73rd Street Road Place Avenue?

Photo from Forgotten NY.

The Times ran a piece today detailing the frustration (and delight) Queens’ streets can pose to those unfamiliar with their system of numbering and naming as well as their curvilinear tendencies. The writer relates his first experience of biking from Manhattan to the Queens College campus in Flushing:

I kept expecting to see the Unisphere on the horizon, but instead came upon yet another row of two-family homes and, out of nowhere, Elmhurst Hospital Center. Queens, I was fast discovering, is a patchwork of villages connected by few direct routes, an exasperating procession of avenues, streets, drives and places sharing numbers but not always contiguous … There was no beacon like the Empire State Building to guide me. Street signs indicated neither east nor west, as if the borough were a giant, directionless Möbius strip.

If you think biking is difficult with all those twists, turns, and confusing names, try understanding the bus routes. Alas, The Big Apple reminds us that things were just as confusing in the last century, and highlights a helpful rhyming “topographical poem” from 1926:

In Queens to find locations best —
Avenues, roads and drives run west;
But ways to north or south, ‘tis plain
Are streets or place or even lane;
While even numbers you will meet
Upon the west and south of street.

They’re you go — no more excuses for getting lost.

Explanation of Street Naming (Greater Astoria Historical Society)
Queens Topographical Bureau (Queens Borough President’s Office)
Queens Bus Route Map (MTA)