From marsh, to Moses, to Mets: A history of the site now eyed for Cohen’s casino or new park

Mets owner Steve Cohen has proposed building a casino and entertainment complex on Citi Field’s parking lot, which extends around 50 acres around the stadium. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye

By Jacob Kaye

Before high-rise towers jutted out across the water in Flushing, before the Mets came to town, before the 7 train, there was a marsh.

At various points in the last 200 years, the marsh has been just that, considered to be just as unremarkable – and unprofitable – as any other marsh in the five boroughs. But also throughout its history, the wetland has been seen as the foundation for grand projects and proposals, including the World’s Fair, a professional sports complex and a shopping mall.

The area, now known as Willets Point, once was a local embarrassment, the inspiration for a particularly desolate setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby.” Before that, it was a temporary refuge for enslaved Black Americans seeking freedom in the north – they would hide in its tall grasses while on their way to their next stop along the Underground Railroad. And years after Fitzgerald dubbed the area the “Valley of Ashes,” it became the home of New York’s newest baseball team, created to fill the void left by the westward migration of the Giants and the Dodgers.

Willets Point has seen years of disinvestment only to later see years of speculation and growth, only later to again fall into disrepair and then, again, into growth.

After decades of relative disinvestment, it appears now as though a new chapter in the history of Willets Point is beginning to be written.

On its east side, the city has begun building the largest affordable housing project it’s embarked on in nearly half a century. The same area will also likely soon be home to the city’s first-ever stadium dedicated solely to soccer.

And while the future of its west side is less clear, what is clear is that the area, a 50-acre parcel of land owned by the city but leased to the New York Mets, has again become to be viewed as a canvas for major development.

New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, the richest owner in baseball with an estimated net worth of around $20 billion, is one of a dozen developers bidding for one of three downstate casino licenses expected to be handed out by the state’s Gaming Commission in the coming year or so. Should he get one, Cohen plans to build a casino and entertainment complex on the former marsh currently being used as Citi Field’s parking lot.

And over the weekend, a coalition of local groups unveiled a competing plan they’ve dubbed “Phoenix Meadows,” a proposal to build a sloped public park atop the Citi Field parking lot.

The dueling proposals both face a number of hurdles.

The plan to build a park, which is in its earliest stages, would require funding that has yet to be acquired. Also adding complications to the plan is the fact that the Mets have decades remaining on their lease on the land with the city.

But Cohen faces his own hurdles.

Beyond convincing the Gaming Commission to grant him a license, he’ll need state lawmakers to change the official designation of the land he hopes to build the casino on.

Though it’s never been one, the land is technically designated as a park.

How that designation came to be lies within the history of the land and can be tied back to New York City’s most infamous urban planner – Robert Moses.

A century of parking

Sitting in the intersection of Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek, Willets Point began as a marsh.

Beyond its environmental purpose, the area went largely unused during the earliest years of New York City.

That changed around 1830, when Black Americans escaping slavery in the south would use the marsh, and a temporary island that had sprouted up in the middle of it, to make their way to Flushing. The neighborhood was home to a large Quaker community that had become major proponents for abolishing slavery and who had made the Western Queens neighborhood a stop along the Underground Railroad.

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the area again went largely unused.

In the late 1910s, the land was purchased by Michael Degnon, a contractor who had begun to make a fortune winning contracts to build the city’s subway system.

Degnon began to fill in the marsh with ash and garbage, dumped there by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company. It was the work of the ash removal company that inspired Fitzgerald’s “Valley of Ashes” – and that would later inspire the coalition behind the park proposal to name it “Phoenix Meadows,” a park rising from the ashes.

A pile of ash created by the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company at Willets Point. Photo via Queens Museum

Though filthy, the dump served a purpose. At the time, most of the city’s buildings were heated with coal-fired burners. Using the burners generated a lot of ash, some of which the city wasn’t able to dispose of on their own. As a solution, they contracted with private companies, like the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, to dump the ashes.

The company operated on the land until the 1930s, when the city purchased it in preparation for the 1939 World’s Fair, which would soon come to Queens.

The area, which had seen the construction of the 7 line begin around a decade earlier, was designated as parkland, if only to allow Robert Moses, the city’s powerful Parks Department commissioner, to control it.

But the land wasn’t always part of the World’s Fair plan.

In a 1936 letter penned by the commissioner, Moses, whose work primarily made New York City a car-centric city, said that he and the state and city engineers preparing the World’s Fair site had discussed the acquisition of Willets Point “for additional parking space for the Fair.”

But Moses said that convincing tax payers that the purchase of the land was needed would be difficult. That could change, he suggested, once New Yorkers understood the scope and grandeur of the 1939 World’s Fair.

“The situation, however, would be entirely different if after the basic plan for the Fair has been worked out and agreed upon, it is the conclusion of the directors, the representatives of the city and state, and all the engineers, that this area is absolutely indispensable for parking,” Moses wrote.

Not long after writing the letter, the city would purchase the land valued at around $673,000, according to a letter written by Moses in the Parks Department’s archives.

After shelling out around $500,000 to build the lot, the city became the largest parking attendant working at the World’s Fair. At the time, the lot was built to fit 12,000 cars.

