Bayside - Queens
From the Queens Giant to Andre the Giant
I once wrote how realtors dubbed the Queens neighborhood of Malba the "Beverly Hills of the East Coast." Presumably, the name was in reference to the oversized Spanish tiled mansions that make up a significant percentage of the local housing stock. Well, believe it or not, there is another Queens neighborhood with the same nickname, though this one, once the stomping grounds of movie stars and producers, is perhaps more deserving of the comparison.
In the early 20th century, A-listers like Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, W.C. Fields, and Charlie Chaplin called the Queens neighborhood of Bayside home. With its waterfront views, yacht clubs, golf courses, and easy access to the film studios in Astoria and other parts of New York, it was the perfect Gilded Age retreat. However, as Hollywood emerged as the new epicenter of the film industry, this East Coast enclave gradually lost its allure and much of its star power. When Robert Moses built the Cross Island Parkway in 1940, Bayside lost access to its waterfront.
Today, Bayside is an upscale neighborhood with a diverse mix of housing, abundant parks, and an almost suburban atmosphere. It even boasts its own version of Rodeo Drive—Bell Boulevard—featuring several blocks of bars and restaurants offering everything from "nouvelle Indian cuisine" to soup dumplings and souvlaki.
BAY SIDE
Long before Moses and the movie stars, the Matinecock Native American tribe fished and hunted in and around Little Neck Bay. In 1637, the Dutch West India Company encouraged settlement in what would become the town of Flushing. The neighborhood's name, which needs no explanation, first appeared in 1798 as Bay Side.
In 1824, Abraham Bell bought a large farm encompassing most of the present-day neighborhood. The road that ran through that farm is the commercial "spine" of Bayside, Bell Boulevard.
Eventually, Bay Side became Bayside, a recreational destination and wealthy enclave with Joseph Crocheron's hotel at its center. The hotel was a favorite of William "Boss" Tweed, who supposedly spent the night there after escaping from the Ludlow jail, where he was serving time for embezzling millions of dollars. The next day, he was on a boat to Cuba. With the development of the North Shore Railroad in 1866, the area continued to grow, and soon, the shoreline was dotted with large and lavish estates.
These spreads featuring film stars Norma Talmadge Mrs. Schenk and Pearl White on their Bayside estates are from an October 1918 issue of Photoplay magazine.
If you really want to get into Bayside history, you should check out the Bayside Historical Society. When your neighborhood historical society has its headquarters in a castle, you know they aren't messing around.
QUEENS GIANT
Speaking of history, in a desolate thicket of woods tucked between the Horace Harding and Cross Bronx Expressways, you will find what is debatedly the oldest, and certainly the tallest, living organism in New York City, a tulip tree known as the Queens Giant. When measured in 2000, it was 133.8 feet tall with a circumference of 18.6 feet. The tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is estimated to be between 350 and 400 years old. For such a large organism, it is pretty hard to see. A small opening in a fence on East Hampton Boulevard leads to a narrow trail that skirts the expressway.
Once the trail turns toward the forest, away from the expressway, you can catch a glimpse of the tulip's silvery trunk through a break in the leaves.
To get to the tree's base, you have to do a little bushwacking and head down a ravine.
When I got there, I saw a temporary encampment that had been set up near the giant's base. If you are looking for a place to set up camp in the city limits, you could do worse than in the loamy shadow of such a commanding arboreal presence.
More surprising was the chain link fence surrounding the tree's trunk. This is New York City, the land of "this is why we can't have nice things," but still, it is a strange way to commune with nature.
The chain-link fence, the steady white noise of traffic, and the potential return of whoever had set up the camp imbued the place with an undercurrent of menace that didn’t make me want to linger.
Tulip trees can live 600 years, so hopefully, the fence accomplishes its purpose. Maybe in another 300 years, when the forest has long reclaimed the asphalt and concrete of the nearby roadways, people will still marvel at the size and tenacity of the Queens Giant.
THE SEER OF BAYSIDE
In 1968, Veronica Lueken, a 50-year-old homemaker and mother of five children in Bayside, started having visions of the Virgin Mary. In 1970, Mary told Lueken that she wanted a shrine established on the grounds of Bayside's St. Robert Bellarmine Roman Catholic Church.
