These landscapes are all taken from the yet to be published. Book called the junkyards, which is a very long-term view on the situation out in Queens in the area known as the iron triangle or Willits point. I did not caption any of these. I’ll leave that to the larger book when I publish it at which time I will delete this essay.
In the meantime, there’s a tremendous amount of information out about this place. You can dive into it. It’s quite interesting. I would call it the last true down in dirty immigrant neighborhood left in New York City. It’s still disappearing today.
The 65 acre area known as the Iron Triangle sits on city owned land. This was the area where the city would dump it’s coal ash so naturally industry, even polluting industries were allowed to flourish, and the land was leased from the city. When Mayor Bloomberg sold 23 acres of the junkyards to millennial properties for one dollar for redevelopment, it became international news. Not just because of the sweetheart deal, but, millennial wanted to build a $4 billion shopping mall in the age of Amazon. Long story short after a lot of arguing compromises were met and the 23 acres became affordable residential property, including schools and a new $800 million soccer stadium was built.
When you see open fields in front of the baseball stadium for the Mets, those were all auto shops, salvage yards, and iron fabricators. Obviously, the untitled and not caption all of the shops that are now gone are there.
Throughout the Bloomberg administration, I always talked about him being the gentrification mayor and the mayor of redevelopment. I would get a lot of grief because this was early on and the store. People just didn’t realize he was. In fact I used to say, I bet he flies around the city in helicopter to look for places to redevelop one after the other, and people would laugh and argue that’s ridiculous. Later I would find once you get out of office not only what was he flying around looking for redevelopment locations, but, he was an expert pilot and was he himself pilot a rather large helicopter to hunt for parcels of development.
When he first flew over the Junkyards in my shirt, his pants.