Monday, November 23, 2009

Up and Running... err... walking

Here we go, folks.

A few years back I left the blogging world after ranting about the irritating trivialities of my daily life, and rather enjoying it, while I finished college and finished graduate school.  It's not that things stopped bugging me, I guess I just lost touch with blogging, got out of the habit of it, and eventually just stopped doing it.  So I'm starting afresh now, with an actual subject rather than just whatever occurs to me in the moment.
This first post is going to be a short one to set you all (hi) up with the basics of what gave me the idea to do this.

I'm a preservationist.  History and architecture are only two of many things that I find fascinating.  I also like to go for walks.  When I go for a walk I see architecture, I mean, we all see architecture but most people don't really think about it while they walk past it.  For me it's more like "hey, those are original steel windows... look at the detail on that cornice... is that all corbelled brick or is it terracotta... etc".  It's my training, it's my life, and I hope it's not too boring for my walking companions.  I decided to go for a walk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon a month or two ago and instead of just doing some good-old wandering I thought it would be neat to try to visit actual destinations.  I set those to be the Lawrence Family Cemetary, the Pike House and the Lent Homestead, three designated landmarks.  I'll post more details about these another time.  All three of these places are privately owned, so I had no expectation of being able to go into them but I thought that at least I'd find historical markers with some identification of them, maybe even a description if I was lucky.  The best I got was at the Lent Homestead where I was able to look over the front gate and see that there was a small plaque on the front of the house noting that it was a designated landmark.  I ended that walk wanting more and so I'm going to go out and get it.

People regularly denigrate Queens for a whole host of reasons and I don't want to be part of that.  My intention here is to draw attention to the surviving history in Queens.  I hope to visit all of the designated landmarks and historic districts and see what we've got.  I'll probably end up talking about some undesignated places as well, just because I think they're neat.

So join me if you're interested... maybe we can learn something along the way...