Avant-Yard

The year is 2034. At the conclusion of the Second Civil War the American left is vanquished and Marjorie Taylor Greene, sitting at the head of a ten million–strong white militia, has declared herself president for life. Cultural studies, veganism, and autofiction are now banned, and podcasts have been made compulsory for every US citizen over the age of eighteen. Thanks to an alliance, once derided as “neoliberal,” between finance, the real estate industry, and local government, New York survives as the nation’s last nominal refuge from fascism. The devastation suffered throughout much of the city has seen whole neighborhoods rebuilt from scratch. The East Village is now a Google campus, Gramercy is a data center, and Clinton Hill has been abolished as a distinct neighborhood and turned into a single, twenty-block-long climbing gym. Columbia University has taken advantage of the destruction to annex the whole of Manhattan north of 110th Street.

Under Mayor Pete Davidson the city has launched a reconstruction initiative known as NYC LFG. The signature project in that initiative is Sunnyside Yards, the gigantic rail yard in northwestern Queens that finally became available for unimpeded development once the bombs of the neo-Confederate forces obliterated the train tracks that had long been its reason for being. New York’s handful of surviving leftists wanted the site to be reserved for free public housing for war veterans and millions of displaced people. Over their objections, Sunnyside Yards has instead launched as a dense, walkable, and fully carbon-neutral mixed-use development designed to coax the creative class—many members of which fled to Portugal, Berlin, and Athens once the fighting began—back to the city after the war. The development’s buildings, of undulating heights and widths, are all made of cross-laminated timber and other carbon-light materials and engage Manhattan’s few remaining skyscrapers in a “conversation about sustainability” across the now toxic and corpse-filled East River. Green “lungs” dot the development and are designed without grass to prevent the lighting of fires, playing of ball games, or having of fun; there are also several resilience stations, hundred-foot-tall solar-powered battery poles that can be scaled in the event of a climate catastrophe, and a memorial to those lost in the war that asks visitors to “reflect on the meaning of sacrifice.” An on-site regenerative farm allows residents of the yard to enjoy premium beef without guilt. The tagline of this new community is “Sunnyside Yards? We’re Walkin’ Here!”

Many features throughout the development replicate the feeling of antebellum New York and the destroyed neighborhoods that once adjoined the rail yard: There is a Sweetgreen on every corner, subway connections have been reestablished to ensure at least three changes are required to cross boroughs to Brooklyn, and several galleries with poor ventilation and mediocre art serve free bad wine every Thursday night. Old stalwarts of the Astoria and Sunnyside food scenes have been rebuilt to replicate their once-lost charms: No one working at the new Parrot Coffee is happy; the food at Adda is still not as good as it was the first time you went there in 2018; and there remains a persistent air of tension in the line to the fresh fish counter at the reborn Astoria Seafood. Café operators have been given strict instructions to serve their cappuccinos scaldingly hot and foamy in a nod to the heritage of the area. Amid a hyperinflationary postwar economy, the prices at all the revamped yard’s businesses remain intimidatingly high: A small “$8.” has been appended to the sign in front of the requisite 99 cent slice place. Discreetly armed “livability stewards” patrol the site at all hours, offering assistance to residents and redirection to outsiders. The development sold out within its first week on the market. Sunnyside Yards is now at the heart of the citywide drive to “get New York back on its feet.”

WHAT WILL BECOME OF SUNNYSIDE YARD? A smeared thumbprint across the northwestern end of Queens, the mighty 192-acre rail depot—seven times the size of Hudson Yards, nine times the size of Atlantic Yards—was slated for “revitalization” under Bill de Blasio but is now left in a kind of bardo while Eric Adams pursues the more important task of blaming everything on migrants. Urban criticism usually operates in a retrospective key, lamenting the lost, assessing the new: The critic’s raw material is the fait accompli, the building or structure or project that has already been built, altered, or destroyed. As a working rail depot, Sunnyside Yard is as busy as ever. But as a development, it’s properly pre-architectural: The release of the Sunnyside Master Plan—a detailed blueprint produced by the city in partnership with Amtrak, which owns most of the yard and the tracks that traverse it—in March 2020 was quickly forgotten amid the chaos of the pandemic’s opening months, and the new mayor has not addressed the site’s future, despite his development-friendly “City of Yes” agenda. As a vessel for dreams of urban renewal, the yard, once at the vanguard of the de Blasio administration’s development wars—the next great battle to be fought after Amazon versus Long Island City—has gone quiet. City of Yes? City of Maybe Later. With the 2020 master plan effectively dead, obstacles to the yard’s transformation are significant. There’s the exorbitant cost of platforming over the open lot to contend with, along with local opposition and a general citywide fatigue with mixed-use megadevelopments, which invariably become magnets for collective resentment in a place where mastering the basics of urban policy (waste collection, rat control, subway stations that aren’t health hazards) still seems confoundingly difficult for the downtown decision-makers.

