Long Island City, Queens Pt. II

Once its own city before Queens County was fully developed and swallowed up by New York City, Long Island City is now the catch-all for a fairly dreary industrial hodge podge made up of several smaller neighborhoods: Hunters Point (detailed earlier), Dutch Kills, Ravenswood and Court Square. (During its 28 years of cityhood -- 1870-1898 -- Long Island City also included Astoria and Steinway.) There's little to link the sub-sections other than the themes of industry and overpowering and inhumanly scaled infrastructure.

The neighborhood's hub, adjacent to Hunters Point, is Court Square, centered around the beautiful Beaux Arts New York State Supreme Court building. Originally built in 1876 as the Long Island City Courthouse (and rebuilt in 1908), it's very hard to imagine a time that this formed the center of any discernable neighborhood or city. It's an unreadable hub butchered by bad planning and interrupted by the needs of transportation and industry.

Across the street from the courthouse is New York's tallest structure outside of Manhattan, the Citicorp Building, with 48 stories and 663 feet. It's not a bad landmark at all and stands completely alone in the far reaches of the sky, visible from every point in western Queens.

Near the hub is a permitted graffiti explosion at 5 Pointz, a sprawling warehouse on Davis Street.

Warehouses, scrapyards and other low-grade industries abound.

In one area around 21st Street, former factories and warehouses have been reborn as film and tv studios, including the big-signed Silver Cup, once a massive bakery.

The Queensboro Bridge and its approach, finished in 1909, is an impressive and gritty structure and it effectively cuts LIC into two pieces.

To the east and across the bridge's approach, Dutch Kills has a somewhat more cohesive and residential character of modest clapboard homes and small brick tenements that house a mostly Hispanic and Black community.

Along LIC's western edge, bordering onto the East River, is Ravenswood, a largely industrial zone with patches of public housing and modest residential streets. Here, a rotting factory on 12th Street has met a graffiti crew called the Wallnuts:

A major landmark is the Ravenswood Plant, once known as "Big Allis." Formerly a Con-Ed facility, it spilled tens of thousands of gallons of fuel oil from underground pipelines in the 1990s. After scandals and half-hearted clean-up efforts, the plant was sold to current owner KeySpan Energy.

From the Ravenswood Houses to the Queensbridge Houses is a scrappy residential area that feels more isolated than it does destitute. The Hip Hop-ily immortalized Queensbridge is one of the city's first (1939), largest (3,149 units in 26 buildings) and most successful housing projects.

Ravenswood Houses:

Queensbridge Houses: