The Unisphere, which we've already seen a few times, was the centerpiece of the 1964-65 World's Fair here at Flushing Meadows. A nearby plaque reads:
UNISPHERE
Dedicated to man's aspirations toward Peace through mutual understanding
and symbolizing his achievements in an expanding universe
Built and Presented by
United States Steel Corporation
to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, April 22, 1964
Made of Stainless Steel, the Unisphere is 140' high, 120' in diameter and weighs 700,000 pounds
This column, dating back to 120 AD, was originally part of the Roman Temple of Artemis* in the ancient city of Gerasa (today's Jerash, Jordan), and it was given to NYC by Jordan's King Hussein to commemorate his country's participation in the 1964-65 World's Fair. Standing next to the column during the fair was the Jordanian pavilion, notable for its undulating architecture, its exhibition of a Dead Sea Scroll, and its controversial anti-Israel mural. (Speaking of the 1964-65 World's Fair, that's the Unisphere in the background of this shot.) As far as I know, there's only one man-made outdoor object in the city that predates this column: the much older Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park.
* According to the inscription on a nearby stone tablet, the columns of the temple are known, intriguingly, as the Whispering Columns of Jerash. As cool as that name sounds, however, I can't find a convincing account of what it means, or even any convincing evidence that it's actually a common name for the columns. (Most mentions of it on the web have to do with this column in Flushing Meadows rather than the remaining ones in Jordan, raising the interesting possibility that the aforementioned tablet itself might be the source of the name.)
The most popular explanation for the name — found, among other places, on a New York Public Library blog — is that it refers to the whispering gallery effect created by the geometry of the temple, but that sounds suspicious to me. I don't understand how an open area of columns in a rectangular temple could form a whispering gallery. There is, however, an amphitheater in Jerash with this acoustical property. I wonder if the temple and the amphitheater have simply become conflated over time, at least in the mind of the person who wrote the text for the tablet here in the park.
Another possibility is that "whispering" describes "the sounds of the wind rustling among" the columns. The columns apparently sway a bit in the wind — which this blog post refers to as whispering — so perhaps this explanation holds some water. Or maybe it's all baloney. Who knows?
Standing 43 feet tall, this recently restored sculpture from the 1964-65 World's Fair is one of the largest works of art in the city's parks. While it may be a hit with your average parkgoing ignoramus (like me), it's not exactly beloved in the art world. A few days after the fair opened, the NY Times's sharp-tongued art critic John Canaday wrote:
And the most lamentable monster [of all the fair's artworks], making Walt Disney look like Leonardo da Vinci, is Donald [De] Lue's "The Rocket Thrower," a bronze muscle man rising 45 ridiculous feet into the air on the main axis.Ouch!
Since "The Rocket Thrower" is an absurdity that might be a satire of the kind of sculpture already discredited at the time of the 1939 fair, we might get it out of the way first by describing it as warmed‐over pseudo‐Carl Milles and left‐over semi‐Lee [Lawrie]. But to get it out of the way physically is going to be impossible, since it was commissioned as a permanent disfigurement to Flushing Meadow Park, one of the fair's residual contributions to culture.
If the jealous heavens do not level "The Rocket Thrower" with a bolt of lightning, a solution would be for some public-spirited citizen to pay for melting it down and putting it back in place. Whatever the shape of the resultant lump, it would be better than the shape the thing is in now.
During the 1939-40 World's Fair here in Flushing Meadows, this was the site of the Lagoon of Nations, which was basically an enclosed pool built on the Flushing River (aerial views from 1938 and 1940). The lagoon contained a massive fountain and featured a spectacular nightly show of water, flames, fireworks, light, and music (video) that was described by the president of the fair as "a Niagara plus a Vesuvius". For the 1964-65 World's Fair, the adjacent sections of the river were buried to create more exhibition space, and what had been the Lagoon of Nations was expanded into the Pool of Industry. The round structure inside the pool, above, was part of the Fountain of the Planets, which was billed as the world's largest fountain. Like its predecessor from the 1939-40 fair, the fountain put on a dazzling show each night, its towering jets of water reaching as high as 150 feet.
Sometime around the early 1990s, during his reign as parks commissioner, the eternally wacky Henry Stern decided to change the name of the defunct Fountain of the Planets to "Fountain of the Planet of the Apes". About a year later, someone — this guy claims it was him — complained about the name change to the Queens borough president, and the original name was restored. Mr. Stern then turned his sights on two smaller pools in the park. He named one of them "Fountain of the Planet of the Apes" (photo) and the other "Fountain of the Grapes of Wrath" (long mislabeled on some official park maps as the even zanier "Fountain of the Planet of the Grapes of Wrath", an error mentioned, weirdly enough, in this young-adult novel). According to Mr. Stern: "We thought since we were paying tribute to a motion picture with an animal title, we should pay tribute to a motion picture with a vegetable title." Sounds reasonable to me!
