Queens Boulevard 50th Street Sunnyside New York June 2001

Back in 2001, the intersection of 50th Street and Queens Boulevard was Controversy City big time, as the then outgoing Queens Borough President, the late Clare Shulman and the New York City Department of Education teamed up with utterly balmy plans to build a major high school complex here. As shown by the distracted passenger in the maroon car, these signs placed upon this commercial building by concerned community activists definitely get noticed. Steven was once a major appliance chain in Queens, but fell on hard times competing with deeper pocketed competitors, such as PC Richard, which had arranged with Steven's owner to lease this property a couple of years ago. Then in stepped the Board of Lousy Education, so desperate for new schools in inundated neighborhoods like Sunnyside, that many students attended class in converted bathrooms and closets, some with desks pressed right up against the urinals. These lunatics decided, with the backing of the apparently senile late borough president, that one of the most traffic clogged sections of the then infamous Boulevard of Death would be the perfect place to stick a new school and placed a claim on the property via eminent domain.

It should be noted that there is not one other public school fronting anywhere on Queens Boulevard, save for Aviation High School further down in Sunnyside by 35th Street, a vocational school where most students arrive practically to its doors via the overhead IRT 7-Train subway line, only four boulevard lanes need be crossed and traffic tends to move at a more civilized pace. Here at 50th Street, nearly all students would have arrived on foot, many crossing the full 15 lanes worth of blacktop from the north side of the boulevard.

Here we see the kind of scene that would have been awaiting these students as they prepared to brave the current of Queens Boulevard's eastbound lanes. Here, a stampede of impatient vehicles come charging out of the cramped, undivided four lanes of the boulevard's Sunnyside stretch. They are winging out now as Queens Boulevard expands into separate service and express lanes, transforming into the megalane monster that so many envision when they think of Death Boulevard at its worst. They've just been sitting at long red lights and are ready to charge. 50th Street was never given the familiar Pedestrian Killed or Be Alert signs. Supposedly this is because it had not been the scene of enough calamities to qualify for them. Locals would have told you different, that the accident tallies for this intersection were covered up and suppressed in the interests of pushing this insane school project forward. One thing was certain; if this school had been built, those signs would have eventually followed, and nearby Calvary Cemetery would have likely received unwanted new business.
Speaking of the dead, the eminent late Claire Shulman issued the following senile retort to those opposing the school. "Who will it bother?" she asked with unconscionable stupidity, "The dead people in the cemetery?" How wonderful that she's lived three quarters of a century and had no common sense to show for it.
It clearly didn't matter to the very liberal Northeastern Queens politicians if a more southwesterly neighborhood full of less than upper middle class children had to attend a school where their closest neighbors would have been gas stations, a cemetery, a strip joint and the world's then deadliest road for pedestrians, not to mention the attendant close-up noise and air pollution from what was then 10 lanes of traffic.

Looking east down Death Boulevard from 50th Street. The proposed school site is unseen to our right. Temporary lulls in traffic in either direction come to sudden ends with a fury, depending on the cycles of the preceding traffic lights. Veritable flash floods of vehicles can quickly inundate the five traffic lanes in each direction, and then there are turn lanes to consider. All this is what any student forced to attend a school here would have faced daily.

The green on the right is the periphery of Calvary Cemetery, an historic Queens burial ground. Every here and there, as on the Donald Deskey SLECO twinlamp "Bigloop" light pole on the right, a first generation HPS Unidor fixture will still be seen. The Sunnyside section of Queens Boulevard got them relatively early in the HPS revolution, around 1971.

One business that probably hoped for a school was Boston Market on the northeast corner of 50th Street, whose parent company at the time was bankrupt. Then again, kids aren't exactly a Boston Market stronghold and it probably would have been converted into a more popular burger joint if the school had been built.

On the northwest corner, a troop of aging 7-train Redbird cars flew towards Flushing over Roosevelt Avenue. Those cars were retired not long after this was originally written in June 2001. The Mobil station was looking very patriotic, perhaps hoping the flags would take motorists' minds off the June 2001 gas prices.

The end shot, up shot as we revisit this issue almost twenty years later in 2018 is that this horrible school project never came to pass. City Hall can be beaten and guess who had the last laugh? Steven's electronics and appliance store rival and suitor for that space the city seized, PC Richard and Son, ended up with the property after all and as late as 2017 was still there according to Google Earth views.