But in a city with a chronic housing shortage, an underloved plot this vast won’t stay unromanced forever. As a Queens Chamber of Commerce official pitching a baseball stadium on the site noted in the 1950s, Sunnyside Yard is the “geographical center of New York City.” (It’s not—the actual center of the city is more likely somewhere in Bushwick—but the claim sounds plausible enough; in New York, facts are never essential to the mythos of development.) Projects at this scale often take decades to congeal and manifest; the pathway to making the megadevelopment real is necessarily circuitous. Before it became the insulated glass Stonehenge for the Equinox class we now know as Hudson Yards, the MTA’s West Side Yard was the subject of fevered imagining for a generation of architects. English paper architect Cedric Price proposed using the site to anchor a network of giant turbines in the Hudson that would blow wind back into the city, creating a new “green lung” for Manhattan; Peter Eisenman imagined a rolling metal carpet across the yard that would accommodate a stadium and convention center. Whether it takes years or decades before the final shape of its metamorphosis becomes clear, development will surely come for Sunnyside Yard.

Once it’s decked and peopled, this feral steppe of western Queens will gain the distinction of the plural, transforming once and for all from Sunnyside Yard—as it is today—to the warmer, more inclusive, more fecund Sunnyside Yards. In losing the defining characteristic of a yard—open access to the sky—the yard will be not diminished but multiplied. The grounds offer a blank canvas for the improvers’ desires: This is the rare place in which New York can still legitimately claim to be a realm of fantasy rather than a container of memory. Progress on the yard’s redevelopment may have halted for now, but its fate seems tantalizingly open, its potential futures multiple. Could a reimagined Sunnyside Yards escape the cultural fate of Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards, those unlovely spawn of architectural anhedonia and the 421-a tax abatement? What will these yardless yards look like? While we all wait for an answer, the areas on the rail lot’s edge throw up continuous conundrums and ideas about what it means to live in a city. The inertia into which the yard has fallen as a development project is also, in its own strange way, an opportunity. It’s a chance to look past the estimates of the quants and the sketches of “visionary” planning consultants and the bluster of a glad-handing mayor, to reject the unearned authority of the talking heads and ignore the models, aspirations, PowerPoints, and bullshit of the technocrats and data sages empowered to shape the city, and instead give in to the free speculative play of inexpert imagination. The yard’s roundabout, unpredictable route to redevelopment provides the invitation to a different type of circuit.

On a blue and underpopulated Sunday in late January I find a man eating raw kale in a communal garden. Smiling Hogshead Ranch is a self-styled “guerrilla garden” that was set up more than a decade ago around the abandoned railroad tracks at the western end of Skillman Avenue, which marks out the southern perimeter of Sunnyside Yard. The garden’s aesthetics sit somewhere between shaggy 1990s café and Superfund site: “RECLAIM THE COMMONS, CULTIVATE COMMUNITY,” commands one sign painted in yellow and brown. “Use caution and visit at your own risk,” adds another. The elevated tracks make up a “flying junction” known as the Montauk Cutoff that was once used as a turning bay to get trains in and out of Sunnyside Yard; inoperative since the 1990s, this pleasingly odd industrial remnant is accessible from the garden’s street-level entrance and pushes a good way into the rail yard itself—a bridge to nowhere. If you ignore the abandoned sun beds and empty beer bottles and perform a mental pruning of the persistent overgrowth strangling the sleepers, you can almost see the High Line–style greenway to come, all those sundecks, overlooks, educational plant labels, and “windows to western Queens” that will surely follow once the yard disappears under the developers’ hood.

I ask the man if he works at the garden as a volunteer. “No,” he says, jawing through a quill of kale freshly ripped from its bed in the middle of the ranch. “Do you?”

“No, I’m here to write about the yard,” I reply, gesturing toward the magnificent mess of tracks, signals, control towers, parking lots, checkpoints, sheds, and piles of accumulated concrete and junk that lies beyond the wire mesh security fence opposite the ranch.

