#24
The thing about Willets Point that the real sticklers and historians will tell you is what we know today as Willets Point isn’t the original Willets Point.
The first Willets Point was in Bayside — on a little tip of land where the East River and Long Island sound meet. The Willets were a prominent family in what we now know as Queens and in the 1850s they gave this bit of land to the government so they could build Fort Totten. What came after was Willets Point Boulevard, which ran from Bayside to the area around Citi Field. Now we call Willets Point, Willets Point, and the old Willets Point, Fort Totten.
I do have an actual point in all this history — New York City is constantly changing, in big ways and small ways. In old names and new names. This week we learned of one big way: The New York City Football Club will get a soccer stadium at Willets Point 2.0 and the area is getting an additional 1,400 affordable apartments.
This adds to the 1,100 already announced, along with the the retail hub, and all the cleanup work being done as I type this. Willets Point has for years been home to car repair shops and the land needs lots of cleaning — not to mention infrastructure upgrades like sewers.
I first started writing about Willets Point in my DNAinfo days and became obsessed with the history of the “Iron Triangle.”
I spent a few days back in 2016 at the Queens Library Archives, poring over the folders of newspaper clippings of all of the failed promises and dreams for Willets Point. These 61 acres held a lot of people’s hopes. Even Donald Trump wanted a piece of it, in the form of a domed football stadium. Robert Moses suffered one of his few losses there, when a young lawyer named Mario Cuomo successfully defended the auto body shop owners from their land being used as parking during the 1964-1965 World’s Fair.
Now it’s going to be a brand new neighborhood, even as we have many unanswered questions — will there be a larger school built in phase 2? What about crowding on the 7 train? What hopes and dreams will grow there?
From the archives
Other interesting stories:
My colleague Alyssa Katz wrote about the heartbreaking story of Clarissa Crader and her son, Justin Campbell, that gets to the larger issues of caring for those with mental illness.
“Laws and policies grasp for an elusive balance between civil liberties and compelled treatment for those driven by paranoid delusions and violent tendencies. For family members, the choices are immediate and dire. Keep him at home, try to treat the mental illness, and pray that your adult child doesn’t deteriorate. Days and nights pass in fear that they could injure someone — a family member, a stranger, themselves.” [THE CITY]
LISTEN
I first met Luke Folger at my friend James’s annual summer barbecue, dubbed the Jum-B-Q. He would perform wearing a MIDI keyboard setup with a power unit on his back, looking a bit like the Rocketeer. He has a new single and video out today, so give it a listen.
WATCH
If you missed the Queens World Festival, you can stream all of the movies shown there from the comfort of your home. There are multiple price points but for $50 you can watch every single film — from shorts to documentary features, from global filmmakers and local ones, too. It’s a great deal! [QWFF STREAMING LINK]
thanks for reading + stay warm!