Queens for a Day

         Oops!

Wrong pictures!

Here's what I meant to post:

Flushing Meadows Park


(Site of 1939 and 1964 Worlds Fairs)





Today we took the subway to Flushing Meadows in Queens.  This is where Citi Field (Mets) is located, as well as the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center (U.S. Open).  Flushing Meadows Park (and the adjacent Corona Park) is large park that includes sculptures, a museum, soccer fields, pitch-and-putt golf course, an art museum, and a fantastic science center and playground.  We spent a couple of hours walking through the parks.  There were a couple of really interesting exhibits at the museum:  one was a "panorama" of New York (all five boroughs) that was created for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  It was a 3-D model of the city, and it took up an entire room; there was an elevated walkway all around it so that you could view it from all sides. See it HERE.  The other interesting exhibit showed the watersheds for the New York area (also a large 3-D model.)

Then we headed over to the Corona neighborhood of Queens to get an Italian ice from the Lemon Ice King.  (I had lime and Mark had banana/strawberry, with real bits of fruit.)  We sat in the shade in an adjacent park and ate our ices.  Then we hopped on a city bus and went to Chinatown in Queens.  This Chinatown is huge, second largest in the U.S. (San Francisco is the largest).  It was like we were transported to another country.  Bustling sidewalks, Chinese signs, Chinese being spoken almost exclusively by those there, unusual sites and smells.  We didn't stay very long because we had been walking a lot already that day.  Took the subway back to Manhattan.  It's not really a subway as most of it is above ground, giving us a chance to see other neighborhoods in Queens.