Tantalizingly soon...coming to Court Square, is Sage's General Store. Cupcakes. Need any further reason?
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The Times takes you to culinary Flushing -- just another 30 minutes on Le 7.
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The Queensbridge Theater. Dinner, dancing. Etc.
We can hardly wait.
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PS1's Warm Up installation this year -- Public Farm One -- is amazing and you have to see it. It's easily the best in 5 years. Live chickens!
Here is the Times on their visit.
Saturday September 6th is the final performance of the year -- the 10th series. Performing:
Lisa Shaw (live)
Bing Ji Ling (live)
Neil Aline (Chez Music)
Jerome Derradji (Still Music)
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Despite the C-Town on 21st and the shockingly huge Korean on Vernon...and, well, hometown heroes Fresh Direct's trucks idling in front of every big building every day...there has been the persistent "no supermarkets" rap on LIC for some time.
No longer.
The Amish Market owners have opened a very Whole-Foods-inspired Food Cellars near 5th Street at the Queens West buildings. It's a great supermarket!
Cheese counter, butcher, lots of vegetables and so forth. Very few major brands -- particularly "alterna market" in that sense with lots of Bob's Red Mills and Kashi etc.
And many prepared foods (Antipasti Bar?) along with a seating area to eat them.
And, by the way, a Duane Reade is in effect now too. Sayonara to the poorly-stocked, rarely-opened Vernon Pharmacy and LIC Pharmacy, sez LICNYC.
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Brooklyn and Queens waterfront has got lots of artful bombers running around.
See more images from the gallery of some of the creative graffiti running lately.
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There are a number of big projects progressing at the intersection of Jackson Ave and 11th Street -- where the Pulaski lets off its Brooklyn traffic.
There is this interesting boutique site which has a nifty red-and-steel building coming
There is this combo of Hunters Point and L
And this guy on the corner where Silver Star auto repair used to be, next to Vine Wine
And of course the completed Echelon, the in progress 1063, and the nearly complete 47th road project
There's the new little coffee shop there too.
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The waterfront is changing fast. Here's a snapshot for your archives.
More from the LICNYC gallery
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Behind the entry to the Pulaski Bridge, kind of near that goliath green construction for the "L" condos, is the best kept little secret park in LIC: handball, basketball, with the soothing hum of the LIE behind you.
But the true champ for best kept secret park (with the best view bar-none) is this one below
Can you guess where it is? Say so in the forums
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Manhattan in three minutes (from the Financial Times)
By Jeremy Lemer
Published: July 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 19 2008 03:00
Hunters View and One Hunters Point, a pair of luxury apartment blocks under construction in Long Island City, are nothing much to look at: two towers, 12 floors, brick, glass and steel overlooking dusty streets.
However, when the buildings opened for sale last September, queues formed overnight and stretched half way around the sales office building. Within hours, the initial offering of 40 properties had sold out, according to the developers.
Six months on, the building is not yet complete but now more than half the 204 properties have been snapped up and the starting price for a one-bedroom apartment has jumped from $371,000 to $485,000. The reaction was unusual but not unheard of for the neighbourhood, say locals, estate agents and developers, who agree that it is yet another indication of the pent-up demand for affordable, well located property in New York City.
In response to that pressure five new luxury condominiums as high as 43-stories have sprung up along the water front, most of them in the past three years. Behind that imposing front, the rest of the neighbourhood is straining to catch up. Seemingly, on every street corner between Vernon Boulevard, the main shopping strip, and the Sunnyside Rail Yards that are Long Island City's eastern extremity, residential condos are popping up.
Alongside the new-builds, restaurants, bars and cafés have arrived to cater to the new residents. Galleries abound since artist Takashi Murakami opened a design factory in the area in 2001. And Silvercup Studios lends the district a frisson of glamour through its association with hit TV series such as The Sopranos and Ugly Betty .
"We are seeing the transformation of an old industrial neighbourhood that was well located but forgotten into one that is brimming with excitement and possibility," says David Brause, president of Brause Realty and chairman of the Long Island City Business Improvement District.
Plans for the area's future are equally ambitious. Rockrose Development is scheduled to add a further four buildings to its current haul of three on the shoreline, while several luxury hotel chains are developing projects inland.
Near to the commercial and transit hub of Queens Plaza, Tishman Speyer, the property company that owns the Chrysler Building, is slated to build 3m sq ft of office, retail and residential space beginning this autumn. When completed, officials say the project will cement Long Island City's place as a commercial centre.
The buildings might be unfinished, the plans unrealised, but Long Island City is unapologetically selling itself nonetheless. On Vernon Boulevard, estate agencies and condo sales rooms outnumber convenience stores. It is easier to buy a dream apartment than a danish.
For New Yorkers, the changes come as something of a shock. Long Island City has traditionally conjured up images of factories and auto repair shops with ranks of dented yellow taxis sitting in crowded forecourts.
Brute geography reinforces the impression. The area is choked by an iron and concrete ring of highways and train tracks: the mid-town tunnel and the Long Island Expressway to the south; the Queensboro Bridge and Queens Boulevard to the north.
Those transport links hold the key to the locale's history, says Dr Jack Eichenbaum, a local historian who gives walking tours of the area on weekends. Waterways, the Long Island Rail Road and later subway links made the area a centre of heavy industry in the 19th century and then a manufacturing base for consumer products in the 20th. Road connections further enhanced Long Island City's accessibility.
