This nearly windowless, generously lawned mini-fortress looks quite out of place amid the densely packed residences that surround it. I was wondering if it was some kind of telecom building, but a woman on the block said it was a water pumping station. At first, I figured she didn't know what she was talking about: the gravity-fed aqueducts that bring upstate water to NYC do require pumping to reach the city's highest elevations, but this neighborhood (South Ozone Park) is an entirely low-lying area.
I did, however, notice an old Department of Water Supply manhole cover on the property. I thought maybe the building was a gatehouse for accessing the aqueduct distribution system, but then I remembered that this part of Queens actually pumped up groundwater for drinking until fairly recently. Could this building be a pumping station after all? And do the new pipes going into the front yard mean it's being reactivated? To the internet!
It seems that the city does indeed intend to put some of the old Queens wells back into service by 2018, to help compensate for the anticipated 8- to 12-month closure of the Delaware Aqueduct, which currently provides about half of NYC's drinking water and which will be shut down so it can be connected to a new bypass tunnel that will divert the water around a leaky section of the aqueduct that's been hemorrhaging millions of gallons every day for decades. (A few years ago, in preparation for this massive shutdown, the city employed the services of six deep-sea divers, who lived in a helium-filled tank for more than a month while taking 12-hour shifts working inside the aqueduct.)
Residents of southeastern Queens have been pressuring the city and state to reactivate the wells sooner, to draw down the water table and reduce the flooding that has plagued the area in recent years. One pumping station was in fact put back on line last year, but was shut down again in December, much to the chagrin of waterlogged Queensites.
So, in conclusion: Who knows? But at least we got to read about squeaky-voiced aqueduct divers.
UPDATE: I've now seen enough of the old southeastern Queens pumping stations to know that this is indeed one. The architecture and the designs above the windows give it away.
The relatively orderly street grid of South Ozone Park is broken on 120th Street between 133rd and 135th Avenues by this religious-looking building sitting smack in the middle of the road. This presumably means that the structure (or perhaps a predecessor) predates the grid, and was built on this site facing Hawtree Creek Road, the original thoroughfare through the area (I'm standing on a remnant of Hawtree Creek Road taking this photo). Here's a shot of the building from 1922, when it was apparently the Bethel Union Sunday School. I think it still serves a similar function today, if the "I ♥ SUNDAY SCHOOL" bumper sticker on the door in any indication, and I assume it's now affiliated with the newer church (St. James-St. Matthew's Lutheran) two buildings down.
Not to be confused with Who's Your Daddy? or Who'zTheDaddy?
This church is the only one in the world dedicated to St. Benedict Joseph Labre, who, sometime in his early 20s, felt a calling to "abandon his country, his parents, and whatever is flattering in the world to lead a new sort of life, a life most painful, most penitential, not in a wilderness nor in a cloister, but in the midst of the world, devoutly visiting as a pilgrim the famous places of Christian devotion".
Located in Richmond Hill, where the Sikh population numbers 15,000 or more, this is the largest gurdwara in the city. Its previous incarnation, established in 1972 in a converted Methodist church, was the first Sikh temple on the East Coast; it stood on this site until 2002, when it was destroyed by a fire.
This former theater in Richmond Hill is now a bingo hall and flea market.
Above me is the old Richmond Hill station on the LIRR Lower Montauk Branch. Passenger service at Richmond Hill and the four other intermediate stops on this line between Jamaica and Long Island City was canceled in 1998, due to exceptionally low use: two of the stops had only one regular rider per day. Richmond Hill was the only one of the five that even remotely resembled a railroad station, as illustrated by these hard-to-believe photos from the 1990s showing the stops "in all their pathetic glory." Many nearby residents were not aware that the stations existed; apparently, they weren't even marked by signs until 1993. One rider recalls:
I had NO IDEA there was a station there. The first time I used the station, I used it from Patchogue, and then got off at Fresh Pond, and then of course you just follow the stairs and then the maze of a pathway to the street. If you were told to wait there, people would have thought you were nuts, as no one would have expected that to actually be a "station". i couldn't even imagine a woman waiting there alone for a train. It's not a bad neighborhood, but it's so desolate down there, that it would have been an invitation for problems.In recent years, passenger service on the Lower Montauk had fallen to just about the bare minimum: a single train each weekday morning. And now, as of a few months ago, the LIRR has stopped making passenger runs on the line altogether, leaving only freight trains to travel its tracks.
To top it all off, it was extremely fun waiting for trains there at Fresh Pond in the winter....when the days were short, and it was dark by 5:00 (the trains stopped at 5:06 and about 5:30 in the afternoon), it was PITCH black down there, no lighting at all, just the faint glow of street lights on Metropolitan Ave above. Then you heard the horn blasting, and finally out of the darkness a bright light would blind you as your eyes weren't used to light by that point. The train blasted through with it's horn and head light, and it was like satan himself had arrived for you.....
UPDATE: The scene in Goodfellas where a couple of kids discover Johnny Roastbeef and his wife murdered in their new pink Cadillac was filmed beneath the tracks here, about half a block up from where I took this photo. Take a look.
