Photo Gallery: 63rd Drive
| We're standing on Death Blvd, but looking right up towards Saunders and 63rd Drive to the south. My two former banks line the corners. These storefronts go back to the Art Deco 30's and the Library of Congress website has photos from the 40's of a Rainbow Womens Shop located in one of these storefronts. By the time I was a kid, it was gone, but Rainbow the chain still exists. These bus stops are late getting their new round euro-style signs. Old First Federal Savings is now the infamous British/Hong Kong import HSBC. At least one lamppost here needs a paint job desperately. Across Saunders on the right is a Colombian takeout joint that was a Chicken Delight type chicken takeout place for years. 63rd Drive gets alot more floral after passing beneath the Long Island Railroad some four blocks up. PS 139 broods over the stores just past Booth St. two blocks away. The Saunders corner was the last here to get new traffic lights in the 60's. I think it held its box lights dear for at least three years after the rest of the Drive got the triplets. |
| A Closer view down the Drive, dominated by lampposts of a myriad heights and overhead traffic lights that appear quite in sync with one another. For the folks waiting at the bus stop by Death Blvd, a Triboro Coach bus is heading their way, just beyond the tracks. Fires have been a plague to the businesses between Wetherole and the tracks. On a particularly vicious icy Sunday in February 1972, one of Rego Park's most spectacular blazes wiped out a row of stores between Austin St and the tracks on the left, finally bringing down the neighborhood library in a final blaze of glory, even shutting railroad service as flames scorched the incline leading up to the tracks. The stores on the right between Wetherole and Austin have also been burned at least a couple of times. |
| Looking north at Saunders, HSBC sits inscrutably on the right. Alot of those no turn signs dot the Drive, with the black arrow and red line and circle, for idiots too stupid to know what the one way signs mean. The massive successor to Alexanders Department Store, the mighty Sears Mall, holds court across the Boulevard of Death, along with its co-Mallsters Marshalls, Circuit City, Old Navy and Bed Bath & Beyond. Park City, behind the mall, went up in the late 1950's. An unusual cost saving move on the part of its builders was to make many hallways external. You leave the elevators inside where a few apartments are, have to walk outside on a terrace-like ledge to reach half the apartments, then back inside again for the rest. As teens, my crowd used to play touch football on their expansive grassy grounds, much to the chagrin of their super. |