Why it looks like this

Queens joined New York City in 1898 as a scatter of towns — Flushing (chartered by the Dutch in 1645), Jamaica, Long Island City and others — each with its own street names and grids at its own angles. To unify them, the borough adopted the 'Philadelphia system' in the 1920s: numbered streets run one way, numbered avenues the other, and where old streets crowd between grid lines they become Roads and Drives with the same number.

The old town centres still interrupt the renumbered carpet — colonial road alignments, railroad suburbs and planned garden communities like Forest Hills Gardens — making Queens a museum of every American street pattern, and famously one of the most linguistically diverse places on Earth.