Tag Archives: Long Island City

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.

wstnqeees

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.

We’re all doomed

I get so paranoid sometimes, like way too paranoid. It’s overwhelming, crushing, really. It’s all stupid crazy stuff, and it sounds just like how these blog posts sound, only out loud, in my head, with no word limit, just this constant stream churning a million different detailed scenarios about how I’m going to die, how, yeah, things are going pretty well right now, but it’s just a matter of time before everything takes a sharp and dramatic turn for the worse.

Like this morning, I was feeling especially on edge, I couldn’t find a comfortable spot, not sitting down, not lying down, not standing up. So I thought I’d go for a long run, get into that soothing rhythm where I focus on my breathing. Only this backfired. As I got maybe a quarter of the way over the Queensboro Bridge, I noticed how windy it was.

Specifically, I could feel the wind coming at me from the other side of the bridge, taking all of that gridlocked traffic, accumulating all of that slow, idling exhaust, and shooting it straight into my lungs in concentrated bursts. I tried to ignore it, to just deal with it, to tell myself that, hey idiot, you live in a big city, this problem probably isn’t limited to being on a bridge.

But then I started thinking about all of the bridges and tunnels in the city. I started thinking about all of those bridge and tunnel workers, the cops that stand there and do whatever it is they’re doing, the maintenance guys, the toll collectors. They always have these crazy World War I style gas masks on. And here I am like an idiot running across the bridge, getting my respiratory system into such a state that I’m actually taking in more air than necessary, I’m taking in as many large gulps of pollution as I can.

OK this isn’t helping. I needed to put that out of my head also. What am I going to do, never go outside? Never run across the bridge? It’s not always this bad. Sometimes the wind comes from the other direction and I get to enjoy what it feels like if there were no cars around. But that taste. I could taste exhaust on my tongue. And I wanted to wipe the taste off somehow, but there was nothing to do, I kind of just moved my tongue around, rubbed it on my teeth. And now I was totally going crazy, because I swear I could feel like a film on my teeth, like the inside of my mouth was just covered with this grime.

I was getting out of control here. Clearly this had to be at least somewhat in my head. New York isn’t that dirty. It’s not like how people describe Los Angeles during the eighties, or Beijing right now. All of those other human beings are making it through OK. I’ll manage just fine. And that calmed me down for a second, but then another image flashed through my mind. I remembered I went for a similar long run like a year ago, the same route, the across the bridge, but it was a little longer, I ran along the East River and down the to the Brooklyn Bridge before turning around and heading back to Queens.

And when I got home and collapsed and took off my sneakers I could see it, a clear line in my socks, white below the ankle line, but above? Where the sock didn’t have any sneaker to cover it? It was stained, browned, just being exposed to this city for a couple of hours had somehow done actual damage, like there’s enough dust and grime at the foot level to somehow make its way into the fabric.

And I run a lot, over and over again, back and forth across that bridge, I’m breathing in and out. All I can think of is tiny micro-particulate, the smokestacks to my right in Long Island City, the smokestacks to my left by the FDR Drive, all of that exhaust, the kind of dust that’s so small it takes decades to float down to the earth’s surface, and I’m breathing it in, giving it that powerful inhale, letting it get all the way inside my system, deep in my lungs, into the tiniest crevasses of my alveoli, accumulating run after run after run.

licsmoke

And someday ten, twenty, thirty years from now, I’ll develop this weird post-post-post industrial cough, and the oncologist will be like, “Yeah, we’re seeing that from a lot of guys your age. Nobody really knows any good answers, but here, we’ll give you a bunch of chemotherapy and hope for the best.”

This is crazy. This is a crazy way to spend a Wednesday morning. It’s too much for me. I need a drink. I need some more coffee. And another drink. We’re all doomed.