Feature

The Queens 50

45 Walk among the crypts. Across a broad swath of southern Queens, from Blissville to Woodhaven, lie a dozen or so cemeteries that once earned this part of the borough the name “City of the Dead.” But don’t let that put you off: Each of these grassy, tree-shaded fields of rest—from bucolic Mount Olivet Cemetery to the impossibly dense rows of Hebrew-inscribed headstones of Mount Zion Cemetery, both in Maspeth—offers a contemplative reprieve from the din of city life.

46 See art movies for less. Here’s the movie-museum-membership tale of the tape: In this corner, Film Forum, where $65 will allow you to shave a mere $5 off a $10 ticket. In the other, the Museum of the Moving Image (36th St. at 35th Ave., Astoria; 718-784-4520), where a modest $50 gets you in free to all screenings. Are they even fighting in the same class? No trailers, either.

47 Get it “Thai-spicy.” For years, Sripraphai (64-13 39th Ave., Woodside; 718-899-9599) has been the defiantly delicious rebuttal to complaints that you can’t get good Thai food in New York. A recent, relatively glitzy expansion gave some pause—would a dressed-up Srip become a watered-down victim of its own success? Not at all: The pad might be fancier, but not the pad Thai.

Kitsch nirvana at Newman Gifts.

48 Overdose on kitsch. A typically modern New Yorker might not swoon when she walks into Newman Gifts (78-03 37th Ave., Jackson Heights; 718-429-3413)—but it’s a good bet her grandmother will. The store is a veritable temple of preciousness, renowned nationwide among collectors of Lenox crystal, Capodimonte figurines, and Stangl pottery. Kitsch doesn’t come cheap: A three-inch-high accordion-playing child by Hummel—one of hundreds of cherubic faces staring down hauntingly from glass cases—will set you back $245. For Grandpa, there’s a surprisingly wide selection of porcelain topless nymphs.

49 Witness the last days of Shea Stadium. Before it all comes down in 2009—if it actually does, now that the Olympics are gone—enjoy the decayed 1964 World’s Fair ambience, the prehistoric scoreboard, the lame lit-up apple out in center field, and the encrusted layers of grease.

50 Really get away from it all. An incongruous, end-of-the-Earth solitude descends as you enter Hermon A. MacNeil Park (Poppenhusen Ave. at 115th St., College Point), a shady 29-acre peninsula in remote northwest Queens. You’re four miles from the nearest subway station and a world away from the bustle of Manhattan, which looms in the hazy distance across the East River. And yet the roar of modernity is so close you can literally feel it: A mere 7,500 feet of sparkling water separates the park from La Guardia’s Runway 4-22.