April 15, 2007
A Road Not Taken, Much
By DAVID McANINCH

NO one answered the buzzer at 964 Jamaica Avenue. A locksmith’s calling card and a KeySpan service notice protruded from the doorframe and fluttered in the breeze, just beneath the sign that read “Taxidermist.” Frozen eerily behind a vitrine above the boarded-up storefront were a lifelike fox, a hawk of some sort, and what appeared to be a couple of chickens.

That a taxidermist’s shop at the edge of Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, had apparently gone out of business was less of a surprise than the fact that such a thing was ever in business in the first place. What kind of city dweller requires the services of a taxidermist? Bereaved poultry fanciers? Urban fox hunters?

If you walk slowly enough and look hard enough, such curiosities abound along Jamaica Avenue, as they do on so many of New York’s unsung thoroughfares. Before the mysteries of the taxidermist’s shop could be pondered at length, within blocks new distractions presented themselves, including, among other things, a gun-supply store with a live firing range in back, an old man in a red vest riding a tricked-out Schwinn festooned with giant Albanian flags, and a plaque honoring the nearby birthplace of Fred Christ Trump, “father of The Donald.”

These may not be worthy attractions for your uncle visiting from Ohio. But they are unexpected delights in their own way, hints that New York bristles with history and eccentricity far from the city’s throbbing heart. They are signs of a street life that, though distinctly urban in its grit and rough edges, is more villagelike than cosmopolitan, a life lived beyond the reach of large-scale gentrification, a long way from the tourist traps and even the most far-flung outposts of hip New York.

Once an Indian path, then a busy wood-plank toll road that connected the farms of Long Island to the Brooklyn ferry docks, Jamaica Avenue appears today to be decidedly average in everything except length, stuffed fowl notwithstanding. The street, which extends roughly 15 miles from eastern Brooklyn all the way to the Nassau County line, is not up-and-coming, it is not celebrated in song or letters, and it is not well traveled by people who don’t live nearby.

It arcs through a half-dozen overlooked neighborhoods, past transit hubs, friendly main streets, cemeteries, suburban-style cul-de-sacs, bustling shopping strips and industrial corridors. The businesses along Jamaica Avenue — run by Guyanese, Colombians, Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Dominicans and Lithuanians, to name a few — include roughly 20 pizza joints, as many West Indian steam-table restaurants, a dozen florists, and so many hair and nail salons that counting became onerous after 30 blocks or so.

The residential areas bisected by this artery are middle-class and uniformly unglamorous. In sum, Jamaica Avenue is a locus of everyday life of the sort lived by the majority of New Yorkers. To walk the length of such a street is to recognize the beauty, pathos and humor inherent in the seemingly banal goings-on of a city’s less-traveled wards.

Junior Gardeners of the World

Jamaica Avenue, unlike Fifth Avenue, Flatbush Avenue or Broadway, does not originate at a triumphal arch, a soaring bridge, or land’s end. It emerges from beneath a thicket of elevated subway tracks at Broadway Junction, just beyond the northern border of East New York and site of the New York City Transit Authority Surface Transit Headquarters and the massive East New York Bus Garage and Shop. On a recent cloudless morning, drivers sipped coffee outside the yawning hangar doors, beneath an insignia reading, “N.Y.C.T.A. Surface Transit: We Serve With Pride.”

What the first mile or so of Jamaica Avenue does have going for it is topography. Past the bus garage and the access ramps for the Jackie Robinson Parkway, as the street eases into a stretch of tidy detached houses and rundown bodegas, a tree-lined ridge heaves up dramatically to the north — Long Island’s terminal glacial moraine.

Pedestrians are few. A handwritten sign affixed to the back of an old station wagon in a junk-strewn lot at Miller Avenue advertises a “Rebuilted Shopping Cart” for $7, ostensibly a good price, though the item in question was not on display. A striking but dilapidated Queen Anne-style house lords over the sleepy corner of Warwick Street, its beautiful window mullions spiked with millions of flecks of peeling yellow paint.

Several blocks east, a sunny mural on a concrete gatehouse announces the Highland Park Children’s Garden, a one-acre enclosure within the sprawling namesake park. A barrel-chested man with slicked-back gray hair emerged from behind the gate and introduced himself as Dennis Moore, “local historian and co-coordinator of this garden.”

“We’ve got gardeners from Suriname, Bangladesh, China, P.R., D.R., the Philippines, Ireland, Trinidad — oh, and one from New Jersey,” Mr. Moore said. “This is the oldest public children’s garden in the country. Also, this was the eastern flank of the Battle of Brooklyn, right here where we’re standing.

