Tag Archives: Astoria

Can we stop saying Western Queens?

I’ve been seeing it a lot lately, the term “Western Queens.” And I don’t think that this is one of those instances where I just noticed something that’s always been there, and now I’m seeing it everywhere. No, I think this is a trend happening, that we’re in the very early stages of the creation of a buzzword. And I don’t like it.

What purpose does Western Queens serve? None. It doesn’t serve any purpose. Whenever you see it used on blogs or in conversation, it’s almost always in reference to Astoria or Long Island City. And that’s it, Western Queens. I guess it should be a little more encompassing, right? What about Sunnyside, Woodside, or Jackson Heights among others? I mean, if you look at a map of Queens, those are all definitely western neighborhoods.

I think what happened is that people who moved to Astoria and Long Island City started going around talking about how much they love Queens, how it’s such a great place to live. And then they probably ran into a friend or a coworker that grew up in Queens, but somewhere else, like Bayside, or Jamaica. And they did the whole, “Don’t you just love Queens?” thing, and after about two or three sentences of awkward conversation, it became painfully obvious that they didn’t know anything about Queens, not really, just Astoria and Long Island City. And so, determined not to make the same mistake again, they latched onto the term Western Queens. “Isn’t Western Queens great?”

I just picked up a copy of BORO magazine, it’s the free circular they give out at all of the cool coffee shops and paninierias around here. And on the cover, it just said, “LIC.” Inside, the editor-in-chief wrote his whole introduction, and he kept saying it, over and over again, Western Queens, it’s such a community, what a sense of place.

At my restaurant in midtown, we just started serving Singlecut Pilsner on tap. They make it right here in Astoria. And when the managers told the wait staff about the brewery and how to describe this particular beer, we were encouraged to read a particular script, to say something along the lines of, “It’s local, it’s from right over the bridge in Western Queens.”

Why does it bother me so much? Because I can just hear it, when you say Western Queens, what you’re really trying to say is, Cool Queens. And you really don’t even care about saying the Queens part, it’s the Cool that you’re really going after. It’s fad terminology, like when East Williamsburg was all anybody could talk about around five or so years ago, before everybody started making fun how ridiculous it was, East Williamsburg, just a clever marketing trick to get people to move to Bushwick, and now it doesn’t matter, go ahead and say Bushwick, that’s trendy as hell too.

But at least Bushwick is an actual neighborhood. Western Queens is just dumb. I’m telling you, just keep your ears open. Maybe you’ve never heard it before, but I guarantee that you will, over the course of the next year or so, one of your friends or coworkers is going to casually slip it into conversation, maybe they’ll invite you out for a drink at one of those cool beer gardens in Western Queens.

You know the New York State government actually tried to make a law a while back that would have prevented real estate agents from just making up trendy neighborhood names for random sections of housing across the city. Why? Because it’s just a cheap way to invent bogus prestige, to drive up rent prices in an already inflated market, yes, but it’s also just really lame.

Western Queens just sounds really stupid, and I’m hearing it a lot lately, and I wish that I wasn’t. But what am I going to do, right? I’m just some random guy complaining about an ever-changing city, and I guess that’s pretty lame too.

The ABCs of Astoria, Queens

A is for Astoria is the best place in NYC.

B is for the Bel Aire Diner, the best diner in Astoria, and therefore, in the whole city.

C is for Christos Steakhouse, the greatest steakhouse in the history of steakhouses.

D is for Ditmars, second only to Broadway in being the most awesome thoroughfare in the borough.

E is for the everything bagel that I always get when I go to Brooklyn Bagel on Broadway.

F is for the free can of Coke that I always get when I order a combo meal at Fatima’s Halal Kitchen, the best Chinese food place on planet Earth.

G is for Gleason’s Pub, where one time, my trivia team almost finished third place. (We blew it by wagering too much on the last question.)

H is for the Hellgate Bridge. It’s so fucking cool. And it’s in Astoria.

I is for Icahn Stadium, where I saw the Warped Tour when I was in high school. It’s really close to Astoria. You just have to take the Triboro Bridge and get off before entering Manhattan or the Bronx.

J is for my friend Jim, he lives on 36th Street in between Broadway and 31st Ave. He has this ridiculous setup in his apartment with a gigantic projection screen and an XBOX Kinect. We have so much fun playing video games together. Hey Jim, if you’re reading this, what’s up man? You want to play some DDR later tonight? (If you don’t have plans already, that is.)

K is for Kans, a sports bar on Steinway. It’s OK … just OK.

