Astoria, Queens

Astoria is whole world of its own, a real neighborhood, even though it's really a sprawling collection of several neighborhoods. It excites and bustles like a large provincial capital -- not quite big city but featuring an exotic mix of people and buildings.

Astoria houses a very large and well-known Greek community, but it's also a world of Arabs (particularly Egyptians), Brazilians, Koreans, Bangladeshis, Latin Americans and Italians.

In Astoria's earlier days as a village and industrial suburb, ferries shuttled residents to 92nd Street in Manhattan from what today is Astoria Park. In 1936, Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge appeared on that site, connecting Queens to the Bronx and Manhattan via Wards and Randall's Islands.
For our purposes, we'll divide the neighborhood into two halves bisected by the Triborough Bridge and Grand Central Parkway/Astoria Boulevard: North (Ditmars and Steinway) and South (just plain Astoria, including the original village). We'll begin in the South, which is generally older and richer in its architecture. Neighborhood life centers around a number of colorful commercial streets: Broadway, 30th Avenue, 31st Avenue, 31st Street and Steinway, which is the center of local Egyptian life.

One of the neighborhood's biggest landmarks is the Kaufman Astoria Studios, an active movie studio -- opened in 1920 by Adolph Zuckor -- that's the largest in New York City.

Catholic churches here share ground with Greek Orthodox, Asian Protestant and simple Mosques.

There are also a few mysterious societies.

Residential architecture in this sprawling place is extremely varied. Most buildings date from the 1910s to the '50s, but a smattering of older homes remain and a number of new homes have sprouted in the cracks. Density-wise, the neighborhood has a few odd housing projects and high-rises, tons of attractive 1920s-era apartment buildings and endless expanses of attached or detached single-family homes, often in monotonous formation.

The DeWayt house from 1845 was centered in the original village of Astoria, on 27th Avenue at 12th Street. It's among a small number of surviving Victorian-era buildings.