She was to be invoked under the mouthful of a title—"Our Lady of the Roses, Mary Help of Mothers." Soon the word got out, and twice a week for over five years, as many as 700 devotees would come to the church grounds to hear Lueken channel the prophecies of the Virgin Mary and, if they were lucky, catch a glimpse of the Marian apparition.
The church had to remove its Virgin Mary statue and later fence off the grounds entirely from the ever-increasing crowds. That didn't stop them from gathering on the median across from the church.
Understandably, neighbors were not thrilled with Lueken's amplified play-by-play of her Marian visions, delivered in a thick Queens accent. Sometimes, even Jesus himself made an appearance. If you told me this excerpt was from a David Sedaris short story, I would ask if I could borrow the book.
Veronica - Oh, over Our Lady’s side, on Her left side, I see the sky opening up and - oh, it’s Jesus! He’s standing right next to Our Lady on Her left side. And He’s wearing a long, sort of an ecru-colored gown and sandals. I can see His feet from down here. He has on brown sandals. They look like leather; I think they’re leather.
And He has on a cape, an ecru, almost white-colored cape over His gown. It’s quite, it’s quite a bit chilly over here. That is why I would assume that Jesus is wearing His cape.
Some audio so you really get the idea:
Among other things, the “Bayside Prophecies” claim that UFOs are actually "transports from hell sent to deceive and confuse mankind," and that a fiery "Ball of Redemption" is on its way to Earth to bring catastrophic destruction to all sinners. Sinners, in this case, include women who wear trousers.
A particularly QAnon-esque vision claimed that Pope Paul VI, in a plot orchestrated by high-level priests, had been kidnapped and replaced by a doppelgänger, who was being used by Satanic forces to manipulate the Church.
They even went so far as to attribute wildfires in California to Secret Jewish Space Lasers. Oh no, wait. That was Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was in the news again this week for saying the government was also using lasers to cause the recent hurricanes.
Eventually, like the Costanzas who were driven out of Bayside for observing Festivus, the adherents of Our Lady of the Roses were pressured to leave the neighborhood. They picked up and moved on to the Vatican Pavilion site in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
After Leuken died in 1995, the group split into two factions, one led by her husband and the other by her former assistant. The Parks Department mediated the dispute by allowing each group to gather at the shrine on alternate Sundays.1
THE WRESTLING UNIVERSE
Though I don’t patronize too many businesses on my neighborhood visits, the giant hot pink Bret the “Hit Man” Hart mural outside of The Wrestling Universe on 34th Ave demanded my attention.
My curiosity was rewarded with shelf after shelf of wrestling action figures and memorabilia, a treasure trove of miniature Junkyard Dogs, Rowdy Roddy Pipers, and Ric Flairs.
Lewis, who was running the show, told me that action figures have “never been hotter,” and after a few minutes spent browsing the intoxicating wares, I could see why. That I was not a collector and couldn't tell the difference between WWF and AEW did not faze Lewis, whose love of the sport was palpable.
I considered telling him how, in 1987, I had seen Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat successfully defend his Intercontinental Title belt against Randy “Macho Man” Savage in a 15’ steel cage match in Nassau Coliseum, but I worried it might seem like I was trying too hard to be cool. So, I bought a Macho Man action figure instead.
MOSES
My first visit to Bayside last week may have finally pushed me firmly into the anti-Robert Moses camp. Hardly a controversial take, I know, but ironically, just an hour earlier, I had found myself praising Moses.
An ill-advised second cup of coffee had left me desperate for a bathroom when I stumbled upon a city playground. Pushing open the door, I felt that familiar mix of revulsion and gratitude that always accompanies visits to park restrooms. I silently thanked Moses for the manic compulsion that led him to build 658 playgrounds during his time as parks commissioner.
Of course, Moses didn’t only build playgrounds. In the 1930s, construction began on the Cross Island Parkway, which would effectively cut off Bayside from the beach. While I could understand the local outcry over losing waterfront access, compared to the devastation wrought by his other projects—like the BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway, which displaced tens of thousands and destroyed entire neighborhoods—this seemed, by Moses' standards at least, a modest imposition.
My opinion would soon change.
Later that afternoon, having already logged nearly eight miles crisscrossing the neighborhood, I decided to call it a day. With the sun starting to set, I found myself on the edge of a complicated tangle of Cross Island Parkway off-ramps. A quick check of my phone's GPS revealed I was at least two miles from my car. There were a couple of suggested routes; one was a "nature" trail paralleling the shoreline that stretched all the way to Fort Totten, nearly three miles away. I figured I'd walk the trail for a bit, maybe take some landscapes along the bay, and then cut back into the neighborhood—mistake number one.