L is for Loukaniko, some sort of a Greek sausage. They have it all over Astoria. It’s awesome.

M is for Manhattan, currently in a four-way tie for second-best borough in New York City. (A distant second, I might add.)

N is for the N train, which takes you to Astoria.

O is for Omonia, the bakery that made the wedding cake for the box office hit, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

P is for Passion Hair and Nails on Broadway, where they just raised the price of a men’s haircut from ten to twelve dollars. (It’s cool. I still love them.)

Q is for the Q train, which also takes you to Astoria. (Just not late night or on the weekends.)

R is for the R train, which has several Astoria stops. It’s also for the Rite-Aid on Broadway and 21st, which just had a massive renovation, and is now open 24 hours.

S is for Socrates Sculpture Park, where one time I let my dog off his leash, and he started terrorizing some neighborhood kids. A park guy came up to me and was like, “Hey man! Get your dog under control!” and I was like, “What do you mean? I thought this was a leash-free park!” and he was like, “Nah man, not until nine. Either before nine or after nine,” and I was like, “Isn’t it always technically either before nine or after nine?” and then he just got really pissed off.

T is for the taco truck on Broadway and 36th Street. The best tacos in North America.

U is for Uncle George (RIP.)

V is for the V train (RIP.)

W is for the W train (RIP.)

X is for X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I saw at the Regal Theaters on 38th Street in Astoria, the best movie theater in the city.

Y is for Your favorite neighborhood in the city, Astoria.

Z is for Zenon Taverna (I’m not sure if it’s spelled with a Z or an X, but you pronounce it Zenon Taverna.)

You’re not supposed to hang out on the stairs

I was taking the train a couple of weeks ago. Where I live, the subway is aboveground, so if you want to take a ride, you’ve got to walk up these two flights of stairs to get to the platform. And exactly halfway up, I ran into my old friend Greg, he was coming down the opposite direction, man, I hadn’t seen him in probably like five years, maybe longer. We caught each other’s eyes right away and stopped to say hi.

A lot of the time it’s a pain to have to stop and say hello to someone when you’re just trying to go about your day. But this was different, Greg used to be a pretty good friend, at least for me, this wasn’t your typical “hey how’s it going,” I mean, maybe it was a chore for him, but if it was, he was doing a good job of not letting me know it, trying his best to seem genuinely pleased to see me.

But after maybe fifteen seconds of pleasantries, right after we got the “It’s been such a long time!” automatic intro sentences out of the way, but right before we could really get into any specific “Where are you living these days?” advanced conversation points, this MTA employee comes up from behind me and gives us this really curt, “Listen, you guys can’t congregate on the stairs, OK, you’ve got to move.”

And yes, it wasn’t the ideal spot to catch up with an old friend, but it wasn’t super crowded, and we both made sure to move as far to the side of the staircase as possible. People were going around us. I’m very aware of whether or not I’m causing a traffic jam, and this was definitely not at all impeding the flow of foot speed.

So I kind of motioned to the MTA employee, like I didn’t say anything to him directly, but I made eye contact, I nodded, and then I looked back toward Greg with renewed urgency, like, yes, let’s continue what we’re doing here, but let’s maybe speed it up a little bit, because we are on the stairs, we can’t very well stand here for too much longer.

But the MTA guy wouldn’t have it, he wouldn’t even let Greg and me get in another back-and-forth, I was just about to ask what he was up to these days, but this guy shouts, “Look, I can’t let you just hang out here. OK, you either have to up the stairs, or you have to go down the stairs, but you can’t just stand here on the stairs.”

And I instantly got kind of annoyed, like yes, I know that we shouldn’t be standing here, but this is where this conversation happened to take place, OK, it’s not like I was like, hey, Greg, do you want to get together this afternoon to catch up? Yeah, great, meet me at the Broadway stop of the N train, the Northwest staircase, about halfway up.

Also, I resented this guy’s message, like, here, let me spell it out for you, let me give you one of these long detailed overly worded I’m-in-charge ways of communicating to you what could easily be said in three or four words. So I turned around, I looked this guy in the eye and I said, “Thank you,” while trying not to appear visibly pissed off, like I tried to smile, and I hoped to get the message across that, OK man, I hear you, we hear you, but thank you, now please go back to doing whatever else it was that you were doing before you came over here to start vigorously enforcing the no-standing-on-the-staircase rules.

