Orange Crate Art: A tea room, and more

Sunday, May 31, 2026

A tea room, and more

[40-11 Queens Boulevard, Sunnyside, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Still in Queens, one of the two boroughs I know least well. (Staten Island is the other). And once again on Queens Boulevard, to visit not a diner but a tea room. I thought that I might find some trace of the Frances Constance Tea Room online — a listing in a restaurant directory, a matchbook for sale at eBay — but I found nothing more than a listing in the 1940 telephone directory. I did find a plausible explanation of the term “tea room.” From John Ferrell’s Mary Mac’s Tea Room: 65 Years of Recipes from Atlanta’s Favorite Dining Room (2010):

It wasn’t uncommon for widows to open tea rooms and serve the food Southern women knew how to cook best. They called their establishments “tea rooms,” rather than using the more pedestrian-sounding “restaurant,” as a way of making the business seem instantly respectable.

If you click for big, you’ll see that the Frances Constance Tea Room was a purveyor of southern cooking in Queens.

Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), would have looked favorably on this block of Queens Boulevard. From the corner on down, it offers a Mayflower Coffee Shop, an insurance agency for apartments and stores, a candy store, a florist, a cleaners, a barber shop (notice the cash register), the tea room, a bowling and billiards establishment, a shoe-repair shop, and a real-estate agency, followed by apartment buildings. Mixed use! The Jacobs ideal would likely include second-story apartments, a hardware store, and a locksmith, but this block pretty well fits her model for city life. (Jacobs and her family lived above a Greenwich Village candy store.)

I wonder: is that man in the doorway hangry? Has he smelled the aroma of fried chicken wafting through the open door of the Frances Constance Tea Room? Or is he scowling at the coat-and-tie boys taking pictures instead of doing a man’s work? But if it is man’s work, why the apron?

That man might be hangrier today: in April 2026, Google Maps showed this block as a block of food.