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.

Roosevelt Island, New York

Roosevelt Island is one of the strangest places in New York and it looks like no other section of town. It's a two-mile long, 600-foot wide island (once called Welfare Island for its many sanitoriums, nursing hospitals and prisons) on the East River between Manhattan and Long Island City and it feels like the lonely outskirts of a post-war downtown, say Houston, San Jose or San Diego. Despite a long history as an institutional center and refuge for the destitute, the island was recreated in the 1970s as a high-density, masterplanned middle class community. Construction continues today.

Cars must enter/exit the island via the Roosevelt Island Bridge (connecting to Queens). Most public parking is confined to a massive garage at the bridge's entrance.

Some 7,500 residents of diverse backgrounds -- Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are all well-represented -- share several high-rise complexes, mostly in the middle and north end of the island. There's just one street, Main Street, that bisects the northern half and entering it feels like walking into a narrow canyon. The architecture ranges from bland concrete slabs to appealing modernist rectangles.

There's heaps of parkland and public space, with a perimeter pathway around the entire island, a decent-sized park occupying the northern point and several smaller parks throughout the residential north and center.

On the northern tip is an attractive and renovated lighthouse, built in 1872 on a tiny island that was later attached to Roosevelt Island.

The island's legacy, though, is its many institutions past and present. After the City bought the island in the first half of the 19th century, it constructed a sprawling penitentiary there, soon followed by a "Municipal Lunatic Asylum." Later came several other medical facilities, including a Smallpox Hospital in 1854. Today, much of that is gone or has been incorporated into the dominant Coler-Goldwater Specialty Care and Nursing Facility (shown below), which houses nearly 2,000 residents with acute rehabilitative needs, both physical and mental.

The Strecker Memorial Laboratory, an 1892 landmark on the southern tip of the island, was once a major medical research facility and has been recently renovated by the MTA for a power conversion substation.

The Blackwell farmhouse, named for the island's first European settlers (who mined local quarries and cultivated fruit orchards), still stands at the foot of Main Street. It was originally constructed around 1800 and restored in 1973.

In truth, Roosevelt Island's most striking sights are its ample views of other places: Manhattan and Queens. Below, a tugboat pulls containers (looking toward East Harlem).

The Queensboro Bridge, which connects 59th Street in Manhattan with Long Island City, Queens.

By far the most prominent landmark on the Queens side of the East River is KeySpan's Ravenswood Power Plant.