So Greg and I kind of continued talking, but it was only like a word, maybe two words, because the MTA guy in his orange neon MTA worker’s vest was not having it. “Gentlemen,” he interrupted. And now I thought, OK, this guy’s not going to let up, maybe we should move? But where? Was I going to go all the way back down the stairs? Because Greg didn’t look like he was willing to walk all the way back up. What if one of us made that effort and then the conversation fizzled out? What if it turned out to be nothing more than a heavy initial dose of nostalgia before we both realized, wait a second, there’s a reason I haven’t seen this person in years, it’s because whatever it was that we had in common wasn’t strong enough to sustain a lasting friendship?

And this got me even more annoyed, like what the hell man, you can’t just let two people run into each other and say hi? Can’t you just take a hint? OK? I took your hint, right, you don’t want us standing here anymore. Hint taken. Can you now take my hint and leave us the fuck alone? Just for like a minute? How long do you really think we’re going to stand here? Is it that important to you that we move right this second?

And so I turned my attention from Greg toward the MTA guy, I started giving him the business, throwing out stuff like, “Why don’t you just back off, all right?” and more stuff like, “You’re not a cop, OK? You want to call the cops? Call the cops, because the last time I checked, MTA guys don’t really have too much in the way of actual authority.”

Which, I don’t know what I was going for here, it was a pure reaction. If I was thinking that my display of defiance might have somehow bought Greg and me a little more one-on-one time, I was wrong. Because even though this MTA guy might not have had any actual enforcement abilities, he was still wearing that vest, he still had a few non-arresting powers at his disposal.

Like getting-in-my-face powers, asking me if I was aware that threatening an MTA employee was a felony offense. “Who’s threatening? I’m not threatening?” I shot back with my hands in the air.

At this point Greg started heading down the stairs, “All right man, it was great to see you. Let’s catch up soon!” and I thought about going down with him, continuing the conversation at on the sidewalk, but that was it, the goodbye was said. And would our forced continued discussion be required to talk about the sort-of argument I had just engaged in with this total stranger?

Yeah, that conversation was over, I’d probably never see Greg again, not that it really mattered, not really. I was already feeling that nostalgia buzz start to die down somewhat. And then it was just me and the MTA guy, he was just staring at me, sort of smiling, like, ha, there goes your friend. I just turned and headed upstairs, muttering, “Asshole,” under my breath.

“What was that?” he screamed out after me, I guess I muttered it a little louder than I thought. But just as I considered saying something else, I realized, no, I muttered that exactly as loud as I had intended, just loud enough for him to hear me say it, and now I’ll just slip back into the background of the city, paying no attention to this crazy guy in an orange vest yelling up at some other guy already disappearing into a crowd of people waiting for the N train.

A winter walk through Astoria Park

I was taking my dog for a walk through the park last weekend. There was still a ton of snow on the ground, snow that’s become a fixture in my head of what I think of when I imagine the outside world. It hadn’t even snowed in like a week, but there was still so much. Even if it were warm out starting today, and I guarantee there’d still be piles of it everywhere, snow that’s fallen, partially melted, frozen, remelted, all resulting in these giant piles of weird sno-cone like slush.

I kind of got used to seeing the snow mostly confined to the huge piles alongside the sides of the streets. But here in the park it was everywhere. None of the paved paths had been cleared off, and so I kept dancing this way and that, hopping from clean piece of ground to the next, regretting my decision to wear sneakers instead of snow boots.

This winter has been a cold one, and even though I tell myself that I like being outside during the winter, that I enjoy the brisk temperature, I’ve definitely recoiled somewhat. There haven’t been as many outdoor runs as there were last year. And just looking out across Astoria Park, it was giving me the same feeling that I got as a little kid after returning home from a weeklong vacation, everything was familiar, but oddly out of place. It became obvious that feeling that I hadn’t been here in a while.

As I walked along one of the paths, I came across these two parents and their very small children. There was a stroller to the side, so clearly they hadn’t made the little kids walk all the way here. But they were all crouched down around a somewhat clean pile of snow. The little kids had plastic buckets and shovels and it was hard to really describe what they were doing. Is that how little kids play? They just kind of shovel stuff and dump it into buckets?

The whole scene struck as me as crazy, but in a cool way. Like I couldn’t even get myself outside much this winter. But these parents had two kids. That’s got to be a lot more difficult than just forcing yourself to leave the house. You’ve got to get their coats and their boots and make sure that they both go to the bathroom before they leave. And this one kid, the younger one, he definitely had to have been in diapers. What if he decided to pee? Would you have to change him right there in the freezing cold? Or would the diaper freeze against his skin?