“The what?” he asks.

“The yard.” Still nothing. “It’s supposed to be like an antediluvian portrait of the yard before it gets redeveloped,” I continue, unnecessarily.

“The yacht?”

“No, the yard,” I say, persisting with my native Australian pronunciation of the word, then adding for context: “The rail yahd.”

“Oh, like a yacht? There’s a yacht here?”

“No, it’s a yard.”

“Like a sailing boat?”

Finally, I give up and switch to an American accent. “No, a yarrrrrrrrrrrrrd.”

“Oh, yard,” he says, standing up. “Right. OK.” The spine of the savaged crucifer hangs limply from his hand. We nod at each other, and I walk away.

Later, finding myself on the corner of Skillman Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, the rail yard at work laid out before me like a termitarium, pickup trucks picking up and putting down, the odd minuscule human just visible underneath the wires, trains cracking toward the city and loafing back out to Long Island, I have a thought: “One day, all this will be affordable housing starting at $2,800 a month.” The yard snakes east from a narrow opening in Hunters Point and opens into a broad paddle around Sunnyside, giving the whole mile-long enclosure, protected by fences and regular signage threatening trespassers with prosecution or incarceration, the shape of a tadpole. Sitting in a depression between Astoria and Sunnyside, hemmed in by a hectic fringe of car dealerships, megachurches, ghost kitchens, craft breweries, strip clubs, and various large-scale experiments and mistakes in urban planning, the yard seems to belong not to the order of archaeology but geology, resembling a kind of drained, prehistoric lake that once emptied into Newtown Creek. A yacht might not be totally out of place here.

NEW YORK IS A CITY built on boundary disputes, empty geographical signifiers, and fine cartographic distinctions: Where does Boerum Hill end and Cobble Hill begin? Does Wyckoff Avenue belong more to Ridgewood or Bushwick? What exactly is Greenwich Village? Nominally, Sunnyside Yard is attached to Sunnyside, but in practice it has nothing to do with that neighborhood’s stout vision of interwar urbanism, cottage life, and quiet amenity; nor does it belong to lower Astoria’s mix of warehouse conversions, strip malls, railroaders, and film studios. Instead, it’s that rare feature of New York topography: a true disconnector, a nonaquatic buffer zone marking a clear and unarguable boundary between two adjacent geographies. Thanks to Sunnyside Yard, the border between Astoria, to its north, and Sunnyside, to its south, is indisputably clear.

Will the city be a place of refuge and hospitality, or exclusion and division? Who belongs here? In contiguous parts of New York, it’s possible for casual walkers to drift a mile without noticing that they’ve passed from one neighborhood to another. The yard, which the ordinary citizen can only experience from its exterior or on its overpasses, inhibits ambling; it’s built for the walker with a purpose. Connection is the way of the city, but it’s hard to achieve in the face of a fenced-off half-mile-wide interlocking that serves eight hundred trains a day. The only ways to cross the tracks, whether on foot, by bus, or by car, are via the passes at Thomson Avenue, Queens Boulevard, Honeywell Street, and Thirty-Ninth Street. These unassuming inland bridges heroically span the yard while receiving none of the adulation of their riverine counterparts; if there is a Hart Crane of the Honeywell Street arch, they have not made themselves known. In all my months stalking the yard, circumnavigating it, crossing it, loitering on its edge, I’ve seen no one pausing for selfies on these flyovers in the style of the golden-hour twirlers on the Brooklyn or Williamsburg Bridges. In fact, I’ve seen virtually no one at all. These are difficult bridges, unshaded and unfriendly—zones of hostility that keep Astoria and Sunnyside well away from one another, both physically and culturally. Like native English speakers struggling for mutual intelligibility through the fog of their different accents, the neighborhoods around Sunnyside Yard belong to the same city but seem somehow estranged.

Everywhere my circuit of the yard takes me, a kind of loose confusion seems to follow. Few people I speak to have heard of the plans to roof the yard with glass boxes; the people in Sunnyside don’t travel to Astoria; the people in Astoria don’t travel to Sunnyside; true to its nominative insularity, Long Island City is lost to all knowledge of New York beyond its hugger-mugger streets. What could Sunnyside Yard be? The experience of megaprojects in New York today always involves some mix of heightened amenity and persistent anxiety; to circulate through a place like Hudson Yards, say, is to confront an abundance of both choice and control. Even in its predevelopmental state, Sunnyside Yard already marries aggression with delight. A vacant lot behind the Food Bazaar on Northern Boulevard, which marks the yard’s eastern extremity, offers a glorious view back down the narrowing fan of the tracks toward Long Island City and Manhattan. Pausing to take a photo of the scene at dusk, I’m interrupted by a man who emerges from a security hut at the foot of a small descent beyond the gravel expanse.

