New York / Queens - The Delaplaine 2017 Long Weekend Guide: Long Weekend Guides

By Andrew Delaplaine

A complete guide for everything you need to experience a great Long Weekend in Queens whether your trip takes you to Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing, Forest Hills, the beach at the Rockaways or Jackson Heights.

“I’d been through Queens a hundred times on my way to Manhattan from LaGuardia. This trip I spent 2 days exploring the multi-ethnic spectrum in Queens. What a thrill.”

--- Fred G, Seattle
 

“You can experience about 50 different cultures by skipping through the various restaurants in Queen. The restaurant list in this books gives ample evidence of this fact.”

--- Jerry A., Atlanta

You'll save a lot of time using this concise guide.

=Lodgings (in several parts of town) variously priced

=Fine & budget restaurants, more than enough listings to give you a sense of the variety to be found. 

=Principal attractions -- don't waste your precious time on the lesser ones. We've done all the work for you.

=A handful of interesting SHOPPING ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gramercy Park Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536526097

Andrew Delaplaine

Delaplaine lives on South Beach, Miami’s Billion Dollar Sandbar. He writes in widely varied fields: screenplays, novels (adult and juvenile) and journalism. He also has a series of Long Weekend Guides covering some 50 cities around the world. Email: [e-mail] He writes several series: The “JACK HOUSTON ST. CLAIR” political thriller novels. “THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IV,” a series of novels starring the great-great-grandson of the famous consulting detective. “THE ANNALS OF SANTOPIA” series, an epic that follows a Santa born in 1900 through to his death 82 years later. The AMOS FREEMAN police thrillers. Other novels: “The Trap Door” follows a boy who is taken back in time to 1594 and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. “The Meter Maid Murders,” a comic look at a detective trying to nab a serial killer on South Beach who only murders meter maids. Has written and directed three features (one doc, two narrative features), as well as several short films and won several awards for his film work. (See imdb.com for details).  His latest film, “Meeting Spencer,” starring Jeffrey Tambor, won the prestigious Milan International Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay.  DELAPLAINE’S “LONG WEEKEND” GUIDES These no-nonsense guides contain Delaplaine’s recommendations and advice for travelers visiting these places for 3 or 4 days. As "The Food Enthusiast," he writes a series of restaurants guides, updated annually. He has no hobbies.

Book preview

WHY QUEENS?

Like most everybody else, my first experience with Queens was a bumpy ride through it on my way into Manhattan from LaGuardia. And it remained this way for 20 years or more.

Things changed when my friends began moving out of Manhattan into Long Island City (LIC to locals), Astoria and into Brooklyn to get breathing room, more bang for their rental buck. When I visited them, I saw they had one and two-bedroom apartments for what it cost for a cramped studio in the city.

More and more people moved out of Manhattan, just a train stop (or two) away.

As I continued to visit my friends, I got to learn a lot about Queens, and also to love its grittiness and its endless variety of ethnic restaurants. I learned that there’s more ethnic diversity here in Queens than almost anywhere else on earth. (That’s right, on earth.) These ethnic groups are clustered into various enclaves throughout the borough. You have the Indian and South Asian population concentrated in Jackson Heights, with Thai people mixing with Filipinos in Woodside, other Asians in Elmhurst, for example; the Greeks in Astoria; the Chinese in Flushing; blacks in Jamaica; the Rockaways, for generations a popular beachside resort area, is now home to a heady mix of upper-class homes as well as a large lower class population.

I also discovered Queens even had museums and other points of interest that were, well, really interesting. After all, you have to remember that over 2 million people live in Queens. When you come to appreciate that so many different ethnic enclaves exist in Queens, you’ll begin to understand it all. In many ways, this is the New Brooklyn. The gentrification hasn’t become so relentless that there still remains an edge (sometimes a sharp one) to the town that will remind a lot of people of the early phase Brooklyn went through when it hit its stride.

Over time, the borough grew