http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/15/nyregion/meet-me-at-60th-and-60th-many-drivers-find-streets-of-queens-a-confusing-maze.html?pagewanted=all
"The system works like this: avenues run east and west and streets run north and south, the opposite of Manhattan’s system. The avenues were given consecutive numbers, but there were often additional parallel streets in between the avenues that needed names, so they were assigned the same numbers and called roads or drives, in that order.
So if there was a street between 65th and 66th Avenues, it would be called 65th Road. If there was another one, it would be called 65th Drive. But there is no uniformity. Sometimes there are roads and drives between the avenues, sometimes there is only a road. Sometimes the avenues run consecutively with nothing in between, depending on the neighborhood.
The same went for streets. If there were additional streets that needed naming between the consecutively numbered streets, they were called places and lanes, in that order. So between 71st Street and 72nd Street, there could be a 71st Place and a 71st Lane. Again, that depends on the neighborhood. In Glendale there is a 71st Street and a 71st Place, but in Middle Village, only a 71st Street.
Breathe. Crescents and hyphens are next.
Curved roads that were not parallel with either the avenues or the streets were assigned numbers and called crescents, courts or terraces. The longer roads, like Queens Boulevard, were called boulevards and not assigned numbers.
… the house-numbering system was designed to indicate the exact location of an address. The number before the hyphen is the cross street, and the number after the hyphen is the position on the block.
So 37-69 103rd Street would be on 103rd Street between 37th Avenue and 38th Avenue (unless there is a 37th Road or a 37th Drive before 38th Avenue), house No. 69 on the block.
The cross streets (or avenues, roads, drives, places or lanes) can tell you where in the borough – east, west, north or south – an address is. The streets, starting with First Street on the borough’s western edge, increase as they go east. The avenues, starting with Second Avenue, increase as they go south. This is important because someone looking for 71st Street could be looking for an address in Jackson Heights or in Glendale, neighborhoods that are miles apart. If the cross street in the address is a low-numbered avenue, like 20th (that is low for Queens), the address is in the north, but a higher-numbered avenue, like 88th or 165th, would put the address in the south."