There’s much to love in Aaron Timms’s peripheric wander through Sunnyside Yard (“Avant-Yard,” NYRA #41). Like any great critic, Timms is equal parts describer and reorienter: The impressive range of underloved bridges and half-hidden ghost kitchens and iconically situated strip clubs he assesses in his essay contributes to the sense that for over a century all of us in northwestern Queens have been secretly living along a single shore, with prehistoric Lake Sunnyside at the center of our edgelander consciousness.
Timms is brilliant on Sunnyside Yard as “disconnector”—one of the major frustrations of life in Sunnyside/Woodside is that one is hemmed in by disconnectors on all sides, and sometimes the disconnectors double or even quadruple up, as with Calvary Cemetery, the BQE, the LIE, and the Maspeth IBZ to the south—and his extremely niche joke about Parrot Coffee is better than Parrot Coffee’s coffee. I don’t understand why Timms perceives “a persistent sense of unease” in Sunnyside Gardens, a lovely and mysterious neighborhood that continues to project modesty in s…