Search

The automated public toilet at National Street and Corona Plaza in Queens -- a self-cleaning contraption that douses itself with disinfectant after each use -- is a prince among lavatories. A stone's throw from the elevated tracks of the No. 7 train, translucent panels jut from a roof topped with a pyramidal skylight. Gender-specific pictographs and Braille text adorn a panel by the door. Inside, revealed for the admission price of 25 cents, is gleaming metalwork and a machine that dispenses toilet paper while making a mewling sound like that of a small wounded animal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST When planes take off from Queens, it isn't exactly newsworthy. But the dozens of aircraft that will fly in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park on Saturday won't be the typical Boeings and Airbuses. They won't have engines, passengers or pilots, and they may travel only a matter of feet. Still, they are designed to soar right into history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on the decision of editor Kevin Boyle to start his own newspaper called "The Rockaway Times" in which the paper will be delivered to apartment buildings and houses and left in busy storefronts in Queens, New York in 2014.

This article profiles the Queens, New York-based Times Newsweekly newspaper. The Times Newsweekly is an exclusively local newspaper, focusing only on events taking place in Queens. The article examines the standing of the Times as a purely local newspaper, and notes that, while larger-scale periodicals have struggled financially during the 21st century, local newspapers such as the Times Newsweekly have thrived.

IF you're contemplating buying a home in Douglas Manor, a peninsula on Little Neck Bay in northeast Queens, be advised: your neighbors may not think of your house as yours right away. On paper it belongs to you, but in their minds it may take years until you truly succeed its old owners. ''We get that all the time,'' said Robert Cangemi, a lighting designer who moved to Douglas Manor -- a subsection of Douglaston -- with his wife, Sonia, a social worker, in 2007. Elliot G. Sander, the former chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, used to live in their black-and-white four-bedroom colonial on Warwick Avenue, which they still hear referred to as the Sander house. When it will become the Cangemi house is anybody's guess. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maria Petrik spreads brittle sheets of paper across a delicate Romanian lace tablecloth. Each page is covered with handwritten translations of words that she and her husband, Gyorgy, taught themselves after arriving in Queens two decades ago. The translations are rendered as equations, alphabetized by their native Hungarian. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At top, paper destined to be cut and folded into shape at Interstate Envelope, which has been in Queens since its founding in 1967, originally in Long Island City and, since 1974, in Maspeth. Above, envelopes in the making. The company can produce about eight million envelopes a day, said [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Isamu Noguchi's Akari paper lamps will be marked down 10 percent on the Noguchi Museum Web site from Dec. 4 to 11 (the floor lamp at left will be $765, originally $850), and 20 percent at the museum on Dec. 14; noguchi.org or 32-37 Vernon Boulevard (33rd Road), Long Island City, Queens; (718) 721-2308. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

City sanitation agents made a gruesome discovery on Monday morning while issuing summonses in Queens. As they approached a sport-utility vehicle, they saw a human foot protruding from a black plastic bag in the back seat. When investigators arrived at the scene, in Richmond Hill, they found the partly decomposed body of a man in a garbage bag inside the vehicle, which was parked at 109-54 Park Lane South, on the south side of Forest Park. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

'KITE FLIGHT: PLASTIC PLAY' Miwa Koizumi and Marco Scoffier think they have found the perfect way to dispose of all those plastic shopping bags that accumulate in landfills (not to mention households): just send them into the atmosphere. Although this may sound like a solution that would make environmentalists blanch, Ms. Koizumi and Mr. Scoffier have no intention of polluting the air. Their plans involve barbecue skewers, packing tape, string and, most important, enthusiastic children. As artists, they have devised a way to turn two or more plastic bags into a modified box kite, and they will demonstrate on Sunday as part of ''Kite Flight: Plastic Play,'' a workshop sponsored by Socrates Sculpture Park and the Noguchi Museum in Queens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reports that New York City investigators claim Audrey Murphy, a principal of Public School 16 in Queens, interfered with the grading of a statewide reading test in 2003. Potential $10,000 salary bonus riding on her pupils' scores; Alleged demand by the principal that the papers of low-performing fourth graders be re-scored with an eye toward raising their grades.