During the first year of the fair, Moses got into a public battle with the World’s Fair Corporation, which had opened up a parking lot for guests just across the street from the city’s lot – Moses had declined to purchase the separate lot for parking despite an earlier request from the World’s Fair. Both lots charged 50 cents per car.

The parking lot had also gotten Moses into trouble with a group of 200 nearby homeowners after the city made it a misdemeanor to offer private parking within the vicinity of the fair. A judge would go on to rule that Moses and the city had created an unfair monopoly by preventing the locals from collecting cash from their lots.

Robert Moses, the city’s controversial former Parks commissioner, standing next to a map of the World’s Fair site. AP file photo

Though Moses took little action on the lot in the years following the conclusion of the fair, his work in the surrounding area had an impact on it.

To the land’s north, Moses spearheaded the construction of the Whitestone Expressway. To its west, the city built the Grand Central Parkway. To its east, the Van Wyck Expressway was built. And the Long Island Expressway boxed in the entire area, including Flushing Meadows Corona Park, from the south.

In 1947, control of the site was given to the NYPD, which was tasked with operating the lot in an effort to control congestion in Manhattan. During the police’s reign over the lot, parking was free.

That experiment would end less than a decade later when Moses would again retain control over the land. The commissioner proposed reverting the lot to a pay-per-park system and building a “recreational spot for model airplane contests and soft-ball games,” the New York Times reported in 1953.

“The entire tract is known informally as Willets Point Park,” the Times story reads.

In 1957, Moses proposed that the then-Brooklyn Dodgers move from Ebbets Field to the former World’s Fair parking lot. However, the baseball club didn’t like the idea and instead proposed moving to the area that now houses the Barclays Center. Moses rejected the idea and the Dodgers decided they’d be better off moving to Los Angeles.

But Moses’ dreams of baseball by Flushing Bay didn’t dissipate.

In 1961, one of baseball’s newest expansion franchises, the New York Mets, signed a lease on the land with the city.

All available parking space is utilized as the New York Mets opened the 55,000 seat Shea Stadium, in a game at Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, April 17, 1964. An hour before game time there was a gigantic traffic jam on parkways leading to the park. More than 50,000 fans were on hand as the Mets followed form and lost the game 4-3. AP file photo

That same year, the City Council voted to pass a resolution asking the state legislature to pass what is known as a parkland alienation bill. The legislation, which eventually was passed, gave the Mets express permission to use the land for a limited number of purposes.

It’s that same parkland alienation bill that now stands in Cohen’s way.

It also stood in the way of the Mets’ former owners, the Wilpons, who around a decade ago attempted to build a shopping mall in Willets Point. The plan was rejected in court by a judge who ruled that the developers’ proposal fell well outside of the scope of designated uses allowed under the parkland alienation bill.

Since the building of Shea Stadium and later Citi Field, much of the land currently eyed for development has remained a parking lot.

With the exception of the Wilpon’s mall proposal, its use as a parking lot has gone relatively unquestioned over the past half century.

A look toward the future

That changed last year, when Cohen began publicly pitching his casino and entertainment complex proposal, which he has since dubbed Metropolitan Park. The plan includes a hotel, 20 acres of new park space, a live music venue, a food hall and several parking garages in the immediate area surrounding the baseball stadium, in addition to the casino.

In all, the project is expected to cost $8 billion.

Cohen and his supporters have largely painted the project as a break from the status quo, and one that would bring a number of economic benefits to the surrounding communities.

“This site has been a parking lot for the last 100 years and it will be a parking lot for another hundred years unless we have an economic engine to make real investments and real change,” a Metropolitan Park spokesperson told the Eagle in a statement. “Metropolitan Park is our once in a lifetime opportunity to transform this asphalt desert into a year-round sports and entertainment destination – creating 25 acres of new open park space and 15,000 good paying jobs in the process.”

Ultimately, Cohen and his team will have to convince both State Senator Jessica Ramos and State Assemblymember Jeff Aubry that the project is worthy of the land it’s proposed for.

Though Aubry introduced a parkland alienation bill in the legislature last year that would allow for the building of a casino, Ramos did not. Instead, Ramos said that she wanted to hold a series of public town halls in an effort to get feedback on the proposal from her constituents.

On Wednesday, Ramos will hold the third of her series of town halls. Wednesday’s meeting will focus on both the casino plan and the Phoenix Meadows plan, which was created by a coalition of local groups known as FED UP.

Rebecca Pryor, the executive director of coalition member Guardians of the Flushing Bay, told the Eagle on Tuesday that unlike Cohen’s casino plan, Phoenix Meadows offers the city an opportunity to fulfill the promise of the land’s designation, regardless of that designation’s original intent.

“Designated parkland in New York City is a valuable, non-replenishing resource,” Pryor said. “If we have areas that are designated parkland, it is our responsibility to be investing in them.”

“This is an opportunity for us not to double down on the wrongs of treating this park not as a park,” she added. “It is a time for us to actually invest in it as real park space.”

Ramos’ town hall will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 7, at 6:30 p.m., at the New York Hall of Science.