Long Island City

This is a pic of Long Island City, seen from the No. 7 elevated train. (I will be getting around to the East Village soon since that is the name of this blog--but I tend to digress a lot.) L.I.C. seen from this perspective seems to merge into Manhattan across the East River. This is the nice part of L.I.C. The part where I labor three days a week is the armpit of the neighborhood, full of block-long factory buildings that have been converted to other uses, such as offices, or junior colleges which make literal the phrase "factory education." The place I work in used to be a paper-bag factory. Which is not to say there aren't any interesting buildings, or sights, in the area because these factories date back to the beginning of the 20th century when cheap land and East River ferry boats lured manufacturers and workers from Manhattan. When the elevated train opened in 1917 (now called the 7), the borough of Queens exploded eastward with growth. In the teens-early 1920s there were even a couple of movie studios built near the 33rd Street station. (Part of my job is doing research--I explored my work neighborhood, which was germinated by an entrepreneur called Degnon, via Internet and books.)

Below is a more picturesque pic of Dutch Kill (the body of stagnant water) in the Hunters Point section of L.I.C. At the back is one of the first factories in the neighborhood, built around 1914 with 900,000 square feet of space, to make cookies for the metropolitan area. Railway tracks from the Sunnyside Rail Yard next door went right inside these factories, bringing raw materials and shipping out finished product. Packard Motors already had a building 3 blocks away, which serviced and repaired the pricey motorcars from 1910 on.

For decades there was a plant called Ford on Thomson Avenue that had nothing to do with automobiles or the famous family headed by the notorious anti-Semite--it was a contractor for the military. During WWII it made servomotors and guidance systems, crude (by today's standard) computers, for aiming and synchronizing the firing of the big guns that were on battleships, cruisers and other U.S. Navy warships. Even on a huge battleship like the New Jersey, imagine what would happen if all the guns on one side went off simultaneously.

Lower East Side

Of course, this is not the 'East Village,' a real estate term that began to be used in the late 1970s in an effort to clean up the image of the neighborhood, i.e., guilt by association with the West Village, which used to be called Greenwich Village when I lived there back in the mid-60s.

This picture shows the heart of the Lower East Side, Pike Street and East Broadway, vastly different than it was 50 or 60 years ago, except for the Manhattan Bridge, which opened 100 years ago -- funny, no great centenary celebrations like for the Queensboro Bridge, also 100 years old in 2009. In the background at left is a public housing project, Rutgers Houses. In the foreground is someone who looks as though he could have walked off the boat onto Ellis Island 100 years ago, except for the expensive looking loafers. Now the neighborhood in the photo is part of the constantly expanding Chinatown.