100 years of Long Island City

100 years of Hunters Point South and Long Island City show a dramatic evolution from a mostly industrial waterfront to a healthy neighborhood.

A thing that people undersell about our neighborhood, is that until about 10 years ago a huge chunk of Long Island City had zero residents and was an active industrial remediation site.

Long Island City was one of New York City’s industrial centers for most of the 20th century, home to factories, rail yards, and warehouses along the East River waterfront. The Pepsi-Cola sign, erected in 1936, survives as the most visible remnant of that era.

In 1961, despite the fact that Hunters Point already had significant residential population, the city’s new zoning resolution classified the area as manufacturing and prohibited residential development. The logic was industrial preservation: the waterfront was seen as an asset for freight, not housing. The result was decades of disinvestment. Industry declined anyway due to a whole host of external forces, but housing couldn’t follow. A 1981 special mixed-use district was the first crack in that framework, acknowledging the reality of what the neighborhood already was.

Rezoning for mixed-use

Starting in the 1990s, the city began converting the waterfront to residential use through the Queens West development plan. The 2001 rezoning (PDF) accelerated the transformation, allowing for the first time since 1961 the ability to build mixed use and residential buildings. The neighborhood has added tens of thousands of residents since. Hunters Point South Park, built on a former rail yard, opened in phases beginning in 2013.

This is why we’ve had very little displacement in Hunters Point South; there was literally no one to displace in a vast section of the neighborhood.

The comparison below is 1924 vs 2024, which clearly shows our industrial past.

But even comparing 1996 to 2016 to 2024 shows sharp changes to the neighborhood.