in the shadow of the A train.

I took today's pictures on an unofficial walk in Queens from Ozone Park to Howard Beach for the filming of this video.

Another garden right beside the elevated tracks of the A train

On the brick wall in the background, you can see the remnants of an old painted ad: the words "Meet me at". And below that is the rounded top of something red, which looks to me like it was part of the original ad, but could also belong to the motley collection of graffiti and graffiti-covering paint that now obscures the rest of the ad (zoom in).

Here's one theory suggested by a simple internet search: The wall was painted by a department store to advertise its in-store Santa Claus. As was the case with these examples, "Meet me at" would have been followed by the name of the store, and the rounded red thing would have been the top of Santa's hat. But would a store really have paid to paint a wall with an ad for a short-lived seasonal attraction? All of the examples I linked to above were little buttons; that seems like a more sensible medium for advertising your Santa Claus.

In case you're wondering, it seems likely that the ad was once fully visible to people here on Liberty Avenue: I'm not sure what year the ad was painted, but a 1951 aerial image shows that the supermarket building in the foreground had not yet been built at that point. The ad would also have been seen by people passing by on the elevated rail line overhead (today's A train), as well as those waiting for the train at the eastern end of the 88th Street station.

The slick-haired, leather-jacketed character leaning against the facade of this building on Cross Bay Boulevard in Ozone Park, Queens, looks an awful lot like one of the figures on display at Steve Campanella's house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Coincidentally or not, Mr. Campanella apparently purchased his statue in Woodhaven, the neighborhood just north of here.

The land for this old community cemetery was donated by the Van Wicklen family around 1681. Part of the burial ground was paved over — buried beneath 149th Street — in the mid-20th century (between 1954 and 1966, as far as I can tell), and almost all of the headstones have vanished. The four stones you see above are the only ones remaining.

This is a view of Shellbank Basin from the public promenade that runs behind the Starbucks on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach.

Perched on the utility line overhead are two wild monk parakeets, also known as Quaker parrots. I've seen many of these birds in Brooklyn and a decent number in the Bronx, but I believe these are the first I've encountered in Queens. In typical fashion, their nest (that big jumble of twigs) is built next to the electrical transformer mounted on the pole.

There are several theories about the origins of New York's wild parakeet colonies, but the most oft-repeated one holds that the birds are descended from imported parakeets that escaped from their shipping crates at JFK Airport. If there's any truth to that, then I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising to find some of the birds making their home here in the JFK-adjacent neighborhood of Howard Beach.

News to me: There was once a native species of parrot in New York State! Extinct for about a hundred years now, the Carolina parakeet was indigenous to much of the eastern and central United States.