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Mayor details Willets Point plan
By Karla Schuster
May 1, 2007
As the Mets' new stadium rises nearby, Mayor Michael Bloomberg Tuesday unveiled a proposed master plan for Willets Point that would transform the 60-acre swath of car repair shops and junkyards near Citi Field into a mixed-used development that officials envision becoming New York's version of the neighborhoods flanking Fenway Park in Boston or Camden Yards in Baltimore.
The single largest feature of the plan, outlined Tuesday at a news conference at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, is 1.7 million square feet of retail and entertainment space that would be built across the street from the new CitiField ballpark.
There would be few, if any, interior walkways and no big box stores -- a street-oriented design aimed at drawing fans before and after games, similar to Landsdowne Street outside Fenway Park or Baltimore's Inner Harbor neighborhood surrounding Camden Yards, according to officials from the city's Economic Development Corporation.
The plan also includes 5,500 units of mixed-income housing, some townhouses and some mid-rise apartment buildings of no more than eight stories; a 700-room hotel, a convention center, 500,000-square-feet of office space, a two-acre park and a new bridge into Flushing over Flushing Creek. Designers have also included plans for so-called "green roofs" on many of the buildings to create additional recreational space.
While the city has outlined its plans for redeveloping what is called the Iron Triangle before, Tuesday's announcement offers the most detailed vision for the site yet and kicks off the formal land-use review process necessary to rezone the area, acquire the property and re-locate the estimated 250 businesses there.
The area has no sidewalks or sewers, and is pockmarked by potholes and deep puddles. City officials acknowledge that an expensive environmental clean-up is necessary before the site can be developed.
The city expects to choose a developer by next summer.
The plan, called bold and ambitious by some and criticized as needlessly uprooting viable businesses by others, must be approved by the city Planning Commission and the City Council. A public hearing on an upcoming environmental study of the site will be held Tuesday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Flushing library.
Businesses and property owners from the area have decried the city's plans, which include seizing the property through eminent domain if owners are unwilling to sell.
Approximately 1,300 workers would be displaced if the city's plans for redevelopment are approved. The city estimates the construction would generate 20,000 jobs, while the the project would create 6,100 permanent jobs at full build-out.
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Willets Point's last man standing defiantly
May 1, 2007
On the west side of 126th Street, the Mets are building themselves a new home, while three blocks away, in the rutted exhibit of planned urban neglect known as the Iron Triangle, Joe Ardizzone is just trying to save his old one.
The higher the concrete towers and steel framework of Citi Field rise, the lower the hopes of Ardizzone sink. But while Bruce Ratner has been successful in displacing - or, to use the preferred term of the real estate vulture, "relocating" - thousands of city residents to make way for the future home of the Brooklyn Nets, Ardizzone says there is no way the city or the Mets or any combination of the two will evict the one and only resident of Willets Point, N.Y.
"They'll have to kill me and drag me out of here first," he said. "This is my home. This is not democracy. This is not American. Why should I have to leave the place where I've lived my whole life so some billionaires can get richer?"
No one has yet told Ardizzone, who is 74 and more energetic than any man his age has any right to be, that he has to leave his two-story stucco and brick house, wedged between an ironworks and an auto parts dealer on Willets Point Boulevard, today, tomorrow or ever.
But then, no one has told Ardizzone or any of the 100 or so business owners in The Triangle anything.
"We don't know what they're going to do," Ardizzone said, although he has a pretty good idea. "Their goal is to take all this away from us, come hell or high water."
The high water already has come. In fact, it never leaves an area in which the only storm drain is used by Shea Stadium and where, although the area businesses pay as much as $75,000 a year in taxes, the city has never seen fit to install sewers or provide basic services such as snow removal or road repair. (By the way, the Mets don't pay a nickel in real estate taxes now, nor will they on their new ballpark.)
But now that Citi Field is rising, it suddenly has dawned on a lot of powerful people that Willets Point, for a half-century the most neglected sliver of land in the city, soon could be a slice of real estate as valuable as Sutter's Mill, circa 1849.
And whatever "they" are doing, the fear is that they are doing it in secret, the way they always do when there is a land grab of this magnitude in the works.
At first, the Willets Point community thought it needed to fear only the city, which would seek to condemn the land they live and work on as an environmental hazard, seize it under eminent domain and then sell it off to a real estate developer.
Now they realize their enemy is not only the city but the Mets.
"Since 1994, Fred Wilpon told us, 'We've co-existed with you for 40 years and we can continue to co-exist with you,' " said Richard Musick, the spokesman for the Willets Point Business Association. "But about two years ago, he stopped returning our phone calls."
Yesterday, the other shoe dropped. At a meeting with politicians at Tully Construction on Northern Boulevard, city councilman Thomas White Jr. passed along the bad news: Wilpon had changed his mind. "He said, 'The junkyards gotta go,' " White told the group.
The stereotype angered Ardizzone even more than the death sentence it carried.
"People from the outside, they come here and all they see is junkyards," he said. "This is a community, with hard-working people trying to make a living. These are human beings here."
It is a point that seems to be lost on the politicians, who see only dollar signs, and on sports fans, who don't care whom the bulldozers flatten in the rush to build their heroes a stadium, and by a lot of sportswriters, who become willing shills for the team just thinking about what a dump the Shea Stadium pressbox is.
None of them seems to realize that the only ones who will truly benefit from Citi Field are the Wilpons and the privileged few who are well-heeled or well-connected enough to score one of its 42,000 high-priced seats. The Mets did not return a phone call seeking comment yesterday.
Ardizzone, who never married and has lived in the house alone for the past 40 years, considers the people of Willets Point his family. One after another, they came up to him yesterday, most uttering a single word: "Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow" is today, when every man and woman working in Willets Point, along with as many family members, friends and supporters as they can rustle up, will gather at the Flushing branch of the Queens Public Library on Main Street to demonstrate against what they see as an invasion of their turf by the people who are supposed to protect it.
They seem to know it is a doomed battle - David hasn't beaten Goliath since the Old Testament - but one worth fighting nonetheless.
"Just because the big guy always wins," Joe Ardizzone said, "doesn't mean you have to roll over for him. What am I supposed to do, lay down and die?"
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