Very few tourists who spend time in New York City bother to visit the Borough of Queens. Those who do are usually in search of the amazing variety of ethnic food on offer. But it would be well worth the effort for street art aficianados to make the short trip across the East River to the Queens neighborhood of Astoria to check-out the amazing Welling Court Mural Project, which has produced hundreds of compelling pieces of public art over the last 11 years.

The art work which covers much of the gritty Welling Court neighborhood is produced by local up and coming street artists, as well as world known figures in the public art scene.

The most recent additions to the project are pieces of art work that reimagine and update three historic fire emergence alarm boxes. Completed secretly by an anonymous artist, the colorful mosaics augment 19th century call boxes.

You can get the flavor of the Welling Court project from the short video below that was filmed just a few weeks ago.

NB: If you get TBTP via an email server, it may be necessary to click on the short url linl at the bottom of the email to play the video. I still don’t know why this is happening.