After decades of false starts, Willets Point development begins to come together
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Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, City Councilmember Francisco Moya, New York City Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Andrew Kimball and Frank Monterisi, the chief operating officer at Related Companies, went on a tour of phases one and two of the Willets Point redevelopment project on May, 9, 2023. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The corner of Willets Point Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue used to be lined by auto shops. The street, which didn’t have a working sewer running beneath it or street lights above it, was perpetually covered in puddles formed in its countless potholes. The area, known as Willets Point, almost always smelled like gasoline, rubber and old metal.
But after years of stalled plans, court battles, a troubled worker and business relocation program and multiple mayoral administrations, the intersection and the six acres surrounding it are now a clean slate. It still kind of smells.
The ground, which had been permeated by over a century of pollution, has been dug up, cleaned and replaced with new dirt. A new water main is currently being installed and nearing completion. And plans have been drawn to bring 2,500 affordable housing units, a new school, commercial space and the city’s first-ever soccer stadium to the neighborhood sitting in the shadow of Citi Field. Officials say construction will begin on the first phase of the development before the end of the year.
“It's historic,” said City Councilmember Francisco Moya, who went on a New York City Economic Development Corporation and Queens Development Group-led tour of the site alongside Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and members of the media on Tuesday.
“It’s a great project – I don’t know what else to say about it,” he added.
Phase one of the Willets Point redevelopment project. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Moya, Richards and Andrew Kimball, the EDC’s president and CEO, appeared to be in awe at the progress made at the site. For city officials, it’s been a long time coming.
A century ago, Willets Point was the inspiration for a particularly desolate setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby.” He called it the “Valley of Ashes,” named for the conditions created by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, which dumped heaps of ash onto the site until 1930, when the company was booted from the neighborhood to make way for the World’s Fair.
For a time it served as a city dump and later became home to scores of auto mechanic shops, some of which agreed to a failed city-run relocation program in 2014.
The city, which owns the land, has been eyeing it for development dating back to former-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. In the decades that followed, auto workers and business owners who remained said the city ignored them, letting their neighborhood’s infrastructure fall into disrepair. Workers in Willets Point joked that people coming to get their car fixed there would drive off and come back several minutes later, having damaged their car on the way out.
A street in Willets Point in 2019. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
“If you really know what the site was like – it was really underutilized and contaminated,” said Frank Monterisi, the chief operating officer at Related Companies, which, alongside Sterling Equities, formed the Queens Development Group to spearhead the project. “And we’re turning this site into a new, mixed-use district with 100 percent affordable housing.”
Remediation of phase one of the site began toward the tail end of former-Mayor Bill De Blasio’s administration in June 2021, when the city also agreed to lease the land to Related and Sterling for 99-years. The clean-up, which included excavating 100,000 tons of contaminated earth and replacing it with 80,000 tons of clean dirt, was recently completed.
In November 2022, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city had secured a deal with the New York City Football Club to build a 25,000-seat stadium in what is referred to as phase two of the development. Next door to the stadium will be 1,000 units of income restricted housing. Clean-up of the phase is currently underway.
The city’s review process for phase two recently began and is expected to be voted on by the City Council in the first quarter of 2024, at which point the plans for the stadium and housing will either be certified, tweaked or rejected.
“The vision for this goes back 20 years,” Kimball said. “What is exciting now, under Mayor Adams’ leadership, is we’re taking a massive step forward.”
While officials were eager to discuss plans for the soccer stadium, which is expected to host its first game in 2027, phase one of the project was at the heart of the tour Tuesday.
Plans for phase one were approved in the early fall of last year, and include 880 units of income restricted housing, 220 units of senior housing, a 25-space parking garage, over 22,000 square feet of retail space, around 5,000 square feet of community facilities, over 30,000 square feet of open space and a new K-8 school with 650 seats, which is being designed by the School Construction Authority in a separate effort. The affordable units are expected to rent from a range of below 30 percent of the area median income to over 100 percent of the area median income.
“All this work has taken years and years to get to this moment,” Monterisi said. “But what's going to happen, by the end of this year, we’re going to be out here again for groundbreaking, and we're going to be breaking ground on the first units of housing, and in a couple of years, we’re going to come back here and people are going to be living in this neighborhood.”
A rendering of phase one of the Willets Point redevelopment project. Rendering via Queens Development Group and S9 Architecture
Richards called the project “the definition of community development.”
“As this site gets developed, we’re really thinking about not just simply calling them [apartment] units,” the borough president said. “These are people's lives that are going to be impacted, who will be able to stay and live in a neighborhood across the street from Citi Field and a new soccer stadium, which is unheard of.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, City Councilmember Francisco Moya, New York City Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Andrew Kimball and Frank Monterisi, the chief operating officer at Related Companies, inside a water main currently being installed in phase one of the Willets Point redevelopment project. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Those who eventually move into the neighborhood may also one day be neighbors with a casino, which New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is looking to obtain the licenses for and build on a portion of Citi Field’s 50-acre parking lot at some point in the coming decade.
The casino bid is entirely separate from the development at Willets Point, though whatever additional development is done in the parking lot – potentially including a food hall, green space and community amenities – is likely to be considered one with the new neighborhood being built in the Iron Triangle.
Though Kimball said that the city had been in communication with Cohen about the Willets Point project, he didn’t comment on the potential casino bid, which will likely soon be pitched to the state’s gaming commission.
“In regard to their own approval process for what they're going to do, the prime mechanism there, as you know, the city has nothing to do with, it’s a state process,” he said.
The Mets agreed to allow New York City Football Club to use their parking lot, which is owned by the city but leased to the Mets, during games. Should Cohen be awarded a casino license and construction on the lot begin at some point in the coming years, Kimball dismissed the idea that the two projects may clash.
“All I can say is, in the various scenarios of what the future might hold, there will be just as much parking as there is today to meet the needs of Citi Field for the Mets and for future soccer games here,” he said. “That's not an issue.”
Regardless of whether or not a casino is built in the Citi Field lot, a corner of Willets Point is only years away from being transformed.
As the tour group on Tuesday made its way out from phase one and into phase two, which is slightly larger than the first phase, Moya, who was a major booster of the effort to bring the soccer stadium to Queens, appeared to be surprised by the openness of the space.
“We're building a brand new neighborhood,” he said.
