Thousands of jubilant Astorians and Long Island City residents jammed the streets and sidewalks of a Greek Cathedral- stopping traffic and bringing part of Astoria to a virtual standstill as they strained to see and hear the spiritual leader of more than 250 million Greek Orthodox Christians. With Greek flags waving and the crowd cheering, His All Holiness Dimitrios, Archbishop […]

They came in wheelchairs and on crutches for the past week, and upwards of 5,000 visited St. Irene Chrysovalantou Greek Orthodox Church in Astoria to see the church’s patron saint’s tear-stained icon. One of the visitors, Anna Konstantinidis, from North Bergen, New Jersey, related: “I believe in St. Irene. My mother (deceased) has a picture of her on her tomb. […]

In what may have been his last public appearance before retiring at the end of this month, Archbishop Iakovos told thousands of worshippers last Sunday that they and their church would triumph over evil “because we believe in him who is the victory”, he said. The archbishop’s 37-year reign as head of the Greek Orthodox archdiocese of North and South […]

Although the Greek Orthodox Church in America encompasses 1.5 million members in about 450 parishes, the newly installed Archbishop of America, Archbishop Spyridon, chose the Greek Orthodox Shrine Church of St. Nicholas in Bayside to celebrate his first vesper services after being enthroned as the new leader of the church in America. The church, at 196-10 Northern Blvd., is the […]

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C, a father explained to his son that 58,209 names on the long, black, angular wall stood for the people our country sent to the war in Vietnam and were killed. The son looked at the wall from side to side and up and down, then his eyes stopped and focused on me. […]

Aligning its theme with New York City’s 100-year centennial celebration of the consolidation of New York, the Queens Astoria Historical Society launched its first meeting of the season with “New York The Way It Was: Queens,” a video presentation looking at life in this borough from the 1930s through the 1960s. It was Andrew Hessel Green’s idea of promoting harbors, […]

Geraldine Ferraro in a recent photo. In the earliest days of the Western Queens Gazette in 1982, the newest kid on the block was doing exactly what it was expected to do- reporting the news, the local news- in Long Island City, Hunters Point, Dutch Kills, Ravenswood; Ditmars, Astoria West, Old Astoria, Steinway and Jackson Heights, according to its masthead. […]

“Is this a park?” the little boy was overheard asking his grandfather. “Yes, Jimmy. It’s a sculpture park, and you’re allowed to climb on many of the things that you see here,” he was told. Sunday in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City on the afternoon of Sept. 29th was a family day- a day for exploring and […]

Get into a conversation with a long-time Queens resident and you’re likely to discover a subscriber of the Long Island Star-Journal, a daily paper that informed the community about local and world news until it folded in 1968. A banner across the Star-Journal masthead reminded readers that the newspaper’s name came from the merger of the Long Island Daily Star […]

Exploring The Universe Of Human Endeavor Western Queens Gazette October 20, 1999 “People are always striving to see something new,” former Cosmonaut Viktor Savinykh told a group of students during a recent visit to the College of Aeronautics to explain the nearly universal urge of human beings to explore the cosmos. Savinykh, the veteran of three space flights amounting to […]