WHERE: From Ridgewood, Queens, through Maspeth, Queens, across two bridges to East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
START: Forest Avenue subway station (M train)
FINISH: Grand Street subway station (L train)
DISTANCE: 3.1 miles (5 kilometers)
Photographs by Michael Cairl. Map courtesy footpathapp.org.
Route (reading from right to left) and profile (reading from left to right) of this walk.
For this last walk of 2022 I decided to walk across the two Newtown Creek bridges I had not yet crossed on foot (I have biked across both many times), beginning with a walk through the Ridgewood and Maspeth neighborhoods of Queens. The bridges are on Grand Street and Metropolitan Avenue.
The walk started at the elevated Forest Avenue subway station, in a quiet corner of Ridgewood. Ridgewood used to be home to a lot of people of German and Eastern European heritage, augmented in recent years by Hispanic people, people from the Balkans, and people priced out of places such as Williamsburg. A few blocks into the walk I noticed Rosemary’s Playground. From the New York City Parks website:
Rosemary's Playground is named for one of Ridgewood's brightest political leaders, who lived much of her life at 1867 Grove Street. Born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1905, Rosemary R. Gunning (1905-1997) graduated from Richmond Hill High School in Queens in 1922. Soon after she received the L.L.B. from Brooklyn Law School in 1927, she was admitted to the bar in New York State. Rosemary worked for a Manhattan and Long Island law firm during the Great Depression, and then served as an attorney for the Department of the Army from 1942 to 1953. She married Lester Moffett in 1946.
Ms. Gunning entered the New York political scene as a Democrat and later joined the Conservative Party. One year after she attended the 1967 New York Constitutional Convention, Rosemary became the first woman to be elected to the New York State Assembly from Queens. During four two-year terms, her major achievements included bills supporting school decentralization and the creation of the Housing Court.
A bit farther along Fairview Avenue I came upon an old German beer hall that appears to have an outdoor beer garden. I’ll be back. Gottscheer Hall gets its name from the county of Gottschee in present-day Slovenia. An interesting history of Gottschee and the migration of Gottscheers to New York and elsewhere is at https://gottscheerhall.com/history
When I was mapping out this walk I saw that along the way was a little one-block street with the grand name of St. John’s Road. So I had to include it on the walk. If anyone knows how this street got its name, please let me know!
St. John’s Road, looking west from Grove Street.
Holiday display on St. John’s Road.
From there I continued along Woodward Avenue, past Linden Hill Cemetery, founded in 1842. Its hilltop location affords an excellent view of Manhattan in the distance. The evolution of Ridgewood is captured in the diversity of family names on the gravestones. Alas, the wrought iron fence around the cemetery is topped with barbed wire and the entrances to the cemetery are festooned with all sorts of “don’ts.”
Downhill from the cemetery, I turned from Woodward Avenue onto Troutman Street. At the end of Troutman Street, at the intersection of Flushing Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue, is the former warehouse of the H.C. Bohack Company. Bohack was a supermarket chain in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island from 1887 to 1977. The first time I saw this, on a bike ride in the area in 2015 (when I took the photo below), I was astonished that this bit of history was extant.
From Troutman Street almost to the end, the walk was ugly. I passed a lot of warehouses, wholesalers of all kinds of things, a big lumber yard, an equally big New York City Transit bus garage, small metalworking firms, and truck terminals. But ugly places like these are vital to the City’s economy. On 54 Street I saw some private houses incongruously placed amid all this, and the former Bushwick Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, which still sees the occasional freight train. It has not seen a passenger train since 1924.
The Maspeth Business Park on Grand Avenue (it becomes Grand Street in Brooklyn, west of the Grand Street Bridge). Look at the signs. All this time I thought Queens met the world at JFK Airport.
Eventually I came to the Grand Street Bridge, a swing span built in 1903. I’ve biked over the bridge and its challenging steel grate roadway many times but had never walked it before. It crosses the most polluted section of one of the most polluted waterways in the United States, Newtown Creek. In the image, note the small wooden shack at mid-span. That was a challenge to shimmy past.
Past the Grand Street Bridge, I passed more of the same until a short detour onto Stewart Avenue to Metropolitan Avenue. Ahead lay the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, a double-leaf drawbridge that opened in 1933. It crosses the English Kills, a heavily polluted tributary of Newtown Creek. Just east of the bridge was a mural that I couldn’t explain but caught my eye.
Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, looking west.
View of English Kills from the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge.
If you ever walk along the north walkway of the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge (I didn’t), do not attempt to cross the exit to westbound Metropolitan Avenue. There is too much fast-moving traffic.
Continuing along Grand Street, warehouses and light industry dominate the south side of the street, while the north side changes slowly with new restaurants and a film camera business (to which I’ll go back) alongside a long-standing auto repair business. The end of the walk was the Grand Street subway station at the top of a gentle hill. This station is being made accessible, and the elevators and other improvements should be complete in 2023.
Elevator tower under construction to the Manhattan-bound platform of the Grand Street subway station.
I have now walked across all six walkable bridges over Newtown Creek and its tributaries: Pulaski, Borden Avenue, Greenpoint Avenue, Kosciuszko, Metropolitan Avenue, and Grand Street. The two parts of this walk were very different but the common denominator was the utter, unsurprising lack of tourists. There was plenty to see for anyone with eyes wide open, taking it all in at a slow pace. Maybe one day I’ll do a series on one-block streets, starting with St. John’s Road. The portions of the route that I’ve biked in the past - everything from Troutman Street west - I saw differently on two feet than I ever did on two wheels. I passed places to which I will surely return: Gottscheer Hall for beer and wurst, a place on Grand Street that sells dumplings and pork buns by the bag, Brooklyn Film Camera, others. This was a good, low-key way to cap a year of good walks.
Onward! Happy New Year!