Woodside, Queens
The neighbourhood
Woodside is a residential neighbourhood in western Queens between Sunnyside and Jackson Heights. It is where people who work in Manhattan live rather than where they visit, which is most of what is good and all of what is quiet about it.
What is actually nearby
The station, the food, and the park
- The station
- 61st Street - Woodside, four minutes' walk. The commuter railroad and the elevated line share the building, which is unusual and useful.
- To Midtown
- About thirteen minutes on the railroad to Penn Station; about twenty-five on the elevated line to Times Square.
- To the airport
- The bus from Roosevelt Avenue to LaGuardia takes about twenty minutes with no traffic.
- Eating
- Roosevelt Avenue is Filipino, Thai, Irish and Ecuadorean within four blocks, and 61st Street has the bakery everybody sends people to.
- A market
- There is a supermarket three blocks away and a greengrocer two, which matters when the house is cooking for a gathering.
- Green
- Windmuller Park is six minutes' walk. Flushing Meadows is two stops.
No business named here is one we have any arrangement with or any opinion of beyond what is written above — a kind of food or a kind of shop, not a name, because a guest house recommending a specific storefront is a step past what it actually knows.
A place people live, not a place people visit
Woodside does not have a landmark the way a neighbourhood built for visitors does. What it has instead is a short walk to a station, a route to Manhattan that is fast enough to use every day, and streets that are lived-in rather than staged for anybody passing through. That is the whole argument for staying here rather than closer to the places a guest is actually going to spend the day: the commute in is short and the street outside the door is real.
The one honest trade-off
The elevated line runs above Roosevelt Avenue and it is audible from the front of the house — the parlour's street bedroom hears it, the garden hears it faintly, and the loft faces the other way and does not. It runs all night. If a silent night matters more than anything else, the loft is the room and the back of the house is the side.
The elevated line. The elevated line runs above Roosevelt Avenue, four minutes' walk away, and it runs all night. It is audible from the front of the house and not from the loft.
See how the journey actually breaks down
Every route from the house is on its own page, with the walk, the railroad and the bus each taken in turn.