The first Long Island City Summit opened at the Museum of the Moving Image last week on Tuesday morning. “LIC Now: Perspectives and Prospects” was the general title of the summit, which examined what has brought Long Island City to its present situation. Long Island City was for some time important as one of the chief industrial zones in the five boroughs. In recent years, the building of residential towers and hotels has been so conspicuous it has seemed the industrial base was not merely being put in decline but driven to extinction. Calls for industrial retention arose and have been bolstered lately by the assumption that the coming of the Cornell NYC Tech graduate center to Roosevelt Island will be a technological boon for Queens, especially Long Island City.
“LIC: Big City, Big Picture” was its morning keynote statement by a four-member panel, as the day’s participants tried to examine the components that have brought LIC to its current state. The “BCBP” panel, moderated by Elizabeth Lusskin, president of the LICP, was completed by Carl Weisbrod, director of the Department of City Planning and chairman of the Planning Commission; Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future; and Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. Weisbrod lives on Roosevelt Island and said that it is a part of Manhattan politically but as a neighborhood tends toward Queens. He said the industrial base in Long Island City or anywhere else in NYC started to lose ground after 1945 because it was necessarily horizontal and was often lured away to places where it could spread out more easily. At present, it is possible it might expand vertically in the city, as it never could before. Wylde favors “robust public-private partnerships” and said that the fastest-growing businesses in New York are technology, tourism and what’s known as “creative.” She believes Long Island City is right and ready for all of them. Bowles said Long Island City has been hailed as the next big thing for 30 years and may finally have arrived. He called movies and television “the true asset of this neighborhood.” As for the impending tech boom, it might be a test for LIC, which he finds not as walkable or bicycle-friendly as it will have to be for tech people. Another test will be building commercial space, even at the expense of residential. He had in mind what might be done with old loft buildings on 21st Street, which he saw as potentially good for tech and NYC Tech. At the same time, Weisbrod said that LIC needs much more retail business than it now has.
The keynote speaker for the afternoon, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen, said that Hunters Point South, the city-built apartment complex that should have 5,000 units once it is completed, stands to be “a model for working class families.” She also said that LIC makes “Muffins, Muppets and movies” and expressed her dislike for the term, “Silicon Alley,” finding it second-rate. She’d replace it with “Technopolis” as a term worthy of LIC when Cornell-NYC Tech’s presence takes effect there. That event she finds inevitable, from the time the technological graduate school shows its first buildings on Roosevelt Island in 2017 and develops for years afterward, to bring benefits to all Queens but LIC especially. Tech employment, she observed, would provide the highest-paying middle-class jobs and build “the pathway to the middle class” that “should be every New Yorker’s right.” The impact of technology is such that even a non-tech company becomes one “to a more-or-less extent,” she said. Success will come from smart capital investment in manufacturing that can grow. Technology and the manufacture of muffins, Muppets and movies are a good bet for anyone’s capital investment, and all should exist in an atmosphere of density, she
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added, because density is the key to the vitality of urban life. Housing and business depend on it. She concluded that “thoughtful density” will make a city and its people stronger.
Beneath the sweep of these keynote declarations was information and commentary coming out of a half-dozen panels, covering both commercial/industrial and residential real estate; services and amenities; television and film; LIC as a tech district; and arts and culture. Services and amenities ranged from hospitals to hotels and restaurants. Caryn Schwab of Mount Sinai Queens in Astoria said that hospitals are now less a matter of beds than outpatient care and that MSQ’s new, six-story facility was built for the necessities of the 21st century, which include expanding the primary care base. Frank “Turtle” Raffaele, who owns several Coffeed cafés, one of them a 200-seater at Hunters Point South Park, said that increasing tourism is paramount but a hard-won task, requiring more than simply flooding the territory in and around LIC with hostelry. One hotelier, Lisa Gneo of Z Hotel, called for slower growth, improvement of infrastructure and beautification of the neighborhoods.
The panel examining LIC as a tech district was moderated by Carol Conslato, Con Edison’s director of public affairs, and featured Cathy S. Dove, founding vice president of Cornell NYC Tech; Ben Guttman of Digital Natives Group; Jukay Hu of Coalition for Queens; Jane E. Schulman, vice president, adult and continuing education at La Guardia Community College; and Joseph Tazewell, NYC regional director for Empire State Development. Jukay Hsu began by saying that Shapeways and other tech companies already have a history in LIC, which needn’t be holding its breath waiting for Cornell NYC Tech. Guttman said he moved from Westchester to LIC because it already had a good tech base and could use some sort of tech campus of its own. Cathy Dove recited a timeline of Cornell NYC Tech development, which runs as far as 2040. She said that current transportation to Roosevelt Island is good but obviously needs to be more extensive if the tech campus is to reach out to Queens. Schulman said that for La Guardia students, success is not a quick process. She said the school needs to develop a better grasp of the demand side. Tazewell spoke of the Excelsior Tax Credit and the venture capital program, Innovate NY, to which Goldman Sachs is a major contributor. Jukay Hsu was grateful for state funds and said he sees technology as a “macro lever” for the creation of so-called echo jobs. “Everyone wants to go where the talent is,” he said.
The panel on arts and culture, moderated by Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, concluded the day’s activities. The commissioner was joined by Orestes Gonzalez, who lists house restoration and photography among his talents; Sheila Lewandowski of the Chocolate Factory Theatre; Jenny Dixon of the Noguchi Museum; and Carl Goodman of the Museum of the Moving Image. If Astoria is included in it, all have had years of experience in LIC. All seem to recognize a thriving arts scene but some worry about its future. Goodman warned of transiency and pictured somebody’s studio forced out by a sportswear chain store, with parlous consequences for artists. Dixon feared that if artists isolate themselves or are isolated, they will perish. Finkelpearl more than once mentioned his great fear: the huge student debt that could leave generations in financial desperation. A woman commenting from the audience said that the main employers of young artists are older artists. Lewandowski looked at a brighter side, hailing the $23 million allocation for the arts in the city budget, being decided even as the forum proceeded. A member of Community Board 2, she said that all community boards should have cultural committees.
It was at this final panel that Jenny Dixon congratulated Liz Lusskin for her effort in organizing the LIC Summit, calling it particularly remarkable since Lusskin assumed the LICP presidency only last autumn. City Controller Scott Stringer had begun the day hoping that the summit would be an annual event, and it seems there are several from this year’s summit determined to put one on in 2015.
