Another Downtown for New York?

Not many people choose to stroll down College Point Boulevard in downtown Flushing, Queens. The industrial streetscape ranges from graffiti-covered buildings where immigrant workers stitch clothing to an asphalt plant. The Western Beef food market is a favorite of the homeless, and some even sleep atop its recycling machines. There are scattered homes, including public housing, but most residents choose to walk immediately east to Main Street, a much livelier and friendlier strip. In short, College Point Boulevard looks like a street that has been ignored for a long, long time.

But all of the sudden, College Point Boulevard is hot property. In recent years, large developers have bought up land on the western side of the street. They plan to transform their plots, now home to warehouses, parking lots, and factories, into condominiums, large retail stores, and parks.

The developers are not alone in their thinking. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to build up College Point Boulevard and other parts of downtown Flushing; development in Queens and New York City’s other outer boroughs is one of his administration’s priorities. John Liu, the local City Councilman who has sought out the mayor’s interest, says he wants to make Flushing “a destination of choice.” Other local leaders have called for a renaissance of the area.

Why is the government of New York City so interested in an area eight miles east of midtown Manhattan? Although remote from the city center, downtown Flushing is well connected to public transportation and has strong commercial prospects of its own. The area is already the busiest section of northeast Queens, a region of more than half a million people. The subway, the Long Island Rail Road, bus lines, and two highways run through it. Just blocks away is the third largest park in the city, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which is home to the New York Mets and the U.S. Open. And the neighborhood also has a waterfront, the narrow Flushing River that runs behind College Point Boulevard.

“Downtown Flushing is a transit hub, and it’s an intermodal hub,” says Ben Wauford, principal in charge of the New York office of Cooper Carry, a consulting firm hired by the city to study Flushing. “It has an untapped resource in the waterfront. It has adjacent recreational amenities that are unparalleled. It’s close to LaGuardia Airport. And quite frankly, it’s highly successful right now.”

Despite the excited talk, the city will have to overcome difficult hurdles in order to continue to develop downtown Flushing. The Flushing River is polluted. A high water table prevents construction deep underground. The Van Wyck Expressway runs between downtown Flushing and the park. And some developers and politicians claim that luring more businesses to Flushing depends on the even thornier redevelopment of Willets Point, an industrial neighborhood to the west. Changing Flushing will be expensive. It remains to be seen whether the city and state, for all of their lofty aspirations, will cough up the millions needed to redevelop an area of New York City that most tourists have never even heard of.

From 1950s Main Street to Booming Multiethnic Village

In the 1950s, Flushing’s Main Street was dominated by department stores, shoe repair shops, and small businesses serving a working-class, white-ethnic population. Nowadays, typical American franchises, such as McDonald’s and Old Navy, greet Flushing pedestrians, but so do signs in Chinese, Korean, and Urdu. As America’s latest wave of mass immigration continues, America’s large cities will likely have more and more neighborhoods like downtown Flushing. Redevelopment of Flushing may serve as a blueprint for changing similar neighborhoods far from conventional downtowns into a new type of urban center.

Flushing was organized as a Dutch township in 1645, but it only began to take on an urban character in the early 20th century when trains connected it and other early suburbs to midtown Manhattan. As those trains were supplanted by commuter rail reaching further out and later highways, many of the neighborhood’s old residents left the neighborhood for less congested areas of Queens and Long Island. The neighborhood’s close proximity to New York’s two major airports enticed waves of immigrants to settle in the area over recent decades.

Some saw the immigrants as a symbol of decline in Flushing. But in the 1980s and ‘90s, developers and neighborhood leaders began to take a serious look at entering the local market. In 1991, the Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel was built in the heart of downtown Flushing. Its developer, Heo-Peh Lee, saw the Sheraton’s construction as a gamble: could a luxury hotel survive in an immigrant neighborhood? The hotel, however, turned out to be a huge success, catering to foreign visitors, airport travelers, and business conferences.

Since then, the neighborhood has boomed. In 1998, the city opened the $22 million Flushing Library, a three-story glass structure more than three times the size of its predecessor. The busy library has been praised as one of the most innovative in New York City. The city also redesigned the Main Street subway station. Other hotels have followed in the Sheraton’s wake. Perhaps most importantly, the city decided in 1998 to rezone downtown Flushing west of Main Street. The rezoning allows for large-scale projects, stirring further interest in development on the Flushing River. One company, TDC International Development & Construction Corp., has finished three large projects in western Flushing since the rezoning: Sanford Tower, an apartment building, the Prince Center, an office building, and the Flushing Mall.

Remembering the Outer Boroughs

In recent years, high land values and lack of space have complicated Manhattan development, leading developers to look for new opportunities in the outer boroughs. While most of the major shopping and retail is located in Manhattan and the suburbs, a substantial percentage of the people living in the metropolitan area actually reside in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx and often prefer to work and shop in their own neighborhoods.

In September 2003, the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan think tank, released “Engine Failure,” a report calling for investment in outer borough neighborhoods as part of a plan to strengthen the city’s economy.

“We use so little of our geography for economic development,” Jonathan Bowles, research director at the Center, says. “I am not trying to make an equity or a fairness argument. I am saying the other boroughs represent an opportunity for economic growth for holding onto businesses, for spurring entrepreneurship.”

The city has already started to invest in developing urban centers outside of Manhattan. Over the last decade, the city has pumped millions into downtown Brooklyn and Jamaica, a Queens neighborhood located several miles southeast of downtown Flushing. Downtown Flushing may be next. At the end of 2002, the city Economic Development Corporation (EDC) hired Cooper Carry to study downtown Flushing and Willets Point, located on the opposite side of the Flushing River.

