1st Look At Willets Point Plan
BY THOMAS COGAN

C u r r e n t l y Willets Point is home to acres of junkyards and polluted earth.

The grand building plan for Willets Point, subject of an announcement from City Hall this week, was available for preview last week, when a few newspaper people were invited to see it at the city Economic Development Corporation's offices in Manhattan. In Willets Point, acres of junkyards and polluted earth, next to a worn-out baseball stadium and the beginnings of a new one, are viewed as a sports/entertainment/ hospitality/residential/commercial area- prosperous, superbly coordinated and fully realized in 10 years' time. In all, a plan for Willets Point has been declared, described at length and put on schedule.

The current presentation grows out of the Flushing Framework, first aired in 2002. David John Brito, a project manager for real estate development at the EDC, said it was a promise to revitalize the waterfront east of the ballpark( s), redevelop Willets Point as a whole and reconnect it with Downtown Flushing. Two years later, the Willets Point Advisory Committee issued a request for expression of interest, or RFEI, to see what the city's real estate interests thought of a Willets Point development plan. Brito said the response was "overwhelmingly" positive. Environmental and soil testing followed in 2005 and a request for proposal (RFP) was made in 2006. The city plan announced this week calls for a zoning change to C4-4 (commercial) from M3-1 (manufacturing).

Brito's presentation included an aerial view he described as "illustrative". It showed what things might look like if 1.7 million square feet of retail and entertainment space were built, along with 5,500 units of mixedincome housing, a 650-seat elementary school, a 700-room hotel, a 400,000- square-foot capacity convention center and 500,000 square feet of office space. The retail space would be in the form of a mall fronting on 127th Street. All this would stand just east of Citi Field, the Mets' ballpark that is currently under construction. The EDC hopes the convention center, which would have a "green" roof, could be considered more accessible than Manhattan's Javits Center by many convention planners. In the dreams of the EDC, commerce, entertainment and housing combine to make Willets Point "New York City's next great neighborhood".

At present, the Willets Point neighborhood is a daunting, isolated triangle of streets between Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, containing some 250 small businesses, most of them with absentee owners that rent to dealers in automobile salvage. Brito said the businesses employ about 900 workers on the books and perhaps 400 off, and pay wages 42 percent below the city average. All the streets lie below the 100-year flood plain, so should severe rain and flooding occur, many embedded contaminants would be spread further. Remediation of this 60- acre brownfield is a necessary part of clearing away the salvage yards to make way for the next great neighborhood. Brito said such remediation is seen as "a showcase for the administration". If 1,300 jobs have to be eliminated or relocated, they could be replaced by 6,100 jobs in retail, dining and entertainment, hospitality and office work, according to the EDC. Even the relocation effort might be an opportunity for legal immigration services to deal with some of the workers on and off the books. As for the jobs to be created, they would, according to Brito, largely entail local hiring and an "aggressive" MWBE (minorities' and women's business enterprise) standard.

With the announcement of the plan, the EDC now awaits an environmental impact statement (EIS) from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and is anticipating a ULURP (uniform land use review procedure) before November. Developers would be submitting their bids in early 2008, with the winning developer to be chosen by the summer. Property acquisitions would follow in the fall, and the first groundbreaking could be in early 2009. The long view is that the building of one segment after another could continue until the entire project is completed in 2017.

The plan is long on hope also. Integration of housing and business, especially the volume projected for construction in a tight area, is pictured as neater and cleaner than it is likely to be in reality- where, for instance, airplane noise is tremendous. The flight path to LaGuardia Airport through Willets Point will be maintained, necessitating a building height limit of 80 feet below the path, though outside it, structural heights on the new ballpark and the business towers might be close to 200 feet. Brito said that sound baffling is integral to all Willets Point construction plans, and that the prospect of airplane noise has not curbed enthusiasm for the big picture. Connecting the isolated streets of Willets Point to Downtown Flushing is also a vital part of the plan, but at the moment the vehicle connector road is only vaguely described and lacks a true connection at either end.