“I used to walk by this place 60 years ago when I was a kid. Now I live on Richmond Street. Most people don’t think of a middle-class white dude from this neighborhood, but here I am.”

He plucked a leaf from a chocolate-mint plant and popped it into his mouth, then bent to retrieve an empty soda can from a patch of giant hosta. “Kids still toss trash over the fence,” he said. “But guess what happened when we started cleaning this place up? Vandalism went way down.”

A quarter-mile on from the garden, past a giant winged statue honoring World War I veterans, Jamaica Avenue intersects with Force Tube Avenue — the off-putting name is not a reference to the making of foie gras but to an underground water tunnel — beyond which one enters the City of the Dead.

For the next mile, graveyards stretch north to the horizon: the National Cemetery at Cypress Hills, with its neat rows of bone-white headstones; Salem Fields, beneath which members of New York’s Guggenheim family repose; Cypress Hills Cemetery, resting place of Mae West and Jackie Robinson; down-at-the-heels Maimonides Cemetery, where a sign by a rusted gate reads, indignantly, “This Is Not Cypress Hills Cemetery”; and, finally, Mount Hope Cemetery, beside the Queens border and opposite the erstwhile taxidermist’s shop, where the dead surveil the dead.

The $79.99 Tuxedo

No slogan-emblazoned sign at Eldert Lane alerts visitors that they have entered Queens — nor, for that matter, is there one welcoming westbound travelers to Brooklyn, a fact that Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz might be interested to know. Still, as Jamaica Avenue rolls into the western fringe of Woodhaven, things change perceptibly.

Daylight dissipates beneath the elevated tracks of the J and Z lines, which run above Jamaica Avenue after Crescent Street; on a sunny day the el creates a kinetic dance of light and shadow as beautiful as a painting by Mondrian, who happens to be interred nearby. There, within just a few blocks of the cemetery district, Jamaica Avenue becomes Main Street, U.S.A., replete with taverns, barbershops, hardware stores, and a small-town feel that’s a world away from Manhattan’s see-and-be-seen restaurants and sleek flagship stores.

Exclusive Menswear, near 84th Street, will sell you a respectable-looking tuxedo for $79.99; at the catering hall down the street, the Knights of Columbus meets once a week; and at nearby Schmidt’s candy shop, chocolates are made by hand and displayed on fudge-spattered wax paper in wood cases. The woman behind the counter at Schmidt’s seems to have an arrangement with the Manor Delicatessen, across the street. “Go over there right now and try their German potato salad,” she instructed a first-time visitor. “It’s the best in the city.”

On a retaining wall beneath a railroad overpass at 100th Street, a weather-beaten mural depicts a bulldog wearing an F.D.N.Y. helmet and extending his paws to embrace a crudely drawn New York skyline; above him is the mystifying inscription “Let’s Not Lose It!”

A brown sedan slowed to a stop beneath the overpass. “Looking at the mural?” the driver, a brunette of about 20, shouted at the stranger staring at the artworks.

“A local guy painted it 20 years ago because the city was going to close our firehouse,” she explained. “The firehouse stayed, but no one’s done anything with the mural, so my friends and I are going to start cleaning it and restoring it next Saturday.”

She started to say something else but stopped to let a train thunder past overhead — the prevailing etiquette in this part of Queens being to stare politely into the middle distance until the noise dies down.

“Come by and help if you want!” she said finally. Sure enough, they were there with buckets and scrub brushes the following weekend.

Just beyond the overpass, Jamaica Avenue crosses into Richmond Hill, a heavily Guyanese neighborhood where roti joints are scattered among numerous street-front attractions that could easily escape the notice of a busy passer-by. There are a hobby shop at 105th Street that sells vintage Matchbox cars for a dollar; a used bookstore that specializes in baseball, military history and Judaica and is open only on Saturdays; Rubie’s Costume Shop, a vast, two-story emporium that sells everything from latex severed heads to medieval jesters’ uniforms; and at Myrtle Avenue, the wedge-shaped building, with its stained glass and carved-wood cherubs, that once housed the famous Triangle Hofbrau, the borough’s oldest continuously operating restaurant until it closed in 1999.

Curry Chicken and Tom Boy Soda

At 129th Street, where the elevated tracks veer away from Jamaica Avenue, the coziness of Richmond Hill gives way to semi-industrial blocks largely devoid of pedestrians. At 130th Street a woman desultorily pushed a cart selling flavored ice past a chain-link fence hung with soot-covered tinsel letters that spell “Season’s Greetings” — the sign’s owners apparently oblivious to the fact that Christmas was long gone.