And then I’m picturing myself, if I had kids, I’d be standing and watching them just playing with the granular snow. Would I be bored? I mean, I never just go outside and play in the snow. And while there’s that idea that it would be nice to get in touch with my inner child, to go out there and get dirty and make snow castles or whatever, I can’t really see it happening. I’d much rather stay inside on the Internet. But maybe if you have your own kids you like watching them enjoy it, I don’t know.

But then I saw the daughter, she had her bucket overflowing with snow, she threw down the shovel and she grabbed the bucket with both hands. She opened her mouth and slowly brought the bucket up. The mom stopped it from happening, she put her hands on top of the bucket and said, “No. Don’t lick it. OK. No. Don’t.” And the girl put the bucket down and her mom backed off. And then two seconds later that little girl was back at it, she brought it up faster this time, hoping to avoid her mom from stopping her. But no, adults are always faster than little kids, and so I heard that voice as we walked past the family outing now receding in view, “No, honey, don’t eat the snow. OK. We don’t eat the snow. Honey. Baby. OK? No.”

I’m just left with the sounds and images of this world totally foreign to me. What if I have kids and I’m not paying attention and they eat something gross off of the floor? I’ll take them to the hospital after days of violent illness, the doctor will be like, “Did junior here eat anything funny?” And I’ll be like, “Uh … I don’t know.” And the doctor will be like, “Well, it looks like a fair amount of dirt has been ingested. I’ll treat the child while you have a conversation with the social worker about negligence.”

How did we get this far as a species? Why do little kids want to put stuff in their mouths? When is all of this snow going to melt?

30 awesome things to do in Astoria, Queens

1. Hanging out at my friend Bill’s place, drinking beer and playing Call of Duty online multiplayer until like two in the morning.

2. At like two or two-thirty, throwing out the question, “Do you want to get something to eat?” before opening up the Seamless App and realizing that all of the restaurants that you want to buy food from closed at like ten.

3. Remembering, wait a second, Bel Aire diner on 21st Street is open 24 hours. Let’s just order from there.

4. You realize that you really want a burger and fries, but doesn’t diner food always taste a little weird in a take-out container? Not weird, bad necessarily, but not great, not like sitting at the diner, getting a fresh burger. It’s the fries, yeah, they’ve got to be crisp. They can’t sit there steaming in a to-go container, everything gets all soggy. Rhe lettuce and tomato on the burger, that gets soggy too. You guys are really stoned and this food should at least hit some of the right buttons.

5. Bill says, “Let’s just go to the diner. I mean, it’s open all night.” And you’re like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s do it.”

6. And then you sit around for like two more hours, playing some more video games, but your fingers hurt, you’ve lost that video game spark, and you’re just kind of mindlessly moving through the maps, not really making any contribution to the team kill count, passing Bill’s little pipe back and forth.

7. It’s the same with the pot. It’s like, smoke all you want, at this point in the night it’s not doing anything, you’re not getting any higher. It’s just making that metallic taste in the sides of your mouth more pronounced.

8. You’re like, “Hey Bill, weren’t we going to go to the diner?”

9. And at this point, you don’t even want to go anymore. It’s close to four-thirty, the sooner you get to bed, the sooner you can get up tomorrow and start nursing that buzzing hangover already starting to give birth at the sides of your head, the one that’ll insist on you streaming all of your favorite Netflix shows while you lie stunned on the couch, while simultaneously making it impossible to really absorb or digest what’s happening on screen. So while yes, you’ll technically be able to say you watched all of House of Cards season two, you won’t really remember what happened, or who did what, and when everyone talks about it at work, you’ll just try your best not to look confused.

10. But Bill is finally like, “Nah man, we’re going. Let’s go.” And he gets his coat on and you’re like, OK, I guess we’re going.

11. Bel Aire diner is much farther away than you remember, and it’s always pretty depressing walking this west of Broadway past one or two in the morning. That buzz of life and activity that defines your mental definition of Astoria, you question whether it ever existed in the first place as you gaze out at the desolate parking lot on the corner of 21st and Broadway, the Rite Aid, the Post Office. What happened to the White Castle?

12. But you go inside and, seriously, you didn’t expect it to be this crowded. Where are all of these people coming from? Why doesn’t anybody else look as dead as you feel on the inside right now?

13. They seat you right away and, even though you knew you just wanted a burger, this menu is huge, and maybe you want a milkshake, or a waffle, or some fried calamari.

14. You ask the waiter for just another minute, and he disappears for twenty. Actually getting food feels like an eternity. You have all the time in the world to mull over what you’ll order.

15. And when the waiter finally shows back up, you surprise even yourself when the words, “I’ll have a Monte Christo please, and a Coke,” come out of your mouth.

