NYCFC breaks ground on Willets Point stadium
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New York City Football Club and city officials broke ground on the team’s new soccer stadium in Willets Point on Wednesday. Photo via Queens Borough President Donovan Richards/X
By Jacob Kaye
The city officially broke ground on New York City Football Club’s future stadium in Willets Point on Wednesday, a little more than two years after Mayor Eric Adams first announced that the soccer club would one day build its future home in Queens.
In that time, the site the stadium will one day sit atop of has changed dramatically. Once home to dozens of auto shops and hundreds of workers, as well as decades of pollution and neglect, a major portion of Willets Point is well on its way to becoming an entirely new neighborhood, replete with new apartment buildings, shops, parks, a school, and, at its center, New York City Football Club’s stadium.
The mayor, local lawmakers, union leaders and fans of the club likened the groundbreaking to a match victory – one long-time supporter of the team said Wednesday’s ceremony was as important a moment in the team’s short history as their first Major League Soccer championship in 2021.
It’s been a long time coming not just for the stadium, but for the development of Willets Point, which has, for decades, stumped city officials.
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, many of which occupied the neighborhood for the past several decades until they were bought out and, in some cases, removed from the area to make way for the development currently underway.
Attempts by city officials to develop the 60-acre neighborhood have been started and stopped multiple times, making the project somewhat of an embarrassment for the city, which owns 23-acres of the area.
Though the details have changed, the current plan for Willets Point’s development dates back to Mayor Michal Bloomberg’s administration, which, in 2008, spearheaded the passage of the Special Willets Point District. In 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio broke ground on the first phase of the project, which is currently under construction and expected to be completed in 2026.
A year later, Adams said the city had struck a deal with NYCFC, which included leasing the city-owned land to the club for them to build their privately-financed stadium – a recent report from the Independent Budget Office found that the stadium won’t come without a cost to taxpayers, who will miss out on $538 million in property tax revenue the club won’t be required to pay.
But city officials claim the center of the development is not the stadium, but the 2,500 units of affordable housing that will one day surround it.
“This is the reality of the dream that we put in place,” Adams said on Wednesday. “This is Willets Point, this is Etihad Park and we won.”
The city broke ground on NYCFC’s future soccer stadium in Willets Point on Wednesday. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
The redevelopment of Willets Point, when completed, will amount to the largest 100 percent affordable new housing project in nearly half a century.
Phase one of the project will include the first 1,100 units of affordable housing, a K-8 school, a parking garage and an acre of open space. Phase two will include a new hotel, 180,000 square feet of retail space, 1,400 affordable housing units and the stadium.
No one on Wednesday was more excited about the project than City Councilmember Francisco Moya, who said that he knew he was going to bring a soccer stadium to Queens “from the moment that I was elected.”
Moya has been a major booster for the proposal and the club – he met with MLS Commissioner Don Garber, who was raised in Queens and attended Bayside High School at the same time as the mayor, over a decade ago to begin discussions about bringing a team to the city.
Moya, whose final term in the City Council will end next year, often referred to the stadium project as his legacy.
“It's often that people in public service…stop to consider the differences between their accomplishments and their legacy,” he said on Wednesday. “Our accomplishments have already happened, but our legacies are the intangibles that will live on into the future.”
Chance Michaels, one of the founders of the NYCFC supporter group The Third Rail, said that even with some of the team’s successes over the years, it has been difficult to build a community around the club given its lack of a home stadium. Though he lives in Brooklyn, he said he was happy to learn that the stadium would be coming to Queens.
“Queens is such a fantastically diverse borough,” Michaels said. “I like to say that Queens is the real heartland of America.”
NYCFC officials and fans were joined by Mayor Eric Adams, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, City Councilmember Francisco Moya and others for the groundbreaking of the team’s stadium in Willets Point on Wednesday.
The prospect of the new stadium and the neighborhood that will surround it was almost enough to get him to consider packing his bags and moving to the World’s Borough.
“I'm a Brooklynite, I'm going to stay where I am,” Michaels said. “But it’s gotta be tempting, right?”
