Home of the Mets!
One of New York's many wonderfully gross industrial waterways
The Institute was founded in 1868 by Conrad Poppenhusen, the rubber baron who developed College Point as a factory town, to provide education and training opportunities to area residents "irrespective of race, creed or religion". The building also housed the town's sheriff, the justice of the peace, a courtroom, a savings bank, a library, and the nation's first free kindergarten, established in 1870.
The caption on the sign didn't tell me much, so I had to climb up on, and balance atop, a bollard to get close enough to scan the QR code (which you can see at the bottom left of the sign in the previous photo) with my phone. Decoded, it read:
8 million swimming,
The traffic rolling like waves,
Watch for undertow.
It turns out that this sign is one of 200+ installed around the city (there are a dozen different haikus), intended to engage pedestrians and encourage safety. I was certainly engaged, although it's unlikely that perching atop a bollard to figure things out made me any safer.
I haven't seen a road like this since North Dakota. I needed to make it to the fence to check this dead-end street off my list; fortunately some weeds growing off to the left provided just enough support to make it over the water.
Midtown skyscrapers to the left; Rikers Island in front; LaGuardia Airport just out of frame to the left
In this park once stood a stone mansion, built in the 1840s, that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia used as his summer City Hall in 1937. The mansion was torn down a couple of years later, and in 1966 the park was renamed for the late Hermon Atkins MacNeil, a sculptor and former resident of College Point whose best-known work is the Standing Liberty quarter.
Built in 1694 in Flushing, it's the oldest house of worship in New York City. The history of the Quakers in Flushing is deeply tied in with the development of religious freedom in America.
