Stops

Note: We will visit each of the sites titled in red on the walk and do our best to visit them in the order they appear here. But, to keep on schedule, we will not stop at those sites titled in black even though we will talk about them briefly.  We strongly encourage you to visit those we’ll skip — and, indeed, everything on the list — on your own!  We thank the citizen historians and web site writers whose descriptions are cut and pasted below.

Hunter’s Point South Ferry Terminal/Hunter’s Point Parks Conservancy

In 1998 a group of concerned residents formed Friends of Gantry State Park with a goal to take care of Long Island City’s parks, trees, and natural areas. Since those early years the group have grown tremendously, and with the opening of Hunter’s Point South Park in August 2013, it evolved into the Hunter’s Point Parks Conservancy the following year. The Friends of Gantry State Park’s goal is to support and enhance the waterfront parks in Hunter’s Point through events, education, and conservation.

Hunter’s Point Branch of the Queens Public Library

The unique design of the brand-new Hunter’s Point Branch of the Queens Public Library includes glazed cuts in the exterior of the building that follow the movement of the stairs, which are flanked by shelves of books. According to the architects, Steven Holl Architects, the library is compact but open to allow for “the most energy-efficient design and the greatest amount of green space on the site.” The library will contain 50,000 books, a children’s room, a quiet room, a rooftop area, and a community room with a 200-person capacity. The Hunters Point Library is the newest branch added to the Queens Public Library system since the Court Square location opened in 2007.

Gantry Plaza State Park

Gantry Plaza State Park is a 12-acre riverside oasis that boasts spectacular views of the midtown Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State Building and the United Nations. Enjoy a relaxing stroll along the park’s four piers or through the park’s manicured gardens and unique mist fountain. Along the way take a moment to admire the rugged beauty of the park’s centerpieces – restored gantries. These industrial monuments were once used to load and unload rail car floats and barges; today they are striking reminders of our waterfront’s past. With the city skyline as a backdrop and the gantries as a stage, the park’s plaza is a wonderful place to enjoy a spring or summer concert.  Recreational facilities include basketball courts, playgrounds, handball courts, and a fishing pier with its own cleaning table.

Pepsi Cola Sign

In 1940, the Pepsi Cola sign was placed on top of a massive PepsiCo bottling plant that sat right where Gantry Plaza State Park is today. Towering neon signs of the sort were actually very common at the time. The bigger, the brighter, the better the calling card. You just don’t see them anymore due to zoning codes that were introduced in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The Pepsi-Cola sign’s own fate had been precarious through the years until it was granted landmark status in 2016 (after 28 years of consideration). It now functions as a permanent nod to not only the area’s, but the city’s, impressive manufacturing run. Standing 20 feet off the ground — with a 50-foot bottle and the “P” and “C” reaching four stories high — the Pepsi-Cola sign is arguably the most recognizable feature on the waterfront. But, the sign you see today is not quite what went up in 1940. The neon-sign bottle was redone in the 1970s to reflect the redesign of the real bottle. And, by 1994, the sign was so badly deteriorated that it was faithfully reproduced and replaced. Then, in 2001, the plant closed and only the sign remained. For some, the Pepsi Cola sign is a landmark of the hip, new LIC skyline, but, for others, it is a reminder of what has been lost with the restructuring of the global economy.

Anable Basin

Anable Basin (also known as Eleventh Street Basin) is a 500-foot-long artificial inlet of the East River located in the Long Island City section of Queens, New York City. The inlet was carved in 1868 at a time when Long Island City was home to numerous oil refineries and factories. A public walkway along the southwest side of the basin was constructed as part of the Queens West development in 2012. The basin contains several private vessels, the former Water’s Edge restaurant, a former Prudence Island ferry boat, and a floating dock owned by Long Island City Community Boathouse, used for its kayaking programs. In November 2018 it was announced that Amazon would be building its large Amazon HQ2 campus on the land surrounding the basin. However, a tide of protest from local officials and community organizations forced the deal to be canceled. Plaxall, which we will see later in the tour, owns the property of Anable Basin and stood to gain a large profit from its sale to Amazon.

Neustadt Gallery

The Neustadt is a premier collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s celebrated lamps, windows, metalwork, and rare archival materials, including over a quarter of a million pieces of original Tiffany flat glass and glass jewels used to create his iconic designs. Dedicated to preservation, scholarship, education, and connoisseurship, the organization provides an in-depth look at the artistry of the Tiffany Studios and its contribution to a uniquely American chapter in the history of stained glass. The Neustadt is committed to sharing this story and its collections with diverse audiences through its gallery at the Queens Museum in New York City and exhibitions that travel to museums nationwide.

Long Island City Artists

Long Island City Artists, Inc. is a nonprofit arts advocacy organization with a mission to increase the development and visibility of professional and emerging artists in Long Island City, New York. It is based out of The Plaxall Gallery, a 12,000–square–foot fine art community center in LIC. Long Island City Artists is made up of volunteers and presents a range of artistic events from exhibitions to performances.