In truth though, the area has always been about more than manufacturing: a patchwork of residences, industrial shops and small businesses. In 1981 it was zoned as a mixed use district. Then, as now, Romanesque Revival terraced houses stood cheek-by-jowl with factories - home to builders' yards, elevator repair companies and printing shops.
The area's reputation is finally catching up. Now, saleswomen with earnest expressions describe the area as "Tribeca in the 1980s" or "Williamsburg a decade ago".
Proximity to Manhattan is a crucial part of the appeal. "Three minutes to Grand Central by subway" boast the advertisements and the residents, many of whom work in the Midtown and Wall Street financial districts. The stunning views are another plus.
In spite of all this, prices are still also hard to beat. Andrew Fine, a property broker estimates that comparable properties cost between a third and a half less than they do in Manhattan. A two-bedroom apartment in a Long Island City new-build, with a top-of-the-range kitchen, still costs $850,000, though this is up from about $550,000 two years ago.
With such obvious advantages, the scale of the development surge in the past three years is less remarkable than the fact that it didn't happen a generation earlier. In part that is because development projects have taken time. For example, the waterfront area known as Queens West was earmarked for improvement as early as 1982. Construction only began in earnest in 2000.
Zoning changes have, belatedly, had rapid and far reaching effects. Inland, a 2004 rezoning has transformed the Hunters Point mixed-use area by allowing industrial sites to be converted to residential uses. "The rezoning made a lot of millionaires," says Fine.
Now, as Long Island City seems to be on the rise, its luck has improved. In 2004 Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed part of the waterfront for use as an Olympic village as part of the city's failed bid for the 2012 games. The higher profile has attracted buyers from Europe and the Middle East, realtors say. And, as in other areas, art and artists have played the role of pioneers. Tom Paino, a 58-year-old architect and planner, moved to the neighbourhood more than 30 years ago after visiting an exhibition at PS1, a contemporary art museum in an abandoned school building.
Paino was intrigued by what he saw and stayed, purchasing a two-storey brick terraced house in 1994. Since then he has restored the building and admits it is worth about 10 times what he paid. For comparison, his next-door neighbour was recently offered $1.2m for a similar house.
If Paino is a good example of the first new wave of migrants to the area, 38-year-old Claus Hertel and 33-year-old Natalia Bruslanova are typical of the latest. The couple work in structured finance, hail from Germany and Ukraine, where "industrial chic" has a pedigree, and were looking to find something more for their money than Manhattan could offer. In January the pair will move into a $1.5m duplex in The PowerHouse, a converted power station on the waterfront. The apartment has sweeping views of midtown Manhattan, easy access to the city for work and space to house Bruslanova's extensive wardrobe and Hertel's Porsche.
The two communities eye one another warily: development brings risks for both old and new residents. Another wall of new condos might screen off midtown views for everyone. The subways are already crowded during the rush hour and there is always the possibility that Tishman's landmark project will stall and Long Island City's rising property values along with it.
But such details fade when standing in the sales office for the Star Tower, a new 25-storey luxury high-rise planned for Queens Plaza by Roe Development. A online database of photos taken by helicopter will allow customers to see the specific panoramic views that each floor will provide. The photos gracefully elide the 1.5 miles of Long Island City between the tower and the midtown skyline, slipping over the crumbling factories, the trucks, weeds and fences, the scaffolding, to the skyscrapers in the distance. A video presentation emphasises that Long Island City is only three minutes from Manhattan. The implication is that for buyers from the city, it takes only three minutes to get back again.
Jeremy Lemer is an FT correspondent in New York
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Neither light beers nor dark ones are affordable to produce in the waterfront boroughs -- Brooklyn or Queens. See the famous and successful Brooklyn creaking under the cost of residential competition (from the NYT):
“We are the Brooklyn Brewery, and we want to be in Brooklyn,” said Mr. Hindy, who often bicycles to work from his home in Park Slope. “If we can’t find a place, then who can? We’re about as perfect an example of light manufacturing as you can get.”
Mr. Hindy has plenty of company in the hunt for affordable industrial land. Manufacturing space has become scarcer and more expensive as city officials have encouraged developers to replace crumbling factories and warehouses with amenity-laden condominiums.
“The scarcity of manufacturing land becomes a problem for manufacturers that are otherwise thriving in New York City,” said Leah Archibald, executive director of the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation, a Brooklyn business coalition.
And for the LIC angle:
A few years ago, Mr. Hindy and his partners hatched a plan to team up with the company that distributes its beers, Phoenix/Beehive Beverages of Long Island City, Queens, and move to Pier 7 in the Red Hook container port. Once there, Phoenix, which is the exclusive distributor of Heineken beer in the city, would have been able to receive its imports by water, skipping the expensive step of having them trucked in from Port Newark in New Jersey and ensuring a steady flow of work for longshoremen on the Brooklyn waterfront.
Under the plan, the new, bigger Brooklyn Brewery would have occupied a building at the foot of the pier, with a beer garden to attract local residents and tourists. The brewery would have served as a buffer between Brooklyn Bridge Park and the industrial piers.
Mr. Hindy and executives of Phoenix convinced officials of the city’s Economic Development Corporation that the city should acquire the pier from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and lease it to them. But the Port Authority got tangled in a legal battle with American Stevedoring, the operator of the Red Hook container port. Several elected officials, including Representative Jerrold Nadler, opposed the city’s effort to replace American Stevedoring, which renewed its lease for 10 years in April.
Mr. Hindy said he was “completely baffled” by the rejection of the Pier 7 plan and felt as though his need for an alternative location had lost the attention of city officials.
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It has to be close. Can't travel far in those trucks. So where? LIC.
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