1ST AVENUE
Geographic Setting
Northern Boulevard is one of Queens’ defining east–west arteries—a sweeping commercial and transportation corridor that runs nearly 11 miles from the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City to the Nassau County line near Little Neck Parkway. Following a broad diagonal course across the borough’s northern expanse, it connects an extraordinary range of neighborhoods: Long Island City, Astoria, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, Flushing, Bayside, and Douglaston–Little Neck.
The boulevard’s character changes dramatically along its route. Near the East River, it is dense, urban, and industrial—lined with auto dealerships, warehouses, and the approaches to major bridges. Through central Queens, it transforms into a lively main street of immigrant commerce, flanked by Latin American bakeries, Korean grocers, Indian restaurants, and Chinese markets. East of Flushing, it widens into a suburban avenue shaded by trees and lined with small businesses, synagogues, and 20th-century homes.
Northern Boulevard’s geography mirrors Queens itself: diverse, multi-layered, and constantly in motion—a living document of the borough’s transformation from farmland to global crossroads.
Etymology
The name Northern Boulevard derives from its position as the northern counterpart to Queens Boulevard, which runs roughly parallel several miles to the south. Originally laid out in the 19th century as Jackson Avenue and later extended as the North Hempstead Turnpike, the roadway was renamed Northern Boulevard in the early 1920s to reflect its growing importance as a modern automobile route. The new name also reflected its trajectory: a road skirting the northern edge of Queens’ settled districts, leading eastward toward Long Island’s North Shore.
The renaming symbolized progress. “Boulevard” suggested modernity and prestige, while “Northern” placed it within the borough’s emerging transportation hierarchy—an arterial spine meant to serve a new age of mobility and suburban expansion.
The Avenue
Origins through the 19th Century: From Turnpike to Arterial Vision
Before urbanization, the path of Northern Boulevard traced older colonial routes that connected the farming villages of western Queens to the estates and harbors of the North Shore. Known variously as Jackson Avenue, Flushing Avenue, and North Hempstead Turnpike, these roads wound through fields and meadows that supplied produce to Manhattan markets.
By the mid-19th century, Jackson Avenue linked Long Island City—then an independent industrial town—to Flushing and the towns of Whitestone and Little Neck. It was a plank road, maintained by tolls collected from horse-drawn wagons carrying milk, hay, and timber. Stagecoaches and early streetcars traveled the route, and small hamlets like Woodside and Corona grew up along its course, their main streets doubling as the turnpike itself.
The incorporation of Queens into Greater New York in 1898 and the rise of the automobile era transformed this rural roadway into a civic priority. In 1910, city planners proposed widening and paving it to create a continuous modern boulevard linking the Queensboro Bridge to the eastern suburbs. The completed Northern Boulevard, officially renamed in 1921, was heralded as “the Motor Parkway of the People”—a public alternative to the private Long Island Motor Parkway to the south, designed by the city’s engineers rather than by Vanderbilt heirs.
Early 20th Century: The Automobile Age and Urban Growth
Northern Boulevard came of age in the 1920s and 1930s as Queens itself exploded with development. The opening of the Queensboro Bridge (1909) and later the Triborough Bridge (1936) made western Queens the gateway to Long Island, and Northern Boulevard quickly became its principal east–west conduit.
Auto dealerships, gas stations, and diners sprouted along its length, earning it the nickname “Automobile Row of Queens.” In Long Island City and Astoria, showrooms for Ford, Buick, and Chrysler gleamed beneath Art Deco façades, while service garages and repair shops filled the blocks behind. For many New Yorkers, Northern Boulevard was where they bought their first car—a symbol of postwar mobility and suburban aspiration.
In Jackson Heights, the boulevard formed the northern edge of one of America’s earliest planned garden communities, with elegant co-ops, shaded medians, and small plazas. South of the boulevard, new apartment houses rose in the 1930s and 1940s to accommodate the borough’s booming middle class. Eastward through Corona and Flushing, the street became a mixed corridor of shops, trolley tracks, and residential rows—a lively urban thoroughfare linking factory workers to the cultural and commercial heart of Queens.
During this era, Northern Boulevard was also a path of transformation: it carried trolley lines that connected the borough’s working-class neighborhoods to the city center, and it marked the boundary between the industrial West and the residential East—a line of motion, commerce, and exchange.
Mid–Late 20th Century: Suburban Expansion and Global Migration
The post–World War II decades reshaped Northern Boulevard yet again. As car ownership soared and suburban Long Island expanded, the boulevard became a commuter artery feeding into newly built expressways—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (1950), Grand Central Parkway, and Long Island Expressway (1958). Its intersections became landmarks of movement: the constant flow at Queens Plaza, the broad underpass at Woodside, and the vast cloverleaf at the Flushing Meadows interchange.
