The World’s Borough Gets a New Slogan
Some municipal slogans are better than others. Fall River, Massachusetts (that’s Faw Rivah, to some), induces anxiety with the words “We’ll try” emblazoned on its police vehicles. “The city of brotherly love” sounds copacetic until you attend a Flyers or an Eagles game. “Trenton makes, the world takes”—not bad, if deflating. What happens in Vegas is, of course, so memorable that we can’t discuss it.
The married artists Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel had no intention of launching a new branding campaign for the borough of Queens when they set out to paint a mural near their apartment, in 2007. They were living on Borden Avenue, near the Long Island Expressway, and noticed an underpass in want of tagging. “Then we thought, If we do it as graffiti, will someone change it?” Frankel recalled recently. They wound up getting permission to use a handball court outside a middle school in Jackson Heights, instead. They painted a subway escaping its tracks, accompanied by the phrase “Queens is the future”—an allusion to the borough’s diversity, and perhaps its tradition of hosting forward-looking World’s Fairs. Then the couple moved to Brooklyn, which was enjoying a trendier present.
Someone changed the mural anyway. In 2014, Sony had a new Spider-Man movie coming out and enlisted another artist to help add Queens’s most famous superhero to the image, along with a misplaced Statue of Liberty. An outcry over the corporate co-opting of public art brought renewed attention to the mural and its optimism. Spidey eventually flaked off in the rain. Biddle and Frankel moved upstate but sold T-shirts with the original design, raising money for the victims of a fire and inspiring a restoration of the mural in 2022. Next came the election of Mayor Mamdani, the first Queens resident to lead the city, and the need for new highway signs to replace all the references to Eric Adams.
“Queens is the future!” the borough president, Donovan Richards, said the other day, greeting the artists near a noisy tangle of aging urban infrastructure: the Midtown Tunnel, the Pulaski Bridge, the L.I.E. “There’s just no getting around it.”
“Are you ready to jaywalk?” Frankel asked.
They crossed several lanes and began ascending an on-ramp to the L.I.E., amid stray honking from trucks and taxis. “We get to choose the slogan as the borough president,” Richards explained, noting that Marty Markowitz, the former Brooklyn beep, had added “Fuhgeddaboudit” to “Leaving Brooklyn” signs on the Belt Parkway. “There was a little controversy,” Richards went on, alluding to complaints about ethnic stereotyping. “And so, he had to come up with ‘Oy vey,’ too.” Richards, for his part, had considered replacing “The world’s borough,” the long-standing but staid Queens tagline, with a favorite Nas lyric: “Queens get the money.” It seemed fitting, both in terms of Realpolitik and considering the projects that Richards began enumerating, as if on a stump: affordable housing in Willets Point, a pair of casinos, the refurbishing of the airports. “But D.O.T. thought it was too ethnic,” Richards said of the lyric. “They didn’t say it, but they said it without saying.”
The politician and the artists were standing now on a sloping grass median, facing a “Welcome to Queens” sign, one of a dozen scattered around the borough’s parkways and expressways, the legacy of Robert Moses, an erstwhile futurist. More honking. “I was thinking about how these green-and-white signs on the highways are one of the only places where the people get to choose some of the words,” Frankel said. He meant the names Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Donovan Richards, Jr., chosen via ballot box: a Muslim socialist and a Black beep. Above the names, in italics, was the new motto, from their mural: “Queens is the Future!” They took turns posing for selfies.
Was it true, though? A bystander found himself wondering, amid the whiplash of the past decade: the retrenching on immigration, the resurgence of nationalism, the Mets’ losing streak. “I mean, it’s unfortunate that our President comes from Queens,” Richards said, referring to Donald Trump, before adding, “He’s from a part of Queens that’s really oriented towards Long Island.”
They began descending the ramp, facing a Manhattan skyline of ever-taller towers that made the Empire State Building look like an afterthought. Richards mentioned a history book he’d been reading. Queens had been home to early color-TV demonstrations: ahead of its time. The vote to establish Israel had taken place in what is now the Queens Museum, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. (Current events leave one unable to predict how that might be viewed in the decades to come.) “And also, Walt Disney is said to have originally looked at that park to be the first Disney World,” Richards said. “But the weather—he needed warm weather year-round.”
So-called unseasonable temperatures loomed in the forecast. In the future, one couldn’t rule it out. ♦