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.

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.....

This former theater in Richmond Hill is now a bingo hall and flea market.

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 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".

No shortage of rocks on the inside, either

Not to be confused with Who's Your Daddy? or Who'zTheDaddy?