Photo Gallery: Sidestreet Scenes
 A couple of blocks east of the Van Wyck Expressway,
just off 101st Avenue in Jamaica, is a little side street called
Cresskill Place, where one of the rarest surviving mercury vapor
lamps still reigns overhead. Welsbach Electric, the contractor
handling most of NYC's streetlights, identified this model in
their mid 1960's handbook as the SL-200, although I do not know
the manufacturer. One of my favorite lumes, I call them the Turtle
Beaks. One of these can also be found on Collin Street, just
off McDonald in the shadows of the Culver El Kings Highway station
in Brooklyn. |
 The south curb of 101st hosts Garrafeira Liquors.
Hard as this may be to believe, this is about the only place
in New York City where you'll find Portuguese or Brazilian specialties
like Cachasa (I spelled it phonetically, as I understand it to
be pronounced). This part of Jamaica, just east of the Van Wyck
Expressway, has long been home to a Portuguese community, although
it is presently heavily integrated with African Americans, West
Indians, East Indians, East Indians from the West Indies, and
Latinos not from Portugal.The Soribel Deli above in the westbound view gives away the present tropical nature of the area. Perhaps the biggest immigrant block hails from Guyana. Below, we face east, where a 1920's vintage school building is undergoing a thorough exterior renovation. The public school system here (state schools for you Limeys) has been hard pressed to meet the exploding immigrant influx, and attendant second generation kiddie boom, and many existant schools are crumbling beneath neglect and overcrowding. Shrouded schools such as this one are not an uncommon site in this, the REAL first year of the new millenium. 101st Avenue ends its enviable run a few blocks up. All shot May 27th 2001. |