In October, Cooper Carry and other teams of consultants unveiled their recommendations for the area. The planners proposed turning the 1,143-space municipal parking lot at the center of downtown Flushing into several twelve- to sixteen-story buildings comprising housing, offices, and “cultural space” surrounding a public square.

“There’s a huge pent-up demand for residential development and even commercial development in downtown Flushing,” Wauford says.

Downtown Flushing already suffers from a lack of parking, so the consultants suggested the city build a 2,000-space parking lot underneath the complex to replace the lost spaces and serve new development. But with a high water table underneath, the spots would be expensive–$30,000 apiece.

Where East Meets West

Downtown Flushing has been studied before, with similar recommendations. But unlike in previous studies, the city included Willets Point. Known as the Iron Triangle, Willets Point is the closest thing New York City has to the Wild West. It was built atop the Corona ash heaps, made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Shea Stadium was constructed on part of the land, and the remainder of Willets Point was given over to scrap yards, auto repair shops, and factories. Most of the triangle has no storm sewer system, and some potholes seem large enough to swallow a small car. Authorities keep a constant eye on Willets Point. In 2001, Carmine Agnello, the estranged son-in-law of the late mafia boss John Gotti, pleaded guilty to extortion, racketeering, and arson in connection with his Willets Point business, New York Scrap Inc.

Many see Willets Point as key to Flushing’s development. The developers who invested in land between College Point Boulevard and the eastern side of the Flushing River want to offer potential residents a view of something other than scrap yards across the river. Furthermore, Willets Point sits directly between downtown Flushing and Shea Stadium and the USTA National Tennis Center, the home of the U.S. Open. If this area were more attractive, local leaders reason, sports fans might venture through into downtown Flushing, bringing business to the neighborhood.

Patrick Phillips of Economics Research Associates, one of the consultants hired by Cooper Carry, noted that it would cost $214.5 million to buy up the land, clean it of pollutants, and install sewers and roads. In order to make good on such an investment, the land would have to generate roughly $11 million a year for the city, Phillips says. A theme park or a convention center could generate sufficient profit.

Local politicians–perhaps spurred by campaign contributions from these developers–generally echo their support for developing Willets Point, as do many community leaders. Julia Harrison, who represented Flushing in the City Council before John Liu replaced her in 2002, is one of the few who have spoken out against developing Willets Point. There are legitimate businesses in the Iron Triangle, Harrison points out.

“The people working there may not be computer experts, but they should have a chance to work,” Harrison says. “Every place you go, manual workers are being displaced across Queens. That’s not exactly a good economic process. Not everyone is a computer whiz.”

While the EDC is looking into developing Willets Point, another city agency, the Department of Sanitation, has a vested interest in the status quo. For lack of a cohesive sanitation plan to compensate for the closing of the massive Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, the city allowed a waste transfer station to open in Willets Point. Over the last three years, the plant has increased the amount of waste it processes. The city will be unable to develop Willets Point fully until it resolves its sanitation woes, and no one is betting on that happening anytime soon.

An Engagement Ring from the City

In the meantime, some developments have stalled. The Muss Development Company, which owns the largest piece of property on the east side of the Flushing River, had planned to open Flushing Town Center, a 750,000-square-foot retail center with 1,200 residential units, in 2003. But problems cleaning up pollution on the site have slowed the plan.

TDC, which also owns property on the Flushing River, has not yet begun to develop the waterfront. Wellington Chen, senior vice president at TDC, says his company wants an “engagement ring” from the city–an assurance that the government has a long-term interest in Flushing.

“Every once in a while we get a study in this area, and then we get sidetracked. We need ongoing attention,” he says. “Cooper Carry’s Flushing Task Force under [New York City Deputy Mayor] Dan Doctoroff is a great start. It’s at least focusing the magnifying glass on this area. But the dialogue needs to be maintained.”

Despite ambitious plans, Flushing still faces challenges. It is a quick train ride to midtown Manhattan from Flushing, but traveling from Flushing to downtown Jamaica, the center of Queens, is a lot more difficult. While property values are high, major retailers still avoid Flushing’s Main Street. One of the neighborhood’s largest retail properties has sat empty for five years. The Flushing Library may be packed, but downtown Flushing does not have one English-language bookstore. And the parking dilemma looms large over the entire area.

“If you drive through downtown Flushing, it’s hard to figure out right now,” Wauford says. “For a retailer to look at downtown Flushing, it’s a difficult sell.”

In the end, the toughest sell may not be to retailers or developers, but to the city, state, and federal governments. Successful development in outlying urban areas such as Flushing may connect them more closely with the city centers and so increase business throughout the metropolitan region. But because such investment could potentially have the opposite effect, strengthening one borough at the expense of another, it’s a gamble that city officials might not be willing to take. As always, public monies are tight, especially when funds are being invested to reinvigorate lower Manhattan. And while nobody likes to admit it, neighborhoods do compete against each other for funds. Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City are just a stone’s throw from Manhattan’s busiest neighborhoods. Jamaica is not close to Manhattan, but trains link the area to the wealthier neighborhoods of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, making it a great place to work for Long Island commuters. In contrast, most of those who work in Flushing live in Queens, not Manhattan or Long Island.

Some worry that investing in places like Flushing will hurt lower Manhattan at a time when the business center needs a boost, while others argue that the development will benefit the city as a whole. Regardless of who is right, when matters come to a vote, most politicians will likely see the question as whether the interests of the people of Queens, a borough dominated by the working class and immigrants, suffice to merit investment from the city as a whole.

Bloomberg has said he wants to invest in Flushing. But until the government actually puts the shovel to the ground, some developers remain skeptical.

“It’s very, very difficult to go forward,” Chen says. “If the sky is filled with dust from the cement mixing plant, and the sidewalks are still full of cracks, we are not going to be able to go forward with good conscience.”