The Neighborhood That Has Been Here the Whole Time

The blocks around 30th Avenue on a Friday evening are one of the more reliable arguments for living in Queens. Not because of any single bar or restaurant, but because of the accumulated layers: the Greek coffee shops that have been operating for forty years alongside the Bangladeshi grocers that opened five years ago, the music from competing storefronts on Steinway Street, the Astoria Park crowd walking back from the waterfront after dark. Astoria is not a neighborhood that was discovered. It was always here.

Ditmars Boulevard at the northern end operates at a different register than 30th Avenue: quieter, more residential, lined with the kinds of Greek tavernas and family restaurants that do not need reviews because the regulars have been coming for decades. Steinway Street between them is one of the densest commercial strips in the outer boroughs, carrying everything from furniture to hookah lounges to the kind of Egyptian social clubs that occupy the upper floors of otherwise ordinary buildings. The neighborhood transitions block by block in ways that reward paying attention.

Kaufman Astoria Studios and the Museum of the Moving Image

Kaufman Astoria Studios has been producing film and television in the same complex since 1920. The Marx Brothers made films here. The Army Signal Corps used it during World War II. Today the same building houses major Hollywood productions and the permanent home of Sesame Street. The Museum of the Moving Image, occupying a building adjacent to the studios, is one of the finest media and film museums in the world, with permanent collections covering the entire history of cinema and television alongside a program of screenings that rivals most dedicated film theaters.

The creative industry presence that the studios and museum represent gives Astoria a professional layer that most outer borough neighborhoods lack. It is one of the reasons the neighborhood has attracted the particular mix of artists, writers, and film workers who have been here long enough to feel like locals.