Queens

Fort Tilden, also known as Fort Tilden Historic District, is a former United States Army installation in the New York City borough of Queens and part... of Gateway National Recreation Area. It is located on the Rockaway Peninsula between Jacob Riis Park to the east and Breezy Point to the west. All three sites are operated by the National Park Service. Fort Tilden today is largely a natural area of beach, dunes and maritime forest. Most of the old military installations are abandoned, though some buildings have been renovated and are used by local arts groups. Atop one of the old batteries, Battery Harris East, is a viewing platform offering 360-degree views that encompass the city, New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. The area is popular with bird-watchers and other nature-lovers and is widely used for fishing. Following a number of temporary military installations on or near the location dating as far back as the War of 1812, and ending with Naval Air Station Rockaway , the fort was established about the time of American involvement in World War I in 1917. It is named after Samuel J.
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The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York City remains the only active airport terminal dating from the first generation of passenger... travel in the United States—the "Golden age of the flying boat." Originally built to handle sea planes, the Marine Air Terminal, an Art Deco building designed in 1939 by William Delano of the firm Delano & Aldrich, consists of a central circular core of two stories with an attic from which a rectangular entrance pavilion and two symmetrically opposed one-story wings project. Inside the terminal hangs "Flight," a mural measuring 12 feet in height and 237 feet in length, the largest mural created as part of the Great Depression-era Works Projects Administration . Completed by James Brooks in 1940, "Flight" depicts the history of man's involvement with flight. The mural was painted over without explanation by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey in the 1950s, possibly because some saw left-wing symbolism in it. After an extensive restoration project headed by aviation historian Geoffrey Arend, the mural was rededicated on September 18, 1980.
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The John Bowne House is an historic home located in Flushing, Queens, New York. Built around 1661, it was the location of a Quaker meeting in 1662... that resulted in the arrest of its owner, John Bowne. Since 1947, Bowne House has been a museum. The house stands at #1 Bowne Street at 37th Avenue in Flushing, New York. The home is a wood-frame English Colonial saltbox, notable for its steeply pitched roof with three dormers. The house was altered several times over the centuries, and several generations of the Bowne family lived in the house until 1945, when the family deeded the property to the Bowne Historical Society. Bowne House reportedly served as a stop on the Underground Railroad prior to the American Civil War. Archaeological investigations have been conducted by Dr. James A. Moore of Queens College, City University of New York. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
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King Manor, also known as the Rufus King House, is in Jamaica, Queens. It was the home of Rufus King, a signer of the United States Constitution, a... Senator from New York, and Ambassador to Great Britain immediately after the American Revolution. It is located at 150th Street and Jamaica Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974.
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The Noguchi Museum, chartered as The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, was designed and created by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu... Noguchi in 1985 to preserve and display his sculptures, architectural models, stage designs, drawings, and furniture designs. The two story museum and adjacent sculpture, located in Long Island City section of Queens, one block from the Socrates Sculpture Park, underwent major renovations in 2004 allowing the museum to stay open year round. The museum is a two story 24,000 square feet building with an attached outdoor sculpture garden. There are 12 galleries within the museum. There is a gift shop. To house the museum, in 1974 Noguchi purchased a photogravure plant and gas station located across the street from his studio, where he had worked and lived since 1961. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum opened to the public in 1985 on a seasonal basis. In 1999 the Foundation Board approved a $13.5 million Capital Master Plan to address structural concerns, ADA and NYC Building Code compliance and create a new public education facility.
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The Queens County Farm Museum is located on 47 acres of the New York City neighborhood of Glen Oaks, Queens. The address is 73-50 Little Neck... Parkway, Floral Park, New York, 11004. This historic farm occupies the city's largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland , and is still a working farm today. The site features restored farm buildings from three different centuries, a greenhouse, planting fields, livestock, and various examples of vintage farm equipment. Queens Farm practices sustainable agriculture and has a four-season growing program. The museum includes the Adriance Farmhouse which is a New York City Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. Free guided tours of the farmhouse are offered to the public Saturdays and Sundays year-round. Hayrides are offered on weekends from April thru October. An on-site seasonal farmstand featuring Queens Farm vegetables takes place every Wednesday thru Sunday from June thru October. For more information on public programs at Queens County Farm Museum, visit http://www.queensfarm.org.