Over the past decade or so, the Pool of Industry — much maligned these days as a stagnant, smelly garbage receptacle (though it seemed perfectly pleasant when I walked by) — has faced a few different threats to its survival. There have been proposals made to replace it with a whitewater slalom course for the 2012 Summer Olympics (which NYC was vying to host), a football stadium for the New York Jets, and, most recently, a soccer stadium for NYC's new MLS team. Those plans are all off the table now, but a long-range Parks Department plan from 2008 that involves turning the pool into a grassy "waterfront festival site" could still be in the works, I suppose.
This is one of two extremely tall flagpoles, relics from the 1939-40 World's Fair, standing beside the Pool of Industry. Atop each of the poles is an Art Deco eagle finial. It's long been rumored that the poles and the eagles came from Nazi Germany, which had at one point been planning to participate in the fair but later withdrew. According to an NY Times article from 1961 about the burying of a portion of the Flushing River for the upcoming 1964-65 World's Fair (the final article on this page):
The only [nearby] sign of the last World's Fair more than twenty years ago was a pair of gigantic flagpoles . . . They were topped by eagles of the Third Reich. The swastikas had been removed.The eagles are actually American eagles sculpted for the fair by Robert Foster, however. The apocryphal story about the Nazis is probably based on the similar appearance of the eagles and the Nazi German Reichsadler, although many American eagles of that era looked pretty much the same as well.
This statue of George Washington, a longtime Freemason who served as the first Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22 in Alexandria, Virginia, is a pseudo-remnant of the 1964-65 World's Fair. The original version of the statue was created in 1959 by Donald De Lue (who also sculpted the Rocket Thrower) for the Grand Lodge of Louisiana. A plaster copy with a faux patina was put on display here in Flushing Meadows at the Masonic Brotherhood Center during the fair. This bronze replica was then commissioned for permanent display in the park and was dedicated on June 3, 1967, the date the park was handed back to the city from the World's Fair Corporation. (There are now several other copies on display around the country as well.) As part of a park renovation in 1999, cherry trees were planted around the statue; I'd imagine it's no coincidence that this playful historical allusion dates to Henry Stern's tenure as parks commissioner.
This snakehead warning sign is posted on the Flushing River downstream of Meadow Lake. The connected Meadow and Willow Lakes in Flushing Meadows are home to what is believed to be the only established population of snakeheads in the city, although a couple of the invasive fish have been spotted in Central Park's Harlem Meer as well.
This is the Korean version of the snakehead sign. (Note the enormous twin flagpoles in the background.)
the Pool of Industry. That's the home of the Mets in the background.
From the February 29, 2008 NY Times:
In an era of private grandeur, New York City has built a temple for the public in Queens: the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Natatorium and Ice Rink — it does not even have a corporate name — which is to open on Friday.Designed to be the water polo venue in NYC's failed bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, this $66.3 million, 110,000-square-foot facility — with its swooping cable-stayed roof spanning an Olympic-size pool and an NHL-standard rink — was the largest and most expensive recreation building ever constructed in a city park at the time it opened (though not anymore).
Here at the Queens Botanical Garden, there's no sign explaining what this statue is or who sculpted it. A garden employee told me its identity is kind of a mystery. He said the most common belief is that it's Icarus, but I think it looks like St. Michael. (The garden employee said he'd heard that theory as well.) Zoom out and you can see where the Satan-slaying instrument in his right hand would have been. If it is indeed St. Michael, this would be the second time we've seen the archangel stripped of his weapon.
The little knot of southwestern Flushing that Kevin Walsh refers to as "The Haight" is home to at least four sellers of the ubiquitous stainless steel fencing and railing known (to some) as Queens chrome.
It's "for the party", a guy on the street told me.
This house seems very oddly situated today, pushed way back into the interior of the block and turned at an angle relative to its neighbors. Compare aerial images from 2012 and 1924, however, and it all starts to makes sense.
This little city park consists of some trees, a few benches, a flagpole, and this nameless, inscriptionless stone cross.
This catering hall appears to be equipped with its own poultry slaughterhouse.
The Van Wyck Expressway and, above it, the AirTrain
What appears to have been a little-used bulletin board for the Teens At Parks program here at Baisley Pond Park has been transformed into a memorial for D'aja (Asia) Robinson, a 14-year-old girl who was killed in 2013 when the bus she was riding was fired upon and she was struck in the head by a bullet apparently intended for someone else.
