Streets By Air Ep 08 - Queens Plaza, Queens, NY

Located in the center of the 18th century village of Dutch Kills, "Queens Plaza" was built in 1909 as a connection for the Queensboro Bridge and Queens Boulevard. By 1928, 86,000 cars were passing through the plaza each day, and the area came to be known as "a new downtown". In the 1920s through World War II, it was home to many industrial warehouses, factories, and banks. The Brewster Building (currently the JetBlue corporate HQ), a factory along the plaza, made horse-drawn carriages, Rolls-Royces, and fighter planes. The Chase Manhattan Bank Building aka the Clocktower (once the tallest building in Queens) still stands as a landmark today. Sadly, with the city's economic decline of the 1970s, Queens Plaza became a territory for drug dealers, pimps, and sex workers; a place of municipal neglect, littered with trash, drugs, and broken glass. Through the 1990s, the Plaza remained a dusty hub of transportation, surrounded by strip clubs, "aging Chinese takeout restaurants, humid fried-chicken joints, sad-seeming doughnut shops, [and] the Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage, a brown concrete structure", that many longtime commuters remember. However, the gentrification of the 2000s has created a city of the future, and brought with it valleys of glass buildings towering over the plaza. What was once (by the year 2000) merely a population of 1,000 living on the streets immediately surrounding the plaza, has suddenly turned into one of the fastest growing populations of affluent new transplanted residents in Western Queens. The 7, N, W, E, M, and R trains all pass through this hub daily. Commuters are usually caught looking out their windows at the magnificence of this revived Queens neighborhood. A sign of things to come for the borough abroad, the area is now a symbol of the unstoppable developments growing all over the city. And even though the rent is borderline insanity, and the buildings look like something out of Tron, the classic sounds of the trains screeching and rumbling into the plaza, preserves some LIC nostalgia. 🗽