The Monkey poses on a pier by the City Lights apartment complex, one of Queens' first skyscrapers. The gantry (used to load rail cars onto ships) announces that this is Long Island, location of New York City's two largest boroughs (Brooklyn and Queens), and beyond the city limits many of its suburbs. Queens is a fascinating place to explore. It is considered the most ethnically diverse "city" in the world, with enclaves of immigrants and naturalized residents from every conceivable corner of the globe among its 2.2 million inhabitants. These communities make Queens a wild mosaic of peoples, with the requisite benefits of interesting restaurants, shops, and unforeseen cultural interactions. A survey of the newspapers on any Queens subway ride will reveal not just English and Spanish but also Korean, Arabic, French, Hindi, Italian, Greek, Russian, Portuguese, and a plethora of other languages.

Unlike Brooklyn and Manhattan, concentrated towns from the earliest days of Dutch colonization, Queens developed as a series of separate rural villages. This contributed to the borough's difficulty in asserting a unified "Queens-ness" akin to Brooklyn's sharply-defined identity once it was incorporated into New York City in 1898. Though its urbanization was fueled by immigration throughout the 19th Century, Queens really boomed after the First and Second World Wars, as families found affordable housing unavailable elsewhere in New York City. This also continues to make it a magnet for new immigrant groups.

Settled by the Dutch in 1646, Brooklyn was an independent city from 1834 until its incorporation as one of the five boroughs of New York City in 1898. At that point, Brooklyn was the third largest city in the United States and even today, as the most populous borough, Brooklyn would retain third place (after Los Angeles and Chicago) if New York City’s boroughs counted as individual cities (a fact nostalgic Brooklyners are fond of pointing out).

Here, the Monkey takes a gander at one of the elegant 19th Century brownstone townhouses of Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. This neighborhood on a bluff overlooking New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan has long been one of the wealthiest quarters of the city (whether Brooklyn or New York). Well-off merchants tended to prefer the serenity of neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights to the bustle and overcrowding of Manhattan, where the busy docks and trading houses were concentrated. Before the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, a ferry service connected Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, but it was really the coming of the first subway to Brooklyn in 1908 that allowed its laboring masses to take jobs in Manhattan’s booming economy while living further out in Brooklyn. While patrician Brooklyn Heights bears little resemblance to most of Brooklyn, it is one of the oldest and most unique neighborhoods in the borough.

While wandering through the streets of Long Island City, Queens, the Monkey came across Joe Colletti's Titanic House. This private home on a residential street is a bizarre shrine to the RMS Titanic, the "practically unsinkable" oceanic liner that sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912 after striking an iceberg.

One of Queens' biggest ethnic enclaves is the Greek community of Astoria. Astoria is home to the largest concentration of Greeks outside Greece itself. Greek groceries, restaurants, cafes, churches, football clubs, and businesses are everywhere in Astoria. Here the Monkey drops by Astoria's Lefkos Pyrgos Cafe, which is named for the early medieval defensive tower in Thessaloniki, Greece (which the Monkey has also visited). Though Greeks are the most established group in Astoria, the neighborhood has an "only in New York" mix, with significant populations of Italians, Czechs, Brasilians, Ecuadorans, Croats, Indians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Mexicans, Irish, and other immigrant groups. The Monkey picked up some tulumbas for dessert after posing for this shot.

Perched atop a fire hydrant, the Monkey inspects a two-tiered section of highway running beneath the bluff of Brooklyn Heights. The photo illustrates the mid 20th Century struggle between forces that sought to make urban areas more car-friendly and those that resisted the bulldozing and paving-over of city spaces. From the 1920s through the 1950s, New York State and municipal planner Robert Moses was charged with the not necessarily compatible tasks of upgrading transport infrastructure and improving state and city parklands.

Brash and self-confident, Moses pushed through countless projects, some of which were commendable (the expansion of state parks and beaches, the building of urban playgrounds, the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs), and others of which were controversial (the incessant highway building, the neglect of public transport systems, the leveling of low-income neighborhoods in favor of high-rise housing, particularly in The Bronx). It was only the vociferous protests and wealth of Brooklyn Heights residents that kept their historic neighborhood from being plowed over by a stretch of Moses’ Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) in the 1940s; the compromise solution was this wedding-cake highway with a pedestrian promenade on the top level.

The Monkey visits Saint Markella Church in Astoria, Queens, one of several Greek Orthodox churches serving Astoria's large Greek community.

The Bronx is the only non-island borough of New York City. Founded by Swedish settlers in 1639, the Bronx came into New York's orbit through the extension of the various railroads that cross it. Underacknowledged (even by the Monkey thus far), the Bronx is home to many of New York's popular destinations, including The Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden, and Yankee Stadium, as well as numerous ethnic neighborhoods. Here the Monkey visits The Bronx's Fordham University, founded in 1841.

The Monkey waits to board the New York Subway's 7 Train, which goes from Main Street in Flushing, Queens to Times Square, Manhattan, and covers a good deal of Queens in the process. Most of the 7 is elevated, meaning the tracks are above ground. The first elevated line in New York was built in 1867, and the first official underground line opened in 1904. Initially, the lines were privately owned, but the city took control of the various lines in 1953.

The Monkey visits the grounds of one of the most interesting museums in New York City, the Isamu Noguchi Museum. Housed in the prolific Japanese-American scultpor's former studio in Queens, the museum has a large collection of Noguchi's works. In the garden, the Monkey inspected Noguchi's Helix of the Endless (1985), inspired by the artist's Romanian mentor, Constantin Brancusi (see the Monkey's photo of Brancusi's Endless Column here).

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