This was 23 acres of metalworks, auto shops, and junkyards, by, I’m standing next to, what’s left of, the late. Artist, Joe Z’s Iron Triangle Installation that he create with found materials in an Iron Triangle brownfield turned toxic marsh. The land itself is owned by the city of New York which had leased it, since the 1930s for industrial uses. The area first got attention when Fitzgerald referred to it as, “The Valley of the Ashes” More accurately, no Valley, just the Ashes, sitting at sea level, prone to flooding, with nor sewer system, with Flushing Creek, to the east, Flushing Bay to the west and Citi Field to the south. The history of the Iron Triangle has always been one of immigrants starting manufacturing and salvage shops, employing immigrants. Like Queens itself, a parade of ethnic groups, throughout the years has been here, and it’s largely South and Central American today.
In 2013, mayor Bloomberg sold, what was, 23 acres of New York parks property leased to dozens of shop owners, to developers for one dollar to build a $4 billion shopping mall, in the age of Amazon. After much protest, over this, including the complete displacement of 23 acres worth of workers, and, with a new mayor, it was decided that most of the site would be housing including 1500 affordable units, retail, and, even, a school. By 2022 a new $800 million soccer stadium was also added to the west end of the development, which is where I am standing, appropriately, because Queens and Flushing Meadows Park are synonymous with soccer, and, it’s kind of still park land in the sense of recreation leisure. Ironically, soccer games by Triangle workers, were held on an open concrete pad, here, until remediation and development began.
Although a deal was brokered to keep the remaining 40 acres of junkyards, not one of the renderings of the future development, reflects that, and, it seems, the new development has only created more of the same, which is extinction for the blue-collar immigrant jobs in favor of enormously profitable leisure activities, including trying to lure the proposed NYC casino. Now that’s stretching the notion of park land.
Is there a relation and gentrification?
2013 was also the last year I would spend in an apartment in Williamsburg where I had lived most of my life, after years of disruption, fighting, only culminating in forced displacement from my legal home. Forced out of brooklyn, after all the years, there, instead of licking my wounds, which was the healthy thing, i got more into the disappearance of the Triangle in Queens. A book that began in 1998 as simply a look at an interesting neighborhood, by 2013, had become the scene for a great struggle, to save it from hyper-gentrifcation, only, like always, to be doomed.