“You can’t take photos, bro! You can’t take photos.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t take photos, bro.”

“OK, just one photo? Just one.”

“Just one.” I take the photo. “You can’t take photos, bro.”

Because they’re usually set away from the judging eyes of the apartment-dwelling public, at the city’s extremities and in its murdery industrial zones, strip clubs have some of the most picturesque settings in New York. Long Island City has some of the prettiest skin joints of all. Show Palace Gentlemen’s Club is tucked under the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge, the type of landscape whose ambient volume is so high that it invites a kind of light-headedness. Under cover of the overpass’s relentless howl, you can indiscreetly sing at the top of your lungs or shout “GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS,” as the strip club does across its façade in neon pink and blue, without fear or social recrimination. Sugardaddy’s Gentlemen’s Club sits right on the water at Dutch Kills, under the buckling, oxidized heap of the Queens-Midtown Expressway, surrounded by sheet metal factories, recycling plants, and concrete suppliers—the wreckage of American capitalism, sex, trash, and infrastructure, all laid out in one perfect tableau. The cube of the strip club is painted a Venetian salmon and plunges directly into the water, where it’s framed by a briary embankment and pile moorings driven into the gassy creek; when viewed from Borden Avenue the building almost resembles a faded palazzo sinking into the Grand Canal, and the smell is not dissimilar either. Redevelopment is underway on the surrounding streets. Once Sunnyside Yard, which begins just a few blocks north, is transformed into Sunnyside Yards, this whole area will be straightened out and made respectable; Sugardaddy’s will probably become a Walgreens.

Perhaps the transformation is already underway. Lemak Kitchen is a Malaysian restaurant with a menu of peninsular standards (beef rendang, roti canai, nasi lemak) and rave reviews on Google (“a tantalizing fusion of flavors,” “the definition of a hidden gem,” “a must-visit for those craving Malaysian cuisine”). When I arrive at its listed address, a few blocks from Sugardaddy’s, I see no restaurant; there’s a loading dock with a small sign that says “Lemak Kitchen” next to a walk-in fridge. I enter the adjoining building via the dock’s metal stairs and walk down a long corridor lined with commissary kitchens supplying different food and catering businesses. Eventually I arrive at Lemak Kitchen and find a lone employee sitting among shelves stacked with slabs of Dr Pepper and Poland Spring. He tells me Lemak Kitchen is a ghost kitchen.

At the opposite end of the yard, around a mile and a half east, Sunnyside Eats is a virtual food hall serving online-only “restaurants” with names like Land of the Food; FU Chicken Rice; Smart for Life; and Stirred, Not Shaken Cookies. The building that houses the hall is painted a heat-seeking gentrification black and sits next to an old factory built for light industry whose strip windows, entrance portals, and signage are adorned with subtle deco-ish accents; the “hall” itself is a vestibule in which various delivery drivers sit slumped against the walls as they wait to pick up new orders, murmurs of put-upon Hindi and Spanish puncturing the silence. The room feels less like the entrance to a kitchen than a doctor’s waiting room, a gastronomized CityMD; aesthetically, the space preparing your “Midtown burrito” (one of the top sellers at Sunnyside Eats’ main Central American attraction, Eggstravaganza Mexican Cuisine) is now indistinguishable from the one that diagnoses you with strep throat. The contrast with the quiet aesthetic confidence of the hall’s adjoining factory, now divided for use between Amtrak and a sheet metal fabricator, is striking. But this is one vision of the yard’s future, one premonition of the nightmare of tech food and gig work that awaits, whose offenses against human dignity and taste will inevitably be dressed up in the needy modern style as the “customizable” and “agile” face of progress. Redevelopment always carries its freight of nostalgia and memory, but in northwestern Queens spectrality is already central to the urban rearrangements to come. The ghosts are already in the kitchens; the phantoms stalking the future Sunnyside Yards walk among us today.

