Travel Tip: Astoria in Queens – A Different View of New York
Travel Tip: Astoria in Queens – A Different View of New York
By Rose Walker
Travel Tip: Astoria in Queens – A Different View of New York
Who doesn’t love New York…bright lights in Times Square, Great Restaurants, Central Park, The Statue of Liberty and all the other fantastic tourist sights? A trip to New York usually means staying and spending all your time in Manhattan, where you can do all the normal tourist things. What if you go to New York and do not go to Manhattan, but go to one of the other boroughs. My last trip to New York, I spent the entire trip in Queens, in the neighborhood of Astoria.
Astoria is about fifteen minutes away from Manhattan, but you will feel like you are in a whole other city. The neighborhood is charming with row houses, brownstones and apartments. There are streets with trees that will make you feel like you are in Vermont, instead of New York in the city where there are so much hustle and bustle, tall buildings and a sea of yellow taxis. The main streets in Astoria are Astoria Blvd, Steinway Street and 30th Avenue. The beauty of visiting Astoria is you have the best of both worlds, because you are only fifteen minutes from Manhattan where you can still be very much in the loop of all the excitement of the city, but you can also experience a homey neighborhood of neighbors, the bakery, the flower shop and beautiful trees.
I felt like I lived there instead of feeling like a visitor as I usually do when I’m in New York. I walked to 30th Ave to Brooklyn Bagel and Coffee Company to start my day with a fresh baked cinnamon and raisin bagel with strawberry crème cheese that was so thick and creamy that you needed a fork to eat it with.
After chatting with the neighborhood New Yorker’s and reading the New York Times, I decided to walk to Steinway Street where there are all types of stores, restaurants, furniture stores, banks, Starbucks and there even was a Goodwill and Salvation Army. I decided to get a manicure and pedicure, so I went into Lynn’s Nail I Salone at 32-44 Steinway Street for one of the best manicure and pedicure I have ever had and at a price of only $18.00 for both. Plus, if you come in 10 times your next visit you will get a free manicure or one free design. I would probably go there every week, if I lived in Astoria.
After walking and being pampered it was lunch time, so I headed back to 30th Ave and decided I would have lunch at Avenue Café at 35-27 30th Avenue. I happen to be in New York when the weather was great, so I sat outside at a table and ate a steak sandwich with white cheese on ciabatta bread, French fries with a glass of Riesling wine.
Sitting there people watching, Frank’s Bakery caught my eye as I watched so many people go in and out of the bakery that when I finished my lunch, I walked over to the bakery to see what they had. I’m not much of a pie person, but this bakery had every type of pie from apple, blueberry to pumpkin that was golden brown and fluffy on display that looked as if they were not even real.
That started me to wanting some cake since I’m not much of a pie person, when I found Leli Bakery at 35-14 30th Ave where there was every type of cake you could want. Since there was really no special reason to buy a cake…except I just wanted one, so I decided to buy a mini red velvet cake with butter crème frosting and a mini chocolate mouse cake with thick butter crème chocolate icing. Both cakes were so moist and light that I didn’t feel bad for buying two cakes and neither did my friends.
I decided after all that eating I needed to walk some of it off, so I walked the neighborhood looking at the different houses, went to the neighborhood dollar store, than I even went into a laundry that had a dry cleaners in the front and in the back had a laundry mat with stainless steel washers and dryers. I found a Queens Gift shop that had 4 caps for ten dollars, so I bought 4 hats with New York on it and a tee shirt with New York on it for $5.00.
By now it was dinner time and I wanted something different, so I went to a restaurant at 37th and 30th Ave called MexiBBQ. The name made me very curious because it sounded like it was Mexican and Barbeque, which it was. The restaurant was spacious where you were not sitting on the next person lap as you can be when in some New York restaurants. The menu actually had one side with all the traditional Mexican foods and the other side was a menu of barbeque that would be founded in any barbeque place. I decide to have beef brisket that came out in a bowl that was so tendered and season so well that it melted in my mouth with a side order of cornbread.
That was just one of my days in Queens, NY in the neighborhood of Astoria. This area was so nice that when I got ready to leave I actually caught the M-60 bus on Astoria Blvd that took me directly to the airport and dropped me right off at Delta to catch my flight back home. Trust me…the next time you plan a trip to New York, stay in one of the other boroughs to explore the area to blend in with the neighborhood. You will have a totally different view of one of the best cities in the world…New York.
Rose Walker
Bio:
Rose Walker is an international published freelance writer, columnist, writing instructor and owner of Rose Walker Writing Consultants where she consults with writers on traveling, movie screenplays, freelance, novels and research. She has written a five article miniseries for the British magazine, The New Writer, published over 200 articles and article on traveling for Travel Writers Exchange.
