On the banks of polluted Newtown Creek, Maspeth, Queens, is a neighborhood of contrasts. Trucks rumble through the industrial areas to the south, the sound of children playing echoes through residential side streets, and the bustle of commerce dominates the main shopping strip of Grand Avenue, which straddles the Long Island Expressway.
Hemmed in by cemeteries and hard-pressed against the Brooklyn border, the insulated and isolated neighborhood has remained a “normal middle-income neighborhood with working class roots,” said Gary Giordano, district manager of Community Board 5. Single- and two-family homes predominate; apartment buildings are few.
Hipsters have yet to discover the neighborhood, and may never infiltrate its confines, mainly because of the absence of a subway connection to the rest of the city, said Maryanna Zero, a real estate broker who is president of the Maspeth Chamber of Commerce. Blue-collar and retired residents make up the bulk of the population, she said, and there are some bargains to be found — small homes sell for around $450,000.
“This is a neighborhood where several generations in a family stick around and go to the same grammar school,” said Zero. “My grandmother and mother lived here. I live here and my children bought homes in the area.”
Even in such a static neighborhood, development battles top the list of contentious local issues. The area is being considered for zoning changes, which cannot come too fast for many residents. Unlike Middle Village, which has seen its share of McMansions, Maspeth’s main problem is what Giordano calls “overdevelopment, where they take a big lot with one house and build four or five new homes on the spot.”
Residents successfully fought against a proposal by the KeySpan energy company to sell the former site of the Elmhurst Gas Tanks to developers looking to build big-box stores. The Bloomberg administration stepped in and decided to turn the area into a park, giving a boost to local activists.
Local groups remain vigilant against illegal building, said Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association.
Holden identified several development squabbles that he claimed affected the quality of life for residents. “In addition to absentee landlords, who buy houses for investments and don’t keep up the property, we see a lot of developers and architects abusing the self-certification system,” he said. “We’ve caught a number of them and now there are several buildings sitting there half-finished after we reported them to the Department of Buildings.”
The group has also fought the city over what it calls an abuse of infill zoning, which allows for higher-density buildings with less parking in R4 and R5 zones, which Holden claims creates a big parking problem on local streets.
For years, residents fought to clean up Newtown Creek and its ancillary, Maspeth Creek, among the state’s most polluted waterways. Remediation of the former Phelps-Dodge copper factory site in Maspeth’s industrial section is complete, but the banks of the creek remain inaccessible. The Department of City Planning considered creating parks alongside the inlet, but the plan has yet to come to fruition.
The latest skirmish roiling the neighborhood centers on St. Savior’s Church, built in 1847, which stands out mainly because it’s one of the few historic structures in an area where most buildings date to the period between 1930 and 1960, said Giordano.
Bought by the San Sung Korean Methodist Church in 1997, the group sold it to the Maspeth Development Corporation last year. Plans for the 2-acre site include 70 new residences and are contingent on a zoning change. Local activists applied for landmark status, though the Landmarks Preservation Commission deemed it ineligible due to the extensive repairs made after a fire in 1970.
“The building offers a glimpse into 19th-century Queens,” said Holden. “It’s built on a rolling hill with stately 100-year old trees, which cannot grow to that size here anymore due to the pollution. There’s a lot of history there and we still have a shot at landmarking.”
As in the rest of the city, the area’s real estate values rose during the recent boom, but have leveled off, said Zero. The newfound affluence has brought some changes to the retail district, including an Indian restaurant, a Japanese restaurant, a large Stop & Shop supermarket that anchors a retail center, and several national chain drug stores. Many residents mourned the end of an era when a new CVS moved into a long-standing mid-sized supermarket. The bulk of other retail outlets are smaller mom and pop shops.
“We have a lot of banks, but still a good number of discount stores,” said Giordano, who notes that the latest wave of newcomers represents those displaced from other areas of the city. “We’ve seen a lot of Polish people move in who have sold their homes in Greenpoint, where they can get $800,000. They can buy the same size house in Maspeth or Ridgewood for $600,000, fix it up and still have money in the bank.”