Actually, mistake number one was that Randy "Macho Man" Savage action figure I had bought earlier that afternoon. While I have no regrets about the purchase itself, the decision to buy it in the first hour of a multi-hour expedition demonstrated poor judgment.
The “trail” turned out to be a shared bike and pedestrian path wedged between the water and the parkway. A low, dented barrier made of galvanized steel was the only thing separating myself and my fellow nature lovers from six lanes of speeding Teslas and Toyotas piloted by a generation of drivers who had clearly grown up playing Grand Theft Auto. The noise was relentless. The scenario of a car flipping the barrier and instantly killing me kept playing over and over in my head.
After maybe half a mile more, I realized that the views I had been looking forward to were banal at best, and the traffic was stressing me out. I decided to get off the trail and back into the neighborhood. I checked my phone—dead. Secure with the knowledge that I was at least heading in the right direction, with my Macho Man action figure in one hand and my camera in the other, I kept going.
Twenty minutes later. Finally. An overpass. After climbing the stairs and crossing the highway, I found myself in a large city park. Could I have made it to Fort Totten already? I sure hoped so, my feet were killing me.
A woman approached, shaking her head in disbelief. "Have you ever seen anything like it?" she asked, pointing at a court packed with throngs of lycra-clad pickleballers. I considered asking her where exactly I was, but the prospect of being subjected to a protracted diatribe on the recent surge in pickleball's popularity dissuaded me, so I just smiled awkwardly, nodded, and moved on.
As I exited what I later figured out was Crocheron Park, I found myself in a labyrinth of dead ends and private cul-de-sacs. At the end of one of these dead-end streets, I spotted a small path that would bring me back to the trail where I started. I hesitated for a minute, but it was getting dark, so it seemed my best option.
As I ascended the ramp to the overpass, I walked right into a thick cloud of gnats that eagerly swarmed every available orifice in my face. Within seconds, my once-white shirt was flecked with a grim constellation of corpses, a senseless gnat kamikaze. My feet were really starting to ache. I wished that instead of an action figure, I was carrying a water bottle.
After roughly another mile, the rash kicked in.
But then, finally, I saw them—the three towering apartment buildings I had parked near earlier in the day. I had been growing increasingly concerned that I hadn't seen these landmarks on my journey, so when they finally came into view, I was relieved. That relief turned into frustration, then anger, and finally despair as the buildings came into view and receded without any visible path across Moses' infernal parkway.
Finally, after a four-mile detour, Randy and I reached Fort Totten, where we could at last hobble back into the neighborhood.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s field recording starts with about 30 seconds at the base of NYC’s oldest living organism, then features the song of an exuberant mockingbird before finishing off, fittingly at the side of the bay in Fort Totten Park.
FEATURED ARTIST
This week, instead of showcasing a photographer, I wanted to share the work of sculptor Rachel Owen. Owens’ 2017 show at ZIEHERSMITH gallery featured several colored glass casts she made of the Queens Giant. For several weeks, with the Parks Department’s permission, Owens used alginate casting (what is used for dental molds)to capture impressions of large sections of the tree’s trunk. She then brought the molds back to her studio and cast them in colored, crushed glass.
“The fortitude of the tree to withstand the development of modern society reminds us that there was always someone before and is also symbolic of migration, mothers, and spatial occupation.” Rachel Owens
ODDS AND END
If you want to get your hands on the complete set of Bayside Prophecies or have a hankering for the days of conspiracy-filled, unhinged Geocities-designed websites, you can visit the These Last Days Ministries website. But I really don’t recommend it.
I’m unclear if Utopia Bagels is within the Bayside borders, but I do know they make a great bagel. (5 stars). I can not, however, vouch for their 10-pound viral bagel pizza.
https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/Lourdes-of-America.htm
came for a Seinfeld reference and I wasn't disappointed
I listened to 8 minutes of droning and had to stop. Oof. I would have hated being her neighbor. Thank you for sacrificing your feet so we could get a good story. That whole "almost there but actually a 4 mile walk away" is one of the worst feelings when you're exploring. One time I forded a river in my underpants because I didn't feel like walking back around.