The auto industry’s imprint deepened. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Northern Boulevard was lined with dealerships and service centers stretching from Astoria to Bayside, many of which remain today. Neon signs, car lots, and chrome facades defined its visual identity—a mid-century streetscape of mobility and modernity.
At the same time, Queens’ population changed dramatically. Immigrants from Latin America, East Asia, and South Asia began transforming the neighborhoods along the boulevard. Jackson Heights and Corona became cultural crossroads of Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Mexicans, their bakeries and taquerías bringing new vitality to old storefronts. Flushing, once a quiet suburban town, evolved into one of the largest and most dynamic Asian communities in the United States—its segment of Northern Boulevard lined with Korean restaurants, Chinese markets, and businesses that extend far into Nassau County.
Further east, in Bayside and Douglaston, Northern Boulevard took on a suburban character of tree-lined sidewalks and family-run shops—Greek diners, Italian pizzerias, and Korean bakeries coexisting side by side. By the late 20th century, the boulevard had become a living atlas of the borough’s diversity, each mile reflecting a different world.
21st Century: Multicultural Main Street and Modern Corridor
In the 21st century, Northern Boulevard stands as one of Queens’ most vibrant and complex corridors—equal parts global marketplace, transit artery, and urban experiment. Its character shifts block by block, but its vitality is constant. In Long Island City and Astoria, old auto lots and factories have given way to residential towers, breweries, and creative workspaces, as redevelopment follows the arc of gentrification from the waterfront inward.
In Jackson Heights and Corona, the boulevard pulses with multicultural life: Colombian arepas sizzling beside Tibetan momo carts, Dominican salons next to Bangladeshi groceries, taquerías beside halal butcheries. Street festivals, parades, and food fairs spill onto the sidewalks, transforming the boulevard into an open-air theater of global Queens.
Flushing’s stretch of Northern Boulevard—arguably the most dynamic—has become the symbolic center of “Koreatown Queens.” Block after block of Korean barbecue restaurants, karaoke lounges, spas, and supermarkets serve both local residents and visitors from across the metropolitan region. The signage is polyglot—Korean, Chinese, English, Spanish—reflecting the polyphonic life of 21st-century New York.
Further east, in Bayside and Douglaston–Little Neck, the boulevard has mellowed into an urban-suburban hybrid: small shopping plazas, schools, and churches framed by maples and magnolias. Here, Northern Boulevard feels less like a highway and more like a neighborhood main street—a reminder of its origins as a rural turnpike transformed by time.
Infrastructure projects in recent years have sought to balance the boulevard’s dual identity as both major traffic corridor and local lifeline. Vision Zero safety redesigns, bus-priority lanes, and bike improvements have tamed portions of its vast width, while new residential and commercial development continues to evolve its skyline from west to east.
Spirit and Legacy
The spirit of Northern Boulevard is movement and reinvention. For two centuries, it has carried the lifeblood of Queens—from horse carts and trolleys to automobiles and subways, from immigrant merchants to global entrepreneurs. It is not one street but many: a mosaic of eras, languages, and ambitions unfolding in a single unbroken line.
Its legacy lies in its adaptability. Each generation has reshaped Northern Boulevard to fit its needs—farmers turned it into a turnpike, industrialists into an auto strip, and immigrants into a multicultural marketplace. It remains the borough’s great connector: uniting the waterfront and the suburbs, the factories of Long Island City and the temples of Flushing, the Latin street vendors of Corona and the Korean cafés of Bayside.
New York City
Use this custom Google map to explore where every neighborhood in all five boroughs of New York City is located.
The Five Boroughs
One of New York City’s unique qualities is its organization in to 5 boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. These boroughs are part pragmatic administrative districts, and part vestiges of the region’s past. Each borough is an entire county in New York State - in fact, Brooklyn is, officially, Kings County, while Staten Island is, officially Richmond County. But that’s not the whole story …
Initially, New York City was located on the southern tip of Manhattan (now the Financial District) that was once the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Across the East River, another city was rising: Brooklyn. In time, the city planners realized that unification between the rapidly rising cities would create commercial and industrial opportunities - through streamlined administration of the region.
So powerful was the pull of unification between New York and Brooklyn that three more counties were pulled into the unification: The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. And on January 1, 1898, the City of New York unified two cities and three counties into one Greater City of New York - containing the five boroughs we know today.
But because each borough developed differently and distinctly until unification, their neighborhoods likewise uniquely developed. Today, there are nearly 390 neighborhoods, each with their own histories, cultures, cuisines, and personalities - and each with residents who are fiercely proud of their corner of The Big Apple.
