And "The Most Beautiful Building in Queens" Award Goes To...
Only in the 1930s, it would seem, could a laundry on 37th Avenue east of 43rd Street in Long Island City be named the “most beautiful building in Queens.” Curvilinear lines, perfectly symmetrical design, and a huge clock above the front entrance earned the “Beautiful Building” accolade from the Queens Chamber of Commerce soon after its…
Only in the 1930s, it would seem, could a laundry on 37th Avenue east of 43rd Street in Long Island City be named the “most beautiful building in Queens.”
Curvilinear lines, perfectly symmetrical design, and a huge clock above the front entrance earned the “Beautiful Building” accolade from the Queens Chamber of Commerce soon after its opening in 1936. It was quite modernistic for its time and its design would be echoed in the futuristic buildings featured in the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.
The Knickerbocker Laundry, and later, Naarden Fragrances, occupied the structure until 1986 when it began a slow slide into utter oblivion and disrepair. I first encountered it when riding past on the north side of the Long Island Rail Road in 1993, and it was seemingly crumbling away at that point.
The New York Presbyterian Church, with a primarily Korean congregation, purchased the building after hopes faded that it would become a shopping center, and as you can see, renovated it from stem to stern. Very few of its original Streamline Moderne Le Corbusier-ish touches remain…
…though the curved corners and etched designs on the concrete and cast stone facade do remain on the left and right sides of the building.
The quote from the Old Testament’s Book of Lamentations 1:12 above the front entrance could be interpreted as a challenge to bored commuters riding past on the Long Island Rail Road. The full quote reads:
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me, that the Lord brought on me in the day of his fierce anger?”
Traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah, the Lamentations were written to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC.
Kevin Walsh’s website is Forgotten New York. His book, with the same name, is also available.
When did this sign come down?
The Knickerbocker Laundry was described in Christopher Gray’s book “Changing New York.” This book was about roughly 100 buildings around the city that were endanger of the wrecking ball that the author implied were worth saving and was written in 1992. While the middle of the Knickerbocker Laundry is badly mangled, it’s not a total loss like some other buildings in the book that are worth getting a handkerchief ready when you find out they met the wrecking ball, even after an authority figure implied they had merit.