How did this little park near JFK Airport get its name? Well, if an NYC park has a strange name, there's a good chance that Henry Stern is the man who thought it up. For some time during Mr. Stern's reign as city parks commissioner (which ended in early 2002), the hotel in the background of this photo was a Holiday Inn, and there was a Hilton two blocks away. I'd guess that Mr. Stern just combined the names of the two nearby hotels and tacked on "Gardens" at the end for good measure.
It so happens that the former Holiday Inn (after first being rebranded as the International JFK Airport Hotel) became a Hilton in February 2012, but I doubt that had anything to do with how the park got its name, as Mr. Stern was no longer commissioner at that point. (It's hard to tell for sure in this Street View image, but it looks like the park already had a "Hilton Holiday Gardens" sign in 2007, when the hotel was still a Holiday Inn.) There's also now a Hilton Garden Inn located about half a mile away, but I think that's just a coincidence as well: the building was constructed between 2003 and 2005, after Mr. Stern's tenure.
At right, although it's hard to see in this photo, is a pair of dueling Queens chrome dealers. A look at their storefronts reveals an impressive array of ornamentation options on display.
Now moored in Anable Basin, this boat once served as a Prudence Island ferry in Rhode Island. Plaxall purchased the vessel a couple of years ago with the idea of turning it into a floating beer garden, but that plan has yet to come to fruition.
as seen from Anable Basin. Just to the right of the slant-roofed Citigroup Center is 432 Park Avenue, which was topped out in October and is now the world's tallest residential building (though not for long). It also has the highest roof of any building in NYC and is considered the city's second-tallest building altogether (though, again, not for long). You can see spectacular photos from the roof and from one of the apartments here.
The old Pepsi bottling plant on the Long Island City waterfront is gone, replaced by a swarm of glassy high-rise apartment towers, but its classic sign remains as a charming reminder (and example) of PepsiCo's tireless efforts in furthering our nation's obesity epidemic.
According to the MTA, this Long Island Rail Road station is "one of the busiest rail hubs in the nation. . . . Trains from 10 of the LIRR's 11 branches travel through Jamaica each day with weekday ridership exceeding 200,000 customers." The station is also the terminus of one of the two JFK AirTrain lines.
Sean Bell Way memorializes the unarmed man killed behind the wheel in a barrage of 50 bullets fired by undercover NYPD officers in 2006, shortly after leaving his bachelor party in the early morning of what would have been his wedding day. The officers said they believed someone in the car had a gun, and they opened fire on the vehicle after an intoxicated Mr. Bell drove it into an unmarked police van and struck one of the officers on the leg. You can read more about the controversial incident and its aftermath here (officers acquitted), here (financial settlement from the city), and here (one officer fired and others forced to resign).
What's That Thing In The Sidewalk?
We actually have two things this time, here on 109th Avenue near 143rd Street in Jamaica: the little granite pillar in the foreground and a similar but shorter nub of granite surrounded by a blob of asphalt in the background (close-up). My best guess is that these stones were set here sometime in the 1910s or early 1920s to mark the property line when this section of 109th Avenue was built through a then-undeveloped piece of land that once belonged to the Van Siclen (or Sicklen) family. Near the bottom left corner of this 1909 map, you can see the property, labeled "A. Van Sicklen", before it was divided up by streets. By 1924, as this aerial image shows, the streets had been built, but the land was still undeveloped; the only house standing on the block pictured above at that time was an old Van Siclen dwelling (which still exists, as we'll see later in the day).
Clockwise from left: Sojourner Truth (I think), James Brown, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln.
Peacocks (close-up), security cameras, and the Great Seal of the United States (close-up; the seal can be found at least three other times on the property). This is the third bootlegged version of the seal we've seen so far; here are the other two.
Most of NYC's sewers are combined sewers, meaning they collect both sewage from buildings and stormwater runoff from the streets in a single pipe and carry it all to a wastewater treatment plant. During times of significant rainfall or snowmelt, however, the increased volume of runoff entering the sewer can exceed the capacity of the system. In order to prevent a backup, the excess (including untreated sewage) is dumped directly into area waterways.
Some areas of the city, however, like almost all of southeastern Queens, have two separate sewer systems: one that carries sewage from buildings to a treatment plant and one that channels stormwater runoff directly to a local waterway. This prevents heavy volumes of runoff from overloading the treatment system and causing sewage overflows, but it also means that any pollutants in the runoff will be discharged into the city's waterways without treatment. Hence the warning on the storm drain above, which I assume was painted pink to call further attention to its message. (Other nearby storm drains were painted bright colors as well. Also, if you're wondering what the green and white dots are, here's your answer.)
