The story of Queens West, a 74-acre waterfront tract in Long Island City, is a tale of two halves.
The northern half of the site will soon see construction of seven more residential buildings that will add thousands of apartment units to an area just across the East River from Manhattan.
The southern half of the tract was supposed to be equally ambitious: Plans called for it to become one of the biggest commercial hubs in New York and briefly the site of the Olympic Village for the 2012 Summer Games.
But Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s heavily touted bid for Olympic glory was eclipsed by a London fog, and the rezoning of a nearby area for heavy commercial left the future of the southern half of the parcel in doubt. So, what to do, then, with the remaining half of Queens West?
Make it like the northern half, apparently.
The Queens West Development Corporation, a city-state-Port Authority partnership, has hired the Weitzman Group, a Manhattan-based real estate consulting firm to evaluate the 31-acre parcel in the absence of large-scale commercial development. Weitzman is expected to publicize its study results by early autumn.
“There is a lot of interest by real estate people in the development of Queens West,” said Alexander Federbush, president of the Queens West Development Corporation.
Federbush said he couldn’t say which developers had approached the corporation about building in Queens West. Two already have, and one has plans to build in the northern half.
Rockrose Development already has plans to build seven residential buildings on the northern half that should add more than 3,000 units. The 522-unit City Lights, a co-op, as well as the 372-unit rental Avalon Riverview, opened in 1997 and 2003, respectively. Retail, parkland, and possibly an elementary school are expected to follow.
Rockrose plans to open the first of its seven buildings a 31-story rental by late 2006, according to Charles Singer, director of market research at Rockrose.
Media speculation this summer had one of the seven buildings becoming the largest condo in the city. Not so, said Singer. Instead, that idea has been scaled down into a 30-story tower.
The evolution of Queens West to a residential hub began with a groundbreaking in 1984 in pursuit of creating the fourth-largest commercial hub in the city after Midtown, Downtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. The original project plan called for more than 2 million square feet of commercial office space. That promise was never quite kept, as politics, economics and market shifts took their toll.
The area northeast of Queens West, around the transit stops of Queens Plaza and Court Square, was rezoned in 2001 to become a central business district for Queens, negating the need for it in nearby Queens West.
“Since the original general project plan,” Federbush said, “the city has done a lot of rationalizing regarding where it wants its commercial hubs. With Queens Plaza rezoned and developing commercially, it didn’t seem practical anymore to build commercially [in Queens West].”
The Weitzman Group study, at a public cost of around $400,000, will weigh in, then, on whether to develop the southern half of Queens West as all residential or as mixed-use, according to the development corporation.
And there are plenty of people waiting to act on its long-awaited formal conclusions.