BEFORE THERE WAS even a thought of Sunnyside being home to multiple yards, there were the gardens. Spurning the temptations of Stirred, Not Shaken Cookies I stop for a beer at a former coach house on Skillman Avenue, at the point in the yard’s periphery where the personal injury billboards and warehouses for companies with vaguely menacing names like The Executive Transportation Group and Dependable Mechanical Corp. give way to a recivilizing streetscape of standalone houses, small public parks, bartering libraries, and prewar apartment blocks. It’s 4:00 p.m. on the Thursday before the Super Bowl, and the bar is empty save for some teachers who’ve just finished work and seem to communicate with each other exclusively in all caps. “LET’S GO CHIEFS!” screams one of them, over and over, to no audible disagreement or approval.

“At the present rate it will not be long before this country can properly be called Sardinia, for we shall be a nation of sardines,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in 1925, staking out a position against the citywide fashion for apartment dwelling and introducing the work of the City Housing Corporation, a company formed with the intent of giving all New Yorkers a chance to own their own home “with a lawn and a flower garden.” The fruit of that effort was Sunnyside Gardens, the planned community of English-style row houses, turreted apartment blocks, and tidy gardens that was built in the 1920s on the barren, weedy edge of Long Island City. Under a certain light this settlement might resemble a company town for Sunnyside Yard, but it bears no institutional relationship to the rail yard it abuts or the different organizations—Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, NJ Transit—that run carriages on the tracks. Whatever angle you approach it from, the encounter with Sunnyside Gardens is always a little jarring; the whole estate has the appearance of a Potemkin village built to impress an Anglophile intellectual class that long ago passed into history.

Among the most committed early advocates for Sunnyside Gardens was Lewis Mumford, who lived there with his family from 1925 to 1936. “What made this neighborhood unit uniquely good, apart from the comeliness of its design, was the fact that, like Greenwich Village and far more than Brooklyn Heights, it was a mixed community, in which one might mingle without undue intimacy with one’s neighbors,” he later wrote. “Not even in Cambridge or in Stanford or Hanover, three admirable university towns, have we ever found better intellectual companionship, or more vivid, enlivening discussions.” Inspired by the English Garden City movement, the development was part of the reaction in urban theory circles against the alienation and overcrowding of life in the tenements and skyscrapers of Manhattan, whose insalubrity, as Mumford put it in a 1927 pamphlet to prospective buyers of property in Sunnyside Gardens, had led to rampant crime, disease, and late marriages. Many of the clichés of residential development we continue to live with descend directly from Mumford’s time and owe their parentage to ideas that he and those in his circle helped popularize: the fetishization of community and human scale, the mistrust of density, the equation of leafiness with beauty. This parentage is acknowledged in Skillman Avenue’s subtitle: Lewis Mumford Way.

On my wanderings through the Gardens, drifting through the grassy commons, courtyards, and mews that link the rows of houses, I haven’t found much evidence of the community spirit that so energized Mumford and his epigones. But I have felt a persistent sense of unease, as if each Beatrix Potter cottage had at least one body buried beneath it. The scrubbed façades and just-so bay windows all seem to point to a muffled horror, Zone of Interest–style, just beyond the horizon. In the model settlement of Sunnyside Gardens, the contrast with a different way of living is gestured at but never fully apparent; perhaps the more appropriate cinematic referent for a place like this, comfortable in its singularity but strangely provincial as well, is Alex Garland’s surprise recent hit, Civil War, a filmic dystopia that smarmily avoids explaining anything about the ideological stakes of its animating conflict. These are streets that strive for a postpolitical harmony, that want to have already evolved beyond politics.

But politics, of course, refuses to go away, as the clash of urban styles and ideologies along the yard’s circumference makes clear. Across the depot from Sunnyside Gardens, the new condos lining Northern Boulevard all have lobbies with faux-historic lantern chandeliers and QR code art on the walls. These two versions of city living—the Gardens’ facsimile of Little England, lower Astoria’s cheap knockoff of waterfront Williamsburg—could scarcely be more different from one another, but elements of each seep into present and past imaginings of the yard’s future. The contrast between wealth and privation is at the heart, for instance, of James Gray’s 2000 crime thriller The Yards, a story of corruption and betrayal that literalizes Sunnyside Yard as New York’s great cultural barrier: On one side of the tracks lies a treeless zone of clapboard walk-ups, hard luck, and poverty; on the other, a fallen Arcadia of Tudor manses, easy luxury, and guiltless graft. Mark Wahlberg plays the film’s protagonist, a young ex-con struggling to reintegrate into society after his release from prison. Emotionally constipated and seemingly waterlogged at the same time, his every utterance heavy with the palpable moisture of a valiant but doomed attempt to produce a convincing Queens accent, Wahlberg struggles through low-lit scenes in peeling kitchens and wood-paneled dining rooms, wetly mouthing banalities like, “We’re gonna get troo dis.”

