the people from Park Slope" but I haven't heard that in a while.

strawpeople

bayside seems surprisingly urban along bell...I always had thought it was suburbs-suburbs before I visited. has it changed over your lifetime?

also am immune to the charms and profundities of certain outer borough sages.
(xp)

no it was always like that. Different stores, less restaurants but it didn't get built up any more than it was. Maybe since W.C. Fields time.

how do you feel about the changes to yr borough? (many xps to james r)

i now live in carroll gardens, brooklyn. a few years ago someone made a ten-minute film featuring long-time locals. (it still retains some of its recent italian past, not least in my landlady, but nothing of its long-ago irish origins.) one dude in the film was like, 'this is our neighborhood, and we'll fight for it!'

and on the one hand i get it that the neighborhood was close-knit and you knew everyone and it seemed eternal. but on the other hand -- what are you fighting for, and who are you fighting? the old people have largely cashed out and moved to florida -- i assume they're okay. it's still okay here, even if there are more high-end baby strollers.

also am immune to the charms and profundities of certain outer borough sages.

But sage is the only decent place to eat in that immediate area.

what I find interesting about queens is that unlike manhattan and brooklyn, it's actually not recovering lost population. queens today has twice the population of queens in 1940 whereas brooklyn and manhattan have fewer. it's not so much gentrifying as uh...urbanifying. flushing is a pretty interesting case study - there are some super alienated old white people who still live there.

fewer people*

(xp)
Don't like the ugly McMansions that they keep putting up to replace the jolie-laide little half-timber or brick two-families out in the old neighborhood, where my sister still lives. Still get a little surprised when I drive down Northern and see all the Korean shops but don't mind it. Interesting to pass by houses where schoolmates grew up and think that most likely nobody they are related to lives there anymore.

haha sage joke.

good point about urbanifying

I didn't know there was so much disdain for Astoria. You guys are going to give me a complex. Hurting, if you consider Astoria I recommend either living near near broadway and MOMI or living in ditmars where you have Astoria park. My friends who live in Jackson heights like the fact that in Astoria there are more restaurants and bars and new stuff is opening all the time. One friend who lives in Jackson heights doesn't like that it's becoming like park slope.

I would base your decision on what train you need. If you don't work near the 7 you'll have to transfer. I would consider living in sumnyside except the 7 isn't convenient for my work.

I don't mind spending time there, it just has a really different vibe. Some of the residential areas seem like these long samey blocks and it doesn't have the same neighborhood feel as those others. I guess it's a gut feeling mostly.

haha okay disdain is probably the wrong word...maybe part of it is that when you approach astoria from our part of queens you first get the trashy steinway astoria.

good things about astoria:
love the middle eastern part of steinway, especially at night.
astoria park, obv
I like 34th avenue for some reason
brooklyn bagel mmm

otoh the beer garden is surely the single worst place in the borough

for the record, hurting jr is neither confirming nor denying a run for president

no to be clear, there isn't one on the way yet, just planned

otoh the beer garden is surely the single worst place in the borough

― iatee, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 10:37 PM Bookmark

btw, thank you for saying this. Everyone talked it up so much and when I finally visited it I felt like it was such a characterless shithole.

it's such a bizarre environment, like some frat's social chair fucked up and threw the annual kegger in the middle of a queensy neighborhood

ex-fucking-actly!

Which beer garden y'all talking about? 36th Street or 24th Avenue?

24th, bohemian. I haven't been to studio square, cause I heard it appealed to the same crowd.

I had a good time at the beer garden once, went at like noon on a saturday. Had some lunch, drank some beer, played some boggle. There were little or no lines, plenty of tables. By 4 or 5 it was filling up with a rowdy crowd and by the time we left there was a huge line. A big fight broke out that was kind of crazy.

Never been to studio square, seems like it would be a worse crowd.

Went to Dutch Kills for the first time a few weeks ago. It was really crowded around the bar but the waitress service tables up front looked really nice.

are any of you guys *from* queens?

i was born in flushing. and my mom lived in bayside when she was growing up -- graduated from bayside high.

LIC doesn't have many left, it's too expensive to live there and overrun by skyscraper dwelling ex-manhattanites.

the area where i live now (the "arts district" part of north hollywood) reminds me of what LIC was like 10-15 years ago. there's a lot of raw space where people have built practice spaces, recording studios, theatres, art galleries. it's gentrifying (slowly, thanks to the shitty economy), but if you stay away from the condos, the rents are still cheap-ish.

Far as I know that doesn't really exist in LIC. When I first looked to moving there, after my first apt after college in 98 or so, we just couldn't find anything. More recently before moving to Woodside I looked again, not at the skyscraper condos but regular ol' apartments, and they were really expensive...1800 dollars for a 1 bedroom where the kitchen and living room was one room. Another place we looked at was a really nice homey apartment but the owners said they'd come back regularly to use the basement and backyard, neither of which we were allowed in, and they kept talking about all the renovations they did because they thought their kids were going to live there and they started crying. I think the problem is there just isn't a huge stock of housing.

cheaper rent exists next to the queensbridge houses...that's technically LIC (or 'ravenswood') but I can't think of any good reason to live there. I like wandering around LIC, I think it has a really cool aesthetic, 1/3 industrial dirt and grunge + 1/3 historic queens + 1/3 super contemporary buildings. and gantry plaza state park is really laid back and nice. but there really aren't a ton of grocery stores and I feel like one block of restaurants would get boring after a while. I'd imagine the people who live there are probably like dan's aforementioned sunnyside person who lived her life in manhattan.

they're still in the process of building it up considerably, though, and in 20 years it'll be pretty populated.

I've been searching all over Queens and parts of Brooklyn for studio space and have been really frustrated. The areas on the other side of the Ravenswood projects and near the Noguchi have some great deals, but it's pretty far from any trains. Just above Queensborough Plaza there are some deals as well, but you're not very close to the G. Below the plaza closer the G things get expensive.

There's some interesting areas further away from the G that appeal to me because they're closer to my house...the Standard Motor Parts building on Northern and 36th and the area around Laguardia Community College which is still considered LIC but is on the Sunnyside side of the Sunnyside train yard.

Virgie Plain, I'm only laffing at Astoria because I had to hear its praises aaaaaall the time. My ex was SO into the food and stores and being around "other Europeans" and was dying for us to move there so he could buy Vegeta. I dug my feet in because I'm stuck on Bk, obv.

those areas are sorta like walking through a freeway, which is why they're good deals I guess. I'm surprised that lcc students don't get hit by a car on a daily basis.