CRASHING QUEENS.(The Talk of the Town)(Queens, New York)(County overview)

Most event planners, when they're throwing a party to publicize something, follow a few unspoken rules. These usually preclude the scheduling of such an event for a Saturday night, in summer, in Queens. But, supposing that there is some reason for the celebration to be held in the heat, in Queens--if, say, it's a book party for a guide to the borough--it would seem particularly bad karma for it to take place on the night of a home game at Shea.

The "Not for Tourists Guide to Queens" is the tenth in a series of small black almanacs for people who don't want to be seen carrying a guidebook. Despite the ballgame, and the fact that the volume's title is arguably redundant, and that its publishers were promoting it as the first and only guide devoted exclusively to the borough (it isn't), several hundred people showed up at the SculptureCenter, in Long Island City. Jane Pirone and Rob Tallia, the founders of the N.F.T. series, were manning a keg of Red Hook E.S.B. "We started very Manhattan-centric," Pirone said. "And then we realized, O.K., we don't know anybody who lives in Manhattan anymore. Everybody lives in Brooklyn. So we did a Brooklyn guide. And, the minute we did a Brooklyn guide, everybody started saying, 'Where's Queens? Where's Queens?' "

TALLIA (struggling with the pump): We're never doing the Bronx, and we're never doing Staten Island.

PIRONE: We said that about Queens! We've already started getting asked for the Bronx guide now. The one we really will not do is Staten Island. There's just nothing there.

The partygoers sprawled across the SculptureCenter's gravel courtyard, picking at pieces of fruit and cheese. Many of them hailed from Manhattan or, disproportionately, from the newly trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, just across the Pulaski Bridge. Michael Sendrow, a twenty-nine-year-old Sunnyside resident (and brother-in-law of one of the guide's editors), gave a possible explanation for the party's inter-borough popularity. "It was posted on Myopenbar," he said. (Myopenbar.com is "your guide to free booze" in New York. "Queens is full of good shit," the site's notice for the N.F.T. party had said. "The Astoria pool, Indian gold by the pound, men with mustaches, strip joints . . .") "Terrible," someone chimed in. "I'm telling you: they're all hipsters, here for the free beer. Cheats."

Insofar as other Queens residents could be found, they, too, were wary of outside interest in their borough. Bryan Kimpel, a lifelong ...