Best Streets to Live on in Queens

Queens holds a dozen or so A-graded streets, on a par with Brooklyn and nowhere near Manhattan. Two of the top four are tower addresses, so the building counts are here too.

Long Island City holds half of them. Queens Street grades 97 and Orchard Street 96, and both are single developments rather than blocks: 2 buildings holding 1,090 homes on Queens Street, one building holding 824 on Orchard Street. Hunter Street grades 85 across 10 buildings, with Jackson Avenue at 83, Pearson Street at 81 and Malt Drive at 82. Five of those six carry transit scores of 97 or better, a reading no other part of Queens reaches.

Jamaica Estates is the eastern exception, and it holds one of the strongest ordinary streets in the borough. Highland Avenue grades 83 across 90 buildings, on a quiet score of 95 and a cleanliness score of 96. Its ZIP code averages 46.

Elmhurst does not turn up on lists like this one. Vietor Avenue grades 86, a point behind Highland Avenue, with quiet at 97 and traffic safety at 96, in a neighborhood usually filed under dense and busy.

Woodside, Ridgewood and Astoria hold the deepest middle: 39th Drive at 80, Catalpa Avenue at 81, 28th Street at 79 and 52nd Street at 78.

Eastern Queens does not place. Little Neck's 11362 averages 45 overall, Bayside's 11361 51 and Forest Hills' 11375 56, all under Long Island City's 62. The quiet scores out there hold up, the traffic-safety scores do not, and the access half of the grade barely registers.

The table below is ordered by the transit-access score, which runs from 70 in Elmhurst down to 8 in Little Neck. The overall column barely moves against it. Every ZIP code here except South Jamaica lands within fifteen points of every other in the overall column, so the wide spread in transit access barely shows up there. Glen Oaks averages 83 on quiet and 74 on cleanliness with a transit average of 13, and it grades level with Rego Park, which has a transit average of 61. The west wins on the ceiling more than on the average: the borough's highest-graded blocks are concentrated in Long Island City, whose ZIP code averages 62 against 51 in Bayside.

The blocks that beat their neighborhood beat it on the quiet score. Vietor Avenue grades 86 in an Elmhurst ZIP code averaging 48 on quiet, and MacNish Street a few blocks away grades 77. In Flushing, Barclay Avenue grades 73 with quiet at 90 and cleanliness at 91. In Astoria, 28th Street grades 79 with quiet at 92 and a tree count of 93.

The floors are the arterials and the blocks they run past. Borden Avenue grades 37 on a traffic-safety score of 1, inside the same ZIP code as the borough's two best-graded addresses. Northern Boulevard grades 44 on a traffic-safety score of 22, Steinway Street 53 on 27, and Welling Court in Astoria is the lowest-graded block in the four Astoria ZIP codes at 31.

Jamaica is the one part of the borough that is short on access and short on block scores at the same time, and it holds the widest spread: Highland Avenue grades 83 in 11432 and the weakest graded block in 11434 reads in the teens. Through the rest of Queens the two halves of the grade move in opposite directions as you go east. The blocks get quieter and cleaner and the access scores fall away, and in the overall column the two roughly cancel.

Queens holds 244 blocks scoring 85 or higher on quiet, second in the city, and geography explains most of it. The farther from a subway, the fewer the complaints.

Several blocks post a perfect quiet score, among them 61st Avenue in Little Neck and 248th Street in Douglaston, with Manor Road in Douglaston at 99 and Vietor Avenue, 73rd Road and 45th Drive all at 97.

Forest Hills Gardens, the private-lane enclave the borough is proudest of, does not lead that list. Groton Street scores 59 on quiet and grades 49. And Long Island City, which sounds like the loud answer, posts a quiet average within a couple of points of Forest Hills', 63 against 63.

The loud end is where you would expect. Roosevelt Avenue scores 39, Steinway Street 36 and Broadway in Astoria 32. Main Street, which runs from Flushing down through Kew Gardens Hills, is the exception at 75, well above the borough average of 53. A busy street is not automatically a loud one. Main Street's real problem is traffic: on the crash measure it scores 4.

This is the number Queens does worst on, and it is worth being plain about it. Our safety score counts injuries and deaths in NYPD collision records against the homes and businesses on the street. It is traffic, not crime.

Queens averages 43, last of the five boroughs, and holds 145 blocks scoring 85 or higher, fewer than Brooklyn or the Bronx. The cause is the road network: wide, fast arterials carrying regional traffic past houses set back from them. Woodhaven Boulevard scores 9 and Francis Lewis Boulevard 12, with Roosevelt Avenue at 23 and 37th Avenue at 35.

The strong blocks are the ones the arterials pass by, and they are not all in the west. Vanderveer Street in Queens Village and Burden Crescent both post a perfect 100, with Hunter Street and Queens Street in Long Island City at 99, 15th Road in Bayside at 99 and Village Lane in Far Rockaway at 99. Vietor Avenue in Elmhurst and 52nd Street in Woodside both score 96.

Forest Hills is the Queens neighborhood most often recommended to families, and its 11375 graded streets average 46 on traffic safety, under the citywide 50. Bayside, recommended for the same reasons, averages 57 in 11361 and 61 in 11364, and earns it. Quiet and safe are separate scores here, and knowing one tells you very little about the other.

The scores point you to the good blocks. Whether Queens fits comes down to a trade it makes more sharply than any borough: the cleanest streets in the city and the second-quietest, in exchange for the worst crash exposure of the five and a transit map you have to read street by street.

Run the real questions first:

1. West or east. Transit is the column that actually differs across the borough. It runs from 70 in Elmhurst down to 8 in Little Neck. Pick the half of the borough your commute can absorb, then shortlist inside it. Below 20 on transit, assume a car or a long bus.
2. Which train. Express versus local matters enormously here, and from eastern Queens the LIRR is often faster than the subway. Check the actual line before you sign.
3. Parking. Queens averages 41 on our parking score, which counts parking complaints in the 311 record against the homes and businesses on the block. Staten Island averages 61 and Manhattan 71. Curb space in Queens is not the given its reputation makes it.
4. Food. Queens averages 49 on food access, which counts restaurants within a walk rather than groceries, and the spread inside that is the useful part. Elmhurst's ZIP code averages 80 and Jackson Heights 78, while Far Rockaway's 11691 averages 32. If eating well within a short walk is part of the decision, read that column by ZIP code and not by borough.

Queens gives you quieter and cleaner streets than most of Brooklyn. It does not give you Manhattan's record on the roads, and outside the western neighborhoods it does not give you transit worth the name.

If you want the access with the block scores, Long Island City and Sunnyside are the picks: 11101 averages 62 overall, higher than any other Queens ZIP code, and Sunnyside's 11104 averages 58 on transit access. Further out, Jamaica Estates holds Highland Avenue and Elmhurst holds Vietor Avenue a point behind it. Our scores say nothing about what a block costs to live on.