Beyond the Van Wyck Expressway, Jamaica Avenue enters the neighborhood that shares its name, the origin of which locals are forever obliged to explain to outsiders. The name is inspired not by Caribbean Islanders, of which there are many in the vicinity, but by the Jameco Indians, of which there are now none.

As the street plunges into the neighborhood’s commercial heart, it becomes an exuberant off-brand mecca of cheap electronics stores and hip-hop apparel outlets with names like Hyperactive, Pretty Girl, Hotti Hotti and Don’t Panic. Shoppers, conveyed from far and wide on the many bus and subway lines that converge there, share crowded sidewalks with workers from the main branch of the Queens Public Library, the Social Security Administration building, various county courts and the other government buildings nearby, and with all manner of shills, proselytizers and hawkers.

Parked at a folding table near 161st Street, Michael Evans, a garrulous type in mirror sunglasses who described himself as a street author and reformed three-card-monte sharper, thrust a copy of his latest self-published novel, “Son of a Snitch,” into the hands of a wary-looking mother of two.

“That’s a $17 book on sale for $10!” Mr. Evans said. He turned to her son, who looked to be about 8: “Shorty, you got to read if you want to be a man!” After a half-minute of deliberation, the mother pulled a 20 from her wallet, whereupon Mr. Evans leaped to his feet and gave her a hug.

Not all vestiges of Jamaica’s earlier days have disappeared.

Some, like the fantastically ornate 1929 building at 165-11 Jamaica Avenue that was once the Loew’s Valencia movie palace, have been virtually engulfed by the garish awnings and signs that have metastasized across the avenue’s facades over the years.

Others have fared better. The King Manor Museum, a 200-year-old gambrel-roofed mansion, is set like a jewel within a one-block-square greensward, one of the few in this parks-deprived swath of Queens. Just up the street, in a prim corner building free of loud ornament, sits Klingbeil Shoe Labs, a 50-year-old artisan’s workshop where top figure skaters, including Sasha Cohen and Emily Hughes, still go to be fitted with custom-made boots.

Beyond Merrick Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue takes on a local flavor again, with a heavy accent on Central America and the Caribbean. At tiny Kassim’s, one of the many West Indian and Guyanese lunch counters that dominate the culinary landscape east of Woodhaven, a huge variety of curry and rice dishes are on offer, along with more than a dozen curiously named baked goods, including butter flaps, tennis rolls, chester cakes, pine tarts and cassava pone. The curry chicken at Kassim’s was sweet and tender, and went nicely with a Tom Boy raspberry soda — “As Famous as Kaieteur Falls,” says the label.

As you advance east toward the neighborhood of Hollis, Jamaica Avenue widens out and quiets down, and worthy distractions are harder to find, unless car transmissions or hair braiding happens to be your thing. But at 176th Street, near the avenue’s eastern edge, a bright yellow facade inscribed with the words “Afrikan Poetry Theater” provides a break in the drabness of the low-rise streetscape. On the walls of the building’s cool, wood-paneled vestibule hang portraits of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, and plaques bearing aphorisms like “If You Are Failing to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail.”

In the room beyond, a woman in bright blue African-print shirt and pants prowled a stage before several dozen rapt schoolchildren. “Reach up and pull down two handfuls of wisdom,” she boomed, “and give them to your neighbor!” Small hands grabbed the air as fans twirled lazily overhead.

‘Live Cricket’ and Uncle Buddy’s

Back outside, the avenue’s two- and three-story storefronts marched off in either direction across the flatness of Long Island. To the east, along the hardscrabble blocks of Hollis, gas stations and restaurant-supply stores alternate with Haitian storefront churches and Trinidadian restaurants advertising “Live Cricket” in the window — which, to an outsider’s sun-fried mind, at first evoked an exotic appetizer.

East of 225th Street, along its final mile and a half, Jamaica Avenue traverses yet another borderland, or, to be more precise, it is the border: businesses on the north side of the street bear a Queens address, and those on the south side belong to the rest of the world. Here, in the Bellerose neighborhood, Jamaica Avenue — or the Jericho Turnpike, depending on which curb you’re on — is less a street than a suburban road.

Just as one passes over the Cross Island Parkway, not far from Jamaica Avenue’s eastern terminus and a horseshoe’s toss from the Belmont Park racetrack, a shabby-looking corner bar called Uncle Buddy’s Tavern comes into view on the Nassau County side of the street. On the sign out front is a little silhouette of a martini glass. Planted on a barstool near the door at the end of a long journey, a visitor can marvel at the sight of cars turning right on red and gaze across the border at New York, contemplating the long route home.