when walking around queens be watchful because you might end up in the twilight zone
that's when you are for example at 43rd avenue and you need to get to 47th avenue
well if my math serves me right 47 minus 43 equals four more avenues so if you are walking the next
avenue is 44th avenue okay that makes sense so the next crossing should be 45th avenue right wrong
it's 44th road then comes 44th drive and you're probably thinking what the hey we're already three
avenues in and haven't even gotten past 44th what happened to 45th avenue well it's up next 45th
avenue then after 45th avenue is 45th road as it turns out this is not really the twilight zone
but the reality in queens when it comes to avenues roads drives courts streets places
lanes terraces or whatever it is you want to call them and if repeating numbers weren't
enough queens has a hyphenated postal address system say what but fear not
in this video we are going to talk about the insane numbered avenues roads drives
courts streets places lanes and terraces and teach you how to interpret this hyphenated number
on an address so you can successfully navigate the borough of queens welcome to urban caffeine
if you like new yorking hit that like button and speaking of streets avenues and lanes the ocean at
the end of the lane is a book i recently finished it's written by one of my favorite authors
neil gaiman and it's available on audible neil gaiman has several audio books on audible and
i'll probably be listening to all of them you can get 30 days free while helping out this channel i
have an affiliate link in the description below audible did not sponsor this video but i do get
a small commission if you use my affiliate link now back to the avenues and streets of queens
so why do we even have these names by the time queens was brought on board as part
of new york city queens itself had already gone through a bunch of shape-shifting to what it is
now queens was the result of combining different towns together each with their own street system
so a plan was made to unify the street system of queens as a whole queens has avenues that run from
north to south and streets that run from west to east which is the opposite of the manhattan grid
i have another video that explains the manhattan grid and link to that is in the description below
but queens is weird shaped so the grid is not really continuous
if you look at the map you'll see this portion has second and third avenues and this doesn't
but continues with avenues it lines up with so they gridded this land the best they could but
some of these blocks are not the same size as your typical manhattan blocks
some of them were larger so as the population of queens grew and the borough became denser there
was a need to divide these blocks to provide more space for people and establishments so
now these new streets and avenues needed to be named because of humanity's infinite wisdom the
solution to name the extra avenues was to not name them avenues at all but instead roads and drives
and the extra streets they became places and lanes if there is one extra pathway between two avenues
it's now called a road of the same number of the lesser avenue if there are two extra pathways it's
road and then drive of the lesser avenue if there are three extra pathways it's road
then drive then terrace of the lesser avenue and if it's not a terrace the third path can
be called a court with streets if there is one extra pathway between two streets the street is
now the place of the lesser street if there are two extra pathways it's placed first then lane
and if there are three extra pathways it's place then lane then quartz easy peasy lemon squeezy
an address in the united states is pretty straightforward you have the building or
house number street it's on and if there's a need to distinguish a unit in the building as a whole
and the rest is straightforward even in manhattan addresses don't really look too foreign and i
discussed manhattan addresses in the video that i linked in the description but for queens places
have a hyphen on their address let's break this down the actual address of a place is this portion
this is the building number the street it's on and so forth this prefix number indicates the
lower street the address is sandwiched in that probably sounded like globally grouped to you
so let's learn by example arepas cafe my favorite arepas place in new york city if you haven't had
arepas yet this is your spot so if we look at the map you'll see that seven is the building number
located on 36th avenue arepas cafe is sandwiched between 33rd and 34th street since the lesser
number of the two is 33rd street then the prefix to the address is 33. another example
halsey's is a gastropub in astoria queens it's located on 33rd street in between
30th and 31st avenue since 30 is less than 31 the prefix on halsey's address is 30.
that's pretty much all i have thanks for watching and until next time happy new yorking