Bayside, Queens

Bayside is the name of a neighborhood in Queens County of New York City, New York in the United States of America. It is an affluent and mostly urban neighborhood connected to Manhattan and Long Island by the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington Branch and major highways, such as the Long Island Expressway, Clearview Expressway,and the Cross Island Parkway. Bayside is home to four major New York City high schools: Bayside High School, Benjamin Cardozo High School, Francis Lewis High School and Holy Cross High School. It is also home to Queensborough Community College, a branch of the CUNY (City University Of New York) system. It is known for its nursing, music and musical technology programs and state of the art recording studios. Bay Terrace is a community of garden apartments located in the north section of the neighborhood; an adjacent shopping center was named after the community. The northern section of Bay Terrace also has a view of the Throgs Neck Bridge, which leads to the Bronx. The Coast Guard station at Fort Totten is located at the northernmost point of the neighborhood, Willets Point. Bayside is a generally urban neighborhood, with many ethnic minorities but very few ethnic tensions. The Bayside population includes Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, Irish, Greek, Chinese, and Korean residents.

Bayside was also the site of alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a housewife named Veronica Lueken. These events took place on the grounds of St. Robert Bellarmine Church in Bayside, but in 1975 she and her followers were evicted, with the vigils (on the eves of important feast days) then taking place in Flushing Meadows Park, at the old Vatican Pavilion site built for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. The events and its apocalyptic pronouncements have always been condemned by the Roman Catholic diocese of Brooklyn as lacking authenticity. (However, this ruling has no authority since the diocese failed to research the prophecies or interview those who were healed.) Following a heart attack in late 1978, and other health problems, Lueken attended the vigils infrequently. She died in 1995, but some followers remain, with the park vigils still continuing in the absence of the seer.

Holy Cross High School, a private Catholic institution run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross, is located in Bayside on Francis Lewis Boulevard and boasts a reputation as one of the finest college preparatory high schools in the nation, although it is officially located in Flushing, Queens, not Bayside.