Plaxall

Ancient Glacier Rock

The ancient glacier rock — or giant boulder left behind by the glaciers which formed Long Island — protrudes from the street at 12th Street’s intersection with 43rd Street, right at the border of the Hunters Point and Ravenswood sections. The striations you will see in the rock, which is made of gneiss, were created by the glacier itself. The East River coastline of LIC is underlain by large deposits of this material, which is what makes building the tall structures in Hunters Point possible. Current scientific opinion leans toward there having been several glaciers, rather than a single monolithic one, credited with scattering these large boulders and carving up the archipelago of islands that we now call New York City.

Queensbridge Houses

Opened in 1939, the Queensbridge Houses, also known as Queensbridge, is a public housing development in Long Island City. Owned by the New York City Housing Authority, the 3,142-unit complex is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, accommodating approximately 6,907 people in two separate complexes (known as “North” and “South”). The 96-unit, six-story buildings have a distinctive shape that, from an aerial perspective, looks like two Y’s connecting at the base. Designed by W.F.R. Ballard, Henry S. Churchill, Frederick G. Frost, and Burnett Turner, the complex’s shape was intended to give residents more access to privacy and sunlight than the traditional cross-shape could offer. The design was also intended to be cost-efficient, and costs were reduced even further by using elevators that only stopped at the 1st, 3rd, and 5th floors. Political pressure to keep costs down was a key reason for the use of cheap designs.  Queensbridge is well known for its contributions to hip hop and rap music, and has been home to some of the most influential musicians in the genre. Marley Marl Williams was the first in a long succession of acclaimed artists from “The Bridge” (another nickname for the housing complex). The Juice Crew collective, hugely influential in the 1980s, featured among its members Queensbridge rappers MC Shan, Roxanne Shanté, and Craig G. One of Queensbridge’s most famous rappers is Nas.

RUX Studios

RUX Studios is a design firm and parent company that creates and grows independent brands with ethical roots. STICKBULB, founded in 2012, is a modular system of LED lights made out of reclaimed wood from decommissioned water towers, demolished buildings, fallen trees, and sustainably sourced forests. GRADUAL, founded in 2018, is an alternative time-telling company that builds clocks for long-term thinkers.

Grand Central Atelier

GCA is an art studio founded in 2013 with a mission to train a new generation of artists to draw, paint and sculpt, and to foster the community that sustains these artists and students. GCA anchors a vibrant community of professional artists, instructors and students. In the tradition of ateliers, GCA instructors are graduates of the core program. Many are alumni of the Water Street Atelier (1990’s – 2007), and the Grand Central Academy (2006 – 2013). These two schools, earlier versions of the current Grand Central Atelier, were led by Jacob Collins and represent a continuum in artistic philosophy and practice.

Sunnyside Yard

Sunnyside Yard is one of the busiest rail yards in the country and a key train storage yard and maintenance hub for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. It also serves New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road, which is developing storage tracks and maintenance facilities there as part of its East Side Access Project. Sunnyside Yard has been the focus of many conceptual overbuild proposals since it was first opened by Pennsylvania Railroad in 1910. With Amtrak and MTA currently undertaking critical capital investments in its rail infrastructure, the city is focused on coordinating long-term planning for the future of the yard. With more than half a million people expected to add to New York’s population in the next twenty years, including over 80,000 in Queens alone, the city hopes development at Sunnyside Yard will provide much-needed residential infrastructure for the new population. As marketing materials from the city and its partners argue, Sunnyside Yard is an opportunity not only to solve its growth challenges, but to integrate new development into the established fabric of surrounding communities. Through the drafting of a Master Plan, the City and Amtrak have recruited local and regional stakeholders to develop a vision and framework to guide investments and address the needs of the adjacent growing neighborhoods, borough, city, and region. However, several other community groups are critical of the Master Plan and believe the benefits to the surrounding area will be minimal in comparison to the windfalls private developers and the real estate industry will receive. Moreover, many locals worry that plans for Sunnyside Yard are out of balance with the borough’s need for enforceable and enforced anti-displacement policies.

Newtown Creek

Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile long tributary of the East River, is an estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Channelization made it one of the most heavily used bodies of water in the Port of New York and New Jersey and thus one of the most polluted industrial sites in the US, containing years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30,000,000 US gallons of spilled oil (including the Greenpoint oil spill), raw sewage from New York City’s sewer system, and other accumulation from a total of 1,491 sites. Newtown Creek was proposed as a potential Superfund site in September 2009, and received that designation on September 27, 2010. The Newtown Creek Alliance was founded soon after to remediate the area and bring a natural ecosystem back to the shoreline.

Circus Warehouse

Founded in September of 2010, Circus Warehouse is a collaborative effort to produce the next generation of elite circus performers, to integrate circus arts into mixed-media forms, and to provide a space for the development of new and experimental works. Arts champion, empresario, educator and Warehouse Director, Suzi Winson, runs the professional program, which turns out top-level performers for traditional and contemporary circuses, and for dance and theatre productions that incorporate circus art skills. The Warehouse has 8000 square feet of training space, and trains in the following skills: trampoline, silks, lyra, cloud swing, static trap, swinging trap, rope, Chinese pole, juggling, acrobatic balancing, classical and modern dance forms, and wire walking.