EQUALLY LUBRICATED, though differently so, is the 2020 Sunnyside Yard Master Plan, which attempts to slime a synthesis of Sunnyside Gardens’ string-light villagism and the blue-glass self-importance of Long Island City. The master plan is the most recent articulation of what Sunnyside Yards could look like, but it adds to a rich history of wishful thinking. Each generation has had its dream for the yard: In 1931 the Regional Plan Association proposed covering it with the high art deco bombast of a radial transportation terminal and office tower; in the 1970s the Urban Development Corporation imagined the yard as a light industrial zone–cum–business park fringed by big-box retail, parking lots, and a token linden tree or two. On multiple occasions the site has been proposed as a sports stadium: It was offered first to the New York Giants in the mid-1950s before the baseball franchise decamped for San Francisco, then almost two decades later to the NFL as New York attempted to derail New Jersey’s plans to build a stadium for the Giants (the footballing ones this time) at the Meadowlands. Anytime there’s discussion of bringing a big international sporting event like the Olympics or the World Cup to New York, Sunnyside Yard looms large, a deckable lot with the size and location to make the kind of world-shaking sporting-architectural statement that a stadium like MetLife—sedated under the stink of the New Jersey salt marshes, aesthetically lifeless, and inordinately difficult to get to by public transit—simply can’t muster.

The 2020 plan, for its part, is a parody of prepandemic design obsessions. It contains all the right buzzwords (“active recreation,” “micro-mobility,” “social infrastructure”) and nods as appropriate to density gradation, affordable housing, green space (never parks per se but triangles and squares of bare grass contained in concrete, alongside miserable strips of shrubbery tricked up as “greenways”; is this the future Lewis Mumford wanted?), food carts, solar panels, small business, cycling, scootering, and walking—most of which, to be clear, are good things, but sound smugly formulaic when mashed together in a planning document, as if they’ve been generated by AI. They weren’t, of course; the 2020 plan was the brainchild of the painfully human former SHoP Architects principal turned “urbanist” gun-for-hire Vishaan Chakrabarti. Switched on, fully charged, hyperconnected, friendly to business, but also considerate—always so considerate—of community, Chakrabarti has in recent years made himself into a leading consigliere of a New York City political establishment perpetually bereft of planning inspiration. He’s the city-making consultant as startup founder, and the various “improvement” schemes he’s advised on in recent years—the Penn Station redevelopment, the Domino Sugar refinery conversion, the New York City Housing Authority’s Fulton Elliott-Chelsea plan—give a strong sense of his peppy, grow-the-pie style. These projects all wrap the reality of modern mixed-use development—displacement, eye-wateringly expensive “affordable” housing, and craven capitulation to commercial demands—in the smugly meliorist skin of cultural access, “community input,” and “resident-led” planning. The Fulton-Elliott Chelsea plan, in particular, seeks to demolish a sizable chunk of state-owned public housing and replace it with privately held “mixed-income” buildings—complete with private security—that would, despite guarantees of the new units’ affordability, inevitably be too costly for most working people and push many former residents out of the neighborhood. Rents are supposed to be capped at 30 percent of income for public housing projects converted to private ownership, but as the tenant organization the United Front Against Displacement points out, 57 percent of public housing residents nonetheless see rent hikes post-privatization. A Whole Foods gained, some humans lost: Such is the cynical bargain advanced by this Mephistopheles of the modern New York megadevelopment.

The 2020 plan conforms to Chakrabartian type. The core is its 12,000 new units of nominally affordable housing—half of which, we learn in a bullet-point list buried deep in the belly of the PDF, will actually be for people making at least 100 percent of the New York metropolitan area’s average income, while only a quarter will go to extremely low-income families—but the document is mostly about vibes. In street-level renderings the denizens of Sunnyside Yards drift with ecstatic faces across the developed deck, embodying both Mumford’s ecumenical flower-tenders and the plugged-in gloryseekers of the modern grindset. Chakrabarti’s plan pictures the built-over yard as a harmonious concert of “corridors,” “clusters,” and “hubs” in which the retail, light-industrial (or “commdustrial,” to use the document’s goofy neologism), educational, cultural, and housing sectors optimize the calculus between risk and reward; the buildings are all imagined as reflective glass blocks of varying size, identical in style and impersonality to the towers rising over Long Island City. Here is Hudson Yards, the document seems to say, but for the middle class.

