Photo Gallery: 63rd Drive
| The heavyset gent with the ski cap appears to be scowling. Perhaps he's annoyed by the way 63rd Drive from the south becomes 63rd Road to the north. If so, he wouldn't be the first, nor the last. It is probably fair to speculate, although I wasn't around to know for sure, that before the construction of Sears ancester Alexanders to the left, Park City beginning the following block and the other assorted 1950s through 1970s era apartment houses and attendant stores, this stretch of 63rd Road was probably a much narrower, inconsequential side street of either private homes or farm fields. Today, pretty much all the way down to 108th Street, 63rd Road is a major one-way south-north main drag; the only such strip between the Long Island Expressway to the west and Jewel Avenue to the east. I never much thought of it before, but this is actually the second busiest traffic route in that direction between the expressway and Union Turnpike far to the east, and the absolute busiest in terms of retail shopping. |
| And all that importance came at the expense of this poor soul. This folks is the 63rd Drive that couldn't. Of all the Avenues, Roads and Drives that litter the Queens Boulevard corridor, there is only one to which people will routinely say, "I'm heading for 'The Drive'." That, of course, is 63rd Drive. Nobody ever says, "Meet me on the Avenue," when they're meeting on 65th Avenue, or "Let's go to the Road" when speaking of 67th Road. Only 63rd Drive earned this special status, but this isn't the 63rd Drive anyone means by 63rd Drive. |
| The 63rd Drive that couldn't is a scant stubby half block east of 63rd Road, the strip that stole its thunder in the leap north across the Boulevard of Death. Everything this 63rd Drive does, 63rd Road just seems to do better. Bigger, glitzier stores, bigger apartment houses, wider lanes, more traffic lights, and it gets all of the other 63rd Drive's northbound traffic without having to give back anything to the south except careless pedestrians. This poor soul only gets one consolation out of all this ignimony; it has the subway station name. Take that, 63rd Road!" |