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The Lewis H. Latimer House, also called the Latimer House or the Lewis Latimer House, was constructed in the Queen Anne style of architecture between... 1887 and 1889 by the Sexton family. It served as the home of the African-American inventor Lewis Howard Latimer from 1903 to 1928, and is now operated as a museum dedicated to the inventor's work. The house remained property of the Latimer family until 1963. Currently, the Lewis H. Latimer House is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, operated by the Lewis H. Latimer Fund, Inc., and is a member of the Historic House Trust. It is located at 34-41 137th Street in Flushing, New York. Originally located on Holly Avenue, the Latimer House was moved to its current home in Leavitt Field in 1988 when threatened by demolition. It was designated as a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1995 following a hearing.
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Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a... non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets , Taxi Driver , Raging Bull , and Goodfellas – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed , having been nominated a previous five times. Martin Scorsese grew up in New York City.
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Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum... electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics . For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
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Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character... recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence , transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Later in high school he created a pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles.
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and... widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo. Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record. Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
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Assata Olugbala Shakur is an African-American activist and escaped convict who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army .... Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was accused of several crimes and made the subject of a multi-state manhunt. In May 1973 Shakur was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, during which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur were killed and Shakur and Trooper James Harper were wounded. Between 1973 and 1977, Shakur was indicted in relation to six other alleged criminal incidents—charged with murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping—resulting in three acquittals and three dismissals. In 1977, she was convicted of the first-degree murder of Foerster and of seven other felonies related to the shootout. Shakur was then incarcerated in several prisons, where her treatment drew criticism from some human rights groups. She escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba in political asylum since 1984.
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Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon &... Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998. Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007.
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Carlton Douglas Ridenhour , better known by his stage name, Chuck D, is an American rapper, author, and producer. He helped create politically and... socially conscious rap music in the mid-1980s as the leader of the rap group Public Enemy. Ridenhour was born in Queens, New York. After graduating from Roosevelt Junior-Senior High School, he went to Adelphi University on Long Island to study graphic design. He is the son of Lorenzo Ridenhour. Upon hearing Ridenhour's demo track "Public Enemy Number One", fledgling producer/upcoming music-mogul Rick Rubin insisted on signing him to his Def Jam label. Their major label albums were: Yo! Bum Rush the Show , It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back , Fear of a Black Planet , Apocalypse 91 The Enemy Strikes Black , Greatest Misses , and Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age . They also released a full length album soundtrack for the film He Got Game in 1998. Ridenhour also contributed to several episodes of the PBS documentary series The Blues.
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Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a... non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets , Taxi Driver , Raging Bull , and Goodfellas – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed , having been nominated a previous five times. Martin Scorsese grew up in New York City.
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Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character... recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence , transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Later in high school he created a pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles.
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and... widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo. Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record. Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
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John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has... hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer. He has had experience with a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music. Zorn brings these styles to his work, which he refers to with the label avant-garde/experimental. Zorn has stated: "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there." Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City and the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada, composed Masada Songbooks , and has produced music for film and documentary. Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid 1970s and has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas.
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Deborah "Debi" Mazar is an American actress, perhaps best known for her Jersey Girl-type roles; as sharp-tongued women in independent films; and for... her recurring role as press agent Shauna Roberts on the HBO series Entourage. Mazar was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, the daughter of Nancy and Harry Mazar. Her father was born in the Latvian SSR, Soviet Union, from a Jewish family, but raised in the Roman Catholic Church. She had no knowledge of this ethnic heritage until her twenties. Her mother was raised a Roman Catholic, briefly converted to Judaism, then became a Buddhist, and later joined Jehovah's Witnesses until she was disfellowshipped for taking a blood transfusion. Mazar began her career as a hip hop b-girl in New York City. Her first television appearance was on the pilot for a hip hop television dance show, Graffiti Rock in 1984. She appeared in five of Madonna's music videos -– "Papa Don't Preach," "True Blue" , "Justify My Love" , "Deeper and Deeper" and "Music" .
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