The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, November 14, 2021

Notably: I don’t often have the desire to cover New York City Council meetings. This week I do. The council on Wednesday unanimously approved rezoning a 54-block swath of Long Island City in Queens to build 15,000 apartments. For the seven years that I lived in Queens, I took the 7 line every day in and out of Manhattan, passing by the Queensboro Bridge station, from where that picture above was taken, as the elevated line passed over Long Island City, the neighborhood at the far west end of Long Island, and Queens, and that edges to the East River, with its fantastic views on Manhattan. Back in my 1980s, there were none of those skinny skyscrapers for the obscenely rich, and Lower Manhattan, not visible in the picture, was still graced by the angular immensity of the Twin Towers, our lost twins. I never thought of Long Island City as needing a lift. We almost lived there, I remember, though I’m glad we stayed in Sunnyside, then Woodside. It was the other side of the tracks, where the Sunnyside Yards sprawl over untold acreage with what seemd like forever unused rail lines, that I always thought redevelopment would strike. Amazon a few years ago tried to redevelop Long Island City, but was thwarted when the company’s plan looked like more gentrification than revitalization, and I’m glad. The new plan would be more like the apartment boom that followed World War II, with all those red-bricked buildings that sprang up all over Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx, but more expensive, like everything. “The new plan, with its focus on housing and community amenities instead of huge public subsidies for a wealthy company like Amazon, has earned the support of the local councilwoman, Julie Won, and other politicians who did not want the headquarters,” the New York Times reports. “The proposal includes nearly hundreds of millions of dollars for parks, public housing, schools, sewers and more. About 30 percent of the housing must be affordable to people of lower or moderate incomes. […] City officials have increasingly come to see neighborhood-specific development proposals as valuable ways to confront a housing shortage that is at its worst point in nearly 60 years. The city has approved plans in Midtown Manhattan, the east Bronx, Jamaica in Queens, SoHo in Manhattan and Gowanus in Brooklyn in recent years.”If only Palm Coast could take a lesson from that. But no. We still treat apartment complexes like ghettoes, never realizing that it’s our soulless, lifeless subdivisions that are the ghettoes. We are “those awful cemetery cities,” as Kerouac once called suburbia beyond Queens.

—P.T.

“… the absolute madness and fantastic hooray of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream — grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land — the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.”

–From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.