Running tour · queens

Bridge to the Gantries

1.9 mi run

Open in Stride Stories

The stories on this route

1. Queensboro Bridge

   Look up from Queens Plaza: steel cantilever trusses overhead, and spiky pinnacles on the towers. This is the Queensboro Bridge. Work began in 1901, under the engineer Gustav Lindenthal, with the architect Henry Hornbostel. About 75,000 tons of steel went into it.

2. One Court Square

   Look up at the green glass tower with the pyramid on top. This is One Court Square, 50 stories and 673 feet. Citicorp, then the largest bank in the United States, announced it in 1985. For 30 years it was the tallest building in New York State outside Manhattan.

3. 5Pointz

   Look at the two towers at Jackson Avenue and Davis Street, 41 and 48 stories. Nothing of what stood here survives. It was a water-meter factory, opened in 1892, and Jerry Wolkoff bought it in 1971. In 2002, a graffiti artist called Meres One, Jonathan Cohen, began curating its walls.

4. Hunters Point Historic District

   Look along 45th Avenue: rows of matching three-story houses, high stoops, bracketed cornices. It started in 1870, when Spencer Root and John Rust bought this land from Union College. They're said to have gone bankrupt before they could meet their obligations. But they left something special.

5. MoMA PS1

   Look at the red-brick school on Jackson Avenue: arched windows, old school lettering. It dates from 1892, and it was Long Island City's first school until 1963. Then the school closed for low attendance, and the building became a warehouse.

6. Pepsi-Cola sign and Gantry Plaza

   Look for the red Pepsi-Cola letters and the bottle on their steel grid at the river's edge. The grid is 49 feet high and about 150 feet long. The sign went up in 1940 on the roof of the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant here.

Stories researched October 2026 · every fact checked against a source