36 Hours? In Queens, Enough Frugal Options for a Week

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The 7 train winds its way through Queens, with Manhattan as a backdrop.

This week, the New York Times Travel section is publishing its first ever 36 Hours itinerary for Queens, N.Y. As a Queens resident, I heartily endorse the weekend romp through its unique museums, wildly eclectic restaurants, energetic night life and extraordinarily affordable foot massages. As the article’s author, I must add that my feet have never felt more relaxed.

But Queens – which is generally untouched by tourists except when they arrive and depart from Kennedy or La Guardia Airports – is surely worth a visit longer than 36 hours. If it were to secede from New York City would become the fourth most-populous city in America and almost certainly its most diverse. So I’ve added a few activities – all quite affordable, typical of the borough — that didn’t quite fit into 36 Hours but that I highly recommend.

“I don’t do Queens,” a Manhattanite told me the other day. It was hardly the first time I’d heard the sentiment. That’s another reason to come to Queens: impress your New York friends. Trips to Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty may get you a roll of the eyes, but brag about enjoying a Korean spa or those tasty Ecuadorean quimbolitos, and you’ll get their attention.

Museums and Galleries

Robert Caplin for The New York Times M. Wells Dinette in Long Island City.

Manhattan is not exactly an arts desert, but Long Island City, which is just across the East River, a couple of stops on the 7 train, has a few oases of its own.

For 15 years MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s Queens branch, has counted on its summer afternoon dance parties to attract young new faces to its contemporary arts space, housed in a former public school (hence the name). This winter visitors are coming for another reason: the much-loved, short-lived restaurant M. Wells has been re-incarnated as M. Wells Dinette, a slightly less indulgent celebration of creative and often elaborate Québécois-inspired cooking. It hews to museum hours, which means no dinner service, and no service at all on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but is a great lunch spot just steps from the Court House Square stop on the 7. Prices aren’t dirt-cheap, but one could easily concoct a meal for, say, $30 or so.

Oh yeah, there’s art at PS1 too (suggested admission, $10). The Web site notes its devotion to “the most experimental art in the world,” which seems boastful. But the exhibitions are consistently mind-bending and provocative. Just this weekend, I saw Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s Byzantine-influenced, kitsch-inspired, gay-sexuality-referencing mixed-media creations, then tried to figure out pieces by Margaret Lee that combined vegetables with telephones, and finally wandered through an exhibition on the African-American arts scene in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1980. I’m a finicky (read: easily bored) museum-goer, but lingered much longer than I had planned.

Walking out of PS1, I couldn’t help noticing tiny Space Womb across the street, a testament to the effectiveness of painting neon-pink amoebic figure on your storefront. Inside the gallery I found some of the most affordable original art imaginable in its exhibition “Postcard,” mostly from youngish Asian artists. Pieces – not surprisingly, the size of a postcard — are on sale for as low as $20 (and many for under $100).

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The Noguchi Museum in Astoria.

The Noguchi Museum (admission, $10) is the other must-visit cultural spot, and it couldn’t be anywhere but in Long Island City — in fact, across the street from the spot where the 20th-century sculptor Isamu Noguchi lived and worked. Noguchi, who died in 1988, himself designed the outdoor sculpture garden and indoor exhibition space, and they are filled with his curvy, abstract stonework. It’s important to visit on a nice day, in order to best take in the outdoor space. While you’re there, hop across the street to the Socrates Sculpture Park, formerly an illegal dumpsite along the East River and now a free sculpture garden smack on the East River.

Indulging

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Spa Castle in College Point.

Relaxing in Queens is not all about $22 foot massages. For $35 on weekdays and $45 on weekends, you can spend all day at Spa Castle, courtesy of one of Queens’s biggest immigrant groups, the Koreans. The four-story building in College Point (with a free shuttle from Flushing) attracts a cross section of Queens to its wild variety of saunas, including one lined with plates of gold, and another that uses color therapy “to help you achieve your desired state of well-being” (results not guaranteed). There are also elaborate hot tubs, with acupressure jets, both indoors and out, and plenty of massages and treatments. There’s even sushi, Korean and other fare and Starbucks coffee. (Don’t worry – the place is immaculately clean.) Massages, treatments and food and drink are extra.

The Walk-and-Eat

Don’t miss a Queens specialty: the walk-and-eat neighborhood stroll. After skipping breakfast, pick a neighborhood (especially in northwest Queens), start walking and see what you find. Stop at newsstands to see what language papers are for sale, peek into the shops selling religious icons, wonder what a fishing tackle store is doing under the 7 train, keep a running count of displays of burkas versus too-tight spandex. But more than anything else, eat. I gave one route through Jackson Heights in the 36 Hours piece, but there are countless others. Here are three possibilities.

Astoria

From the Noguchi Museum you can stroll up Broadway (the Queens version) into Astoria, a hodgepodge of ethnicity with a reasonable dose of gentrification. You’ll see a mix of restaurants from Greek to Brazilian to Middle Eastern. One recent day I was drawn to Pão de Queijo by the Brazilian style hamburger ($6.25 and up), which are less known for meat quality and more for their toppings. The X-tudo, for example, has ham, cheese, bacon, egg, calabresa sausage, corn, potato sticks, lettuce, tomato … what were we talking about again? Another day my favorite food stop was at Astoria Bier & Cheese, which opened in late September. For local residents, it’s shopping that saves a trip to Manhattan, but more relevant for visitors are the $7 sandwiches, including a grilled cheese made with holzhofer (a tangy Swiss with a punch) and beautiful melted buttery toasted bread. On a cold, rainy evening it went great with an $5 Bear Republic Big Black Bear Stout.

Woodside

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times La Flor Bakery and Cafe, under the 7 train in Woodside.

I always liked how the area around Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside somehow managed a homey feel even as 7 trains rattled overhead. Get off at the 52nd Street stop and you’ll immediately find La Flor, a warm, welcoming, full-functioning restaurant and bakery that succeeds in combining elegant Mexican dishes with homey continental fare. Ordering frugally is a bit of a challenge, but a plate of chicken flautas (rolled-up-and-fried tortillas) presented prettily under a blanket of red and green salsa ($6.95) and a rich, dense flan ($5.95) made for a light meal.

Might as well keep it light in case Ñaño’s, the Ecuadorean restaurant across the street, has a tempting sandwich-oard sign out front as it did when I visited recently, advertising “morocho,” “humitas” and “quilombitos.” In Queens, when you don’t recognize a dish’s name, the appropriate thing to do is to try it. I passed on the morocho, a hot corn-based drink, but tried the other two tamale-like dishes. The humita – steamed corn cake with cheese – beat out the raisin-studded quilombito. (A tip: Don’t wash it down, as I did, with a cloying Tropical brand apple soda.) The total bill was $8, plus tip. If you still have room, there are plenty of Irish pubs in the area to grab a pint. Head west and you’ll hit Donovan’s, best known for its city-famous burgers; head east, onto Skillman Avenue, and you’ve got your pick of the Kettle and the Brogue.

Flushing

New York’s best Chinatown is also its best Koreatown, and adventures abound in all directions. (Window-shopping for ginseng root alone could kill an hour.) But if you need direction, I’d suggest starting at the Flushing branch of the Queens Library (near the Main Street stop of the 7 train), a striking dose of blue-green glass modernity in the midst of the bustle. Wander in to see how packed it gets, to count how many languages DVDs come in or just to browse the manga collection. Finish at the massive Korean supermarket H-Mart (29-02 Union Street), just over a mile away. What will you find in between? Who knows? But it will be interesting — that’s a Queens guarantee.