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"Let's Make It a Real Champs Elysees in Time for Fair," read the headline on a story about Queens Boulevard in a 1936 brochure touting the upcoming World's Fair at Flushing Meadows.
"Queens and Long Island will boast not only of a practical twelve- lane traffic artery but a beautiful boulevard," the accompanying article said.
For years, Queens Boulevard was just that: a leafy thoroughfare on which drivers could wind into Manhattan and residents could stroll.
But today, the road that was first an Indian path, then a settler's wagon trail and later a European-inspired wonder is best- known as the street that has seen scores of pedestrians killed by cars in recent years.
Historians differ on whether Queens Boulevard -completed around 1936-was designed to ever be both car- and pedestrian-friendly.
But all agree on this: the architects of Queens Boulevard never envisioned the kind of congestion that...