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Blog Posts by Subject: Queens

When They Trod the Boards: Christopher Walken, Song and Dance Man

How do we love Christopher Walken? On his 70th birthday, let us count the ways. Star of film, TV, and NYPL's own iBook Point, somehow everyone has a favorite film that stars him, be it The Deer Hunter, True Romance, or Pulp Fiction. The consummate villain, he faced off Batman and James Bond with his signature dead stare that transforms at the drop of a hat into a Rockwellesque boyish grin. By the time his fancy footwork stupefied us in Spike Jonze's Fatboy Slim video, few knew Walken was already a 30-year Broadway veteran, sharing the stage with Liza Minnelli and Raul Julia. What? Read on, share movie quotes, or just look at the pictures!

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Whispering Column of Jerash

The Whispering Column of Jerash sounds very intriguing and mysterious. What does this mean, many will ask. Are you whispering to the column or is the column whispering to you? And, more importantly where exactly is this column located...

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Jane McGonigal and NYPL present Find the Future: The Game

For 100 years, The New York Public Library's landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and its world-renowned collections have inspired people everywhere to find their futures. In honor of the Centennial Celebration, pioneering game designer Jane McGonigal helped the Library kick off its Weekend Festival with Find the Future: The Game, an all-night scavenger hunt in the Stephen A.

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Changing the Changing City

Seeking further enlightenment into the city we call home, I recently took a class on the literary and cultural history of New York City. Among the many themes common to New York City novels we discussed was the portrayal of the city itself as a character with power to shape the lives of its citizens.

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My Favorite Team

If the Super Bowl is over and it is February and there is 12 inches of snow on the ground, to me that means baseball season is just around the corner!

I’ve been a New York Mets fan right since the beginning in 1962. I was 11 years old, and I have a very strong, and good, memory of going to the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan with my father and brother during that first season. We bought tickets at the park and got seats about 10 rows behind the Mets dugout! I got the autograph of one of the Mets coaches, Cookie Lavagetto, and I never saw such a bright blue as the color of his hat along with the brilliant white of his uniform.

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The Birth of Freedom of Religion - Flushing Remonstrance, December 27, 1657

350 years ago, 30 Quaker farmers from the Flushing, Queens area signed an appeal to the governor of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, to allow them to freely practice their religion. Stuyvesant had banned all religions outside of the Dutch Reformed Church from being practiced in the colony, which led to the persecution of Quakers, among others. In response to this petition the government of New Netherland threw some of the signers in jail and replaced the government of the town of Flushing with more reasonable substitutes.

A few years later, John Bowne of Flushing (then known as Vlissingen) started to allow the Quakers to hold meetings in 

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