Why I Don’t Really Hate Queens
E.E. Lippincott (NYC)

I hate the borough of Queens or, more accurately, until last week I hated the borough of Queens. It's an unsightly place, full of the pollution that the rest of New York City won't tolerate being produced in its backyard. It's full of immigrants who may or may not take their new country seriously. It's full of longtime United States citizens, who decided decades ago that with as little learning and bravery and creativity as possible they could just about avoid any progress. It’s full of large, dirty thoroughfares, two huge airports and a second-rate baseball stadium. It's decorated in cheap wrought iron and gaudy fake-gold appliqué, like a prize out of a 25 cent machine in a grocery store. Buildings keep going up all over the place as rents in Manhattan become too severe and people move east towards Queens and Long Island. And that construction is of the poorest quality possible because the entire borough has been put up for sale by the smalltime crooks who are elected to run it. Families hand down run-down diner or restaurant dynasties to their offspring. Newspapers are bought out by the advertisers or the politicians who pay for their printing. The old ladies, Italian or Greek or German, sit on their front porches and are very sure they know exactly the way life should be and why you are not acceptable. The men make a lot of talk about what they won't tolerate and how they're not afraid to stand up to so and so and then quietly, with harsh lined faces, let themselves be hoodwinked again and again. It's a place of sit down and shut up and don't you dare talk back you'd better like what's coming to you. It's a place that refers to Manhattan, the next borough over and often plainly visible on the horizon, as "the city."

It's a borough full of losers. It's a borough made to be suckered. I hated it because I felt I was suckered too. No man is an island, so they say, but its very easy to get walled off onto what you think is an island. It's easy to loose sight of the rest of the world, and instead become blinded to everything but the few opportunities in your immediate sphere. About two years ago I embraced a job as a reporter covering a culture that was different from anything I'd ever seen before. The Queens woman: her hair permed and teased into a ball framing her metallic, rose-tinted glasses. How exotic. The well-groomed Queens man: clean shaven, often with a mustache, and leaving a scent trail of cologne behind him. The wide 'ahs' in the word "horror" and "radiator" enchanted me. The long dirty streets with their crazed traffic, the kids from the projects who soup up their cars and race them, one block at a time between stop lights, the manner of the butcher and the shifty eyed behavior of everyone in the traditional Italian bakeries thrilled me to the bone. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an anthropologist.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but somehow I became caught somewhere along the line and enmeshed within the culture I was studying. I was breathing the Queens air, I'd moved to the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. I was faced day in and day out with the conversation of Queensites. I felt I had lost the larger view of life. I guess for a brief time, kicking and screaming, I became a Queensite too. It was horrible. It reached gnashing-teeth level about three weeks ago, as I stood in line at the Steinway Post Office. As I waited I composed the following tome to my disgust.

Post Office On Broadway, Queens
Even the children look stern
at a post office in Queens.
Men, the bags beneath their eyes hard won at 40,
stand silently in the line that always stretches out into the street.
Women from Yugoslavia try to be polite to the tellers
while struggling to get a money order
which will send their American dollars far away.
The tellers, also do not speak English,
behind the scratched plastic walls.
Girls, wherever they were born, waiting primly
neatly put together in cheap imitations
of today’s fashions.
A Hispanic man, his wavy hair immaculately parted
in some 1950s method
attempts to retain his dignity at the window,
his cravat around his neck.
He is reduced to awkward straining
because the Post Office is not a dignified place
and his English is still not so good.
A middle-aged woman, her hair hennaed red, stares
at the girls with an unpleasant face.
When she speaks, her voice is too young
to match her sagging flesh and harsh lines.
Two young boys, their hair and skin look dusty,
are very quiet as they wait for their mother.
They smile but there is no play here
where an old Indian man waits an hour
to buy one 34 cent stamp.

But you can’t sum a whole culture up in disgust—can’t turn your nose up at an entire world. What’s so bad about Queen anyway? In terms of New York, it isn’t as decayed and suffering as Harlem. It isn’t as dirty and isolated as parts of Brooklyn. It isn’t racially divided like the Bronx. It isn’t ignored like Staten Island. It isn’t congested with cars and insipid small talk like parts of Manhattan. Queens is pretty mild compared to a lot of other places in this town. It isn't lovely or inspiring but it isn’t THAT BAD. I hated Queens because I had gotten stuck in Queens. I had an apartment I’d invested in, I had a car I had to make payments on. I had a job that sucked all the energy out of me so at the end of the day I didn't have the drive to go anywhere. Feeling trapped is an awful feeling. I would have hated heaven if I’d felt trapped there. So while what I saw at the post office is true, from a slightly different perspective it could have been fascinating rather than damning. The proud Hispanic man may have seemed dapper and touching. The young girls’ mimicry of expensive fashions may have struck me as ingenious. The whole scene could have been proof of the resilience of pop culture or that cultures make small improvements on a concept in order to make it their own. It could have been a very different poem.

I am leaving New York City within the next couple of months to seek out adventure in other parts of the globe. I made the decision last week. I will most definitely miss being a daily part of this crazy, mile-a-minute town, which I truly love. Maybe when I visit again I’ll put some time aside to make a special trip to Queens. I imagine then, I’ll see something quite different.