16. When Bill says, “What’s the Monte Christo?” you don’t even remember, and the waiter already took the menu away, but it must have looked really tasty.

17. And while the walking to the diner took forever, and the ordering took half a lifetime, the food shows up two and a half minutes later. It’s the Monte Christo. It’s French toasted challah topped with hot turkey and ham covered in melted Swiss. The waiter gives you a little monkey dish of butter and maple syrup, again, you had no idea, but you think, whatever man, he gave it to me for a reason.

18. And then you blink and you’re walking out of the diner, only having the vaguest idea of having devoured something delicious, the corners of your lips coated with the residual stick of mapley deliciousness.

19. And then you blink again and you’re back at your place, you’re lying in your bed trying to go to sleep but, even though you couldn’t keep your eyes open toward the end of the night at Bill’s, now everything’s kind of buzzing. But it’s not a buzz, buzzing, it’s like just enough of a buzz to keep you up. And the sun’s starting to come up and that’s not helping you drift off either. All you’re thinking about is how you overdid it, how you were looking so forward to this weekend but now it’s over, and tomorrow’s shot, and maybe some of Monday too.

20. You wake up in the morning and the hangover is soul shattering.

21. There’s nothing in the fridge. You place a takeout order to Brooklyn Bagel, and the guy has you on hold for like fifteen minutes. You know that this is only the tip of the waiting-around iceberg here. You’re on the phone, lying in your own misery, while the rest of Astoria is out and about, they’re all awake, they’re all currently standing on line at Brooklyn Bagel. They take the priority, OK, take out calls for lazy assholes too hungover to put on a pair of pants, they’ve got to wait.

22. You order your two everything bagels with bacon egg and cheddar, you’re half gallon of Tropicana Some Pulp OJ, and no, you’re not being obnoxiously over-specific, it’s the take out guy. Everything you order has at least two or three follow-up questions. Cheese: what kind? OJ: what size? How much pulp?

23. And what time is it anyway? Twelve-thirty? That’s actually not too bad. Maybe some of Sunday night can still be salvaged here. I mean, it’s still kind of late. You’re not going to go running in Astoria Park or anything, but maybe drinks later at The Strand? I’m just saying, it’s not like it’s three, or four. Twelve-thirty, you can still get breakfast at twelve-thirty.

24. And then the food finally shows up, you hadn’t anticipated the shame of having to confront another human being in your current state, really hung over, disheveled, desperate for food. All while this other person is, what, he’s on a bike delivering the food that you couldn’t get yourself to get dressed and wait on line for like everyone else? Maybe if you just give him a big tip, like a seven or eight dollar tip, maybe he won’t think you’re such a loser. He must party every once in a while, right? You guys are just on different schedules. Just like an eight or nine dollar tip.

25. The food, it’s great, but it’s just like your grandmother always said when you were a little kid, that thing about your eyes being bigger than your stomach. Because yeah, you were really hungry, and sure, two bagels seemed like a good idea at a time. But two bites into that second sandwich and it’s obvious the extra money that you’ve wasted. Maybe you’ll eat it later, but probably not. More than likely it’s going to sit there for the rest of the day, a cautionary tale, a reminder when you go to order dinner that, hey man, just take it easy OK? Maybe you only need four tacos from Los Portales, OK, not eight. That’s just excessive.

26. And when Bill calls you up at four and you’re like, “Bill, did you just get up?” and he’s like, “Yeah man, when did you get up?” you don’t have to be honest, you can just say that you don’t remember. But take a look, OK, that’s a guy who doesn’t have his shit together, OK, you can’t sleep until four in the afternoon, man, this isn’t college, all right, this shit isn’t cute when you’re almost thirty.

27. You’re starting to feel better about yourself, but you remember all of that pot Bill bought yesterday, how you guys barely made a dent last night, even though you just kept smoking, over and over again, you can still feel it on the back of your throat.

28. “Hey Bill, you want to get together and watch some House of Cards?”

29. “Yeah man, I’ve still got all of that pot. You want to grab some beers and come over?”

30. Bingo. And then you head over to Bill’s for a nice, easy Sunday. Nothing crazy, nothing like last night. Maybe just Corona, you know, nothing crazy. And bring the bagel. Someone’ll eat it. Just enjoy it man, you’re still young, just put on a clean pair of pants and go to Bill’s. And fucking House of Cards man, that show is the fucking best, you gotta savor that shit, because you know you’re going to blow through, if not all thirteen episodes, at least six, at least a solid six or seven hours of once-a-year, quality TV.