Karl Heidenreich                                          ACEFilmCo.com                                          Contact: acefilmco@aol.com     

Revisiting  Queens, New York City in N-Scale   11/2024

Original Article Sept 2016

To an outsider, the details of everyday life in Queens are culturally dominated by the overwhelming presence of Manhattan.

Most people who are from the surrounding suburbs, rural areas, and even from the four 'outer boroughs' consider only Manhattan to be truly synonymous with 'New York' and 'the City.'

Most people who have not lived in the 'outer boroughs' - whether they are from Manhattan or from a suburban or rural area - only know The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island at all due to driving through them on a trip to somewhere else.

For Queens, that would be to the Long Island beaches or the airports.

For others, their sole knowledge comes from some of the culturally iconic films, such as 'Goodfellas' (Queens) and 'French Connection' (Some of it in Brooklyn), and 'A Bronx Tale.'  That's kind of like saying that you learned to swim from watching 'Jaws.'

During my childhood, residents of Queens were considered (untruthfully), by the Manhattan intelligentsia, to be rednecks on small plots of land (such as Archie Bunker).

Later, Queens became synonymous with the mob and particularly John Gotti, who had a social club down the block from where I worked.

The reality is that Queens was ( and still is) a collection of small urban towns, each with a rich history and identity, connected to each other and to 'the City' by rail, road and bus, and populated by the most diverse collection of peoples ever assembled in human history.

Yet, the fact that a model entitled 'Queens, NYC' is visually dominated by the Manhattan skyline is not far from reality.

As it says in an article about this layout (N-Scale Magazine, 2017) this project was conceived as a more-or-less present-day representation of my experiences.  A memoir in 1:160 scale if you will.  In the time it took to complete this project (1991 - present) my wife and I have raised three children to successful adulthood, welcomed a grandchild into our family, and long-since semi-retired to a rural area.

Also in that time, Jahn's (the ice cream parlor), Lewis of Woodhaven (the old-school hardware/housewares store) and the iconic Redbird trains have all long since disappeared.

I also recently heard that the gifted and talented program I helped start, at an obscure NYC middle school, in a lower income area, a program which helped send newly arrived immigrant children on to medical school, Broadway and West Point, among many other destinations, has been abolished.

For 'Queens, New York City in N-Scale,' what began as present-day has morphed into a nostalgia project for a city long lost.

Except in memory.                                                                                                                                 KH 11/2021