We've just left the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Interstate 278 and are heading east toward the eastbound Long Island Expressway, Interstate 495. We've now been behind this dark van with the spare tire backpack since at least Williamsburg on this clear, sunny August 2001 afternoon, a scant few weeks prior to 9-11. Doesn't this lush scene evoke a more tropical locale, like Florida? The orange striped cones of course mean there's ongoing construction work. As I write this 17 years later in 2018, there's still ongoing construction work. One thing you learn quick with the LIE; there is ALWAYS ongoing construction work. There never isn't ongoing construction work.

Another day, another monster overhead green directional sign. Looks like our buddy in the van is not getting off at 48th Street. I guess he doesn't like cemeteries. That massive overpass you see looming ahead was not an overpass, but an upper deck. Since the late 1960s from just west of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway interchange, on through much of Maspeth, the Long Island Expressway has been double decked, to enable through traffic headed to and from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to avoid interchange tie-ups where the two massive arterial highways meet. Instead the lower deck of the LIE, which is actually the original Long Island Expressway route, handles all interchange exit and entrance ramp duties.

We're just about to slip beneath the upper deck, whose supports are distinctive for their massive steel joists sitting upon equally massive pillars. To say the original six lanes of the Long Island Expressway were buried beneath the upper deck might sound ghoulish, considering we're kind of surrounded by cemeteries here.

Fully immersed in the Long Island Expressway now and our van buddy has finally pulled away from us. We must have been spooking him, taking these photos as we went. The arched overpass ahead is 48th Street. This overpass, despite its rather spartan, cement and brick embellishments, was exemplar of the original postwar LIE overpass construction east of Queens, in Nassau County. Strangely, this was the only such overpass within New York City limits. All the other LIE overpasses built from the mid 1950s on had bare, straight steel beam fascia; no stonework or arches, although like this one the surrounding walls were bricked.