This prepandemic dream for Sunnyside Yard perished amid the distractions of a global health crisis, the economic crunch that followed, and a change in mayor. Disrupted supply chains begat higher prices; inflation triggered a rate-hiking cycle; and high interest rates are inhospitable to investment of any nature, especially investment in a colossal public works program with an estimated cost of $14 billion to $22 billion and a requirement of decking over working railroads. There’s also the simple plausibility of decking as an engineering and planning project to contend with; it’s taken twenty years for a deal to be struck between the MTA and developers to start building a platform over the tracks at Atlantic Yards (otherwise known as Pacific Park, per its official rebrand in 2014). A final problem is accessibility: Any successful deck will likely sit three stories above Sunnyside, necessitating a lot of stairs. Decking can be done, but it will be symphonically complicated to cover the whole of Sunnyside Yard. With the 2020 plan seemingly defunct, the stage may now be set for a new master plan to take its place, replacing the old text’s prepandemic enthusiasms with the reigning architectural hobbyhorses of the postpandemic present. What can we expect from the Chakrabartian city whisperers’ next vision for the yard? A casino, perhaps, such as the one now planned for the “next phase” of development at Hudson Yards? A Hamilton-grade exercise in liberal self-congratulation similar to the Museum of Freedom and Democracy, imagined for the United Nations–adjacent Freedom Plaza megadevelopment by the grating Dane Bjarke Ingels? A hype house and flexible workspace for influencers, makers, and creators; some bauble featuring a rain room or the latest sculptural eczema from Yayoi Kusama; a megatall with vertical gardens, a drop ride, or an “immersive” observation deck?  Why not all of the above?

THE URBAN BOUNDARIES that become clearer farther east—the transition from a city of apartments to a city of houses, the end of that part of the five boroughs where most people rely on the subway for transport to the start of car country—are not yet apparent in northwestern Queens; New York at this point is still the New York of hedonists and narcissists, people who rent and spend all their spare money on restaurants. In the cold and sweaty upstairs room at Rudar Club, founded in 1977 by emigrants from the small Croatian mining town of Labin, overcoated regulars play games of briškula in determined silence; downstairs a wilting, diffident waiter in a white shirt brings me a delicate Istrian fish soup and a plate of gluey veal njoki. At Sami’s Kabab House I order leek and scallion dumplings, a braised lamb shank over pulao, a beef kofta kabab, fried eggplant, and stewed okra, and the waiter purses his lips and says, “I think it’s too much.” (After finishing the first four dishes I ask the waiter—politely—if the okra is still coming and he looks at me with alarm: “It’s too much!”) The counter staffer at SVL Souvlaki Bar tells me I can have sheftalies in a pita despite the menu not offering that option; the men running the souvlas tell me they’re out of sheftalies. In the gloom of a spitty Thursday afternoon, groups of workmen sit spread-legged around tables at Astoria Seafood, talking in short bursts of loud Spanish over pooling plates of octopus and shrimp off the grill.

The bartender at Veronica’s Bar is wearing a T-shirt with QUEENS emblazoned over a Nike swoosh and the words JUST REP IT underneath, greets a pair of regulars with the cry “What’s up, fuckers” and announces to the assembled boozers that this will be her last shift before she heads to Ireland and Paris, a city in which she plans to spend exactly two days.

Guy at the bar: “Paris? You’re only going to be there for two days? That’s all you need. Two days max.” A knowing nod. “You’ll see.”

Bartender: “I don’t know how I’m going on vacation—I’m fuckin’ broke; I’m gonna be eating McDonald’s every day.”

The track-panted bro seated next to me, who has a beard and haircut ripped directly from the “boys with time machine” meme, asks me whether I live in the area. I give my by now standard explanation (portrait of Sunnyside Yard before it gets redeveloped, pre-architectural criticism, surrender to the free play of inexpert imagination, etc.) and get the by now standard reaction (blinking incomprehension). After a moment he tells me I should write about all the migrant shelters that have taken over the area. “Bro, I have ancestors from Germany who were turned away from Ellis Island because they were sick, then turned around and made that trip again from Europe and got in the second time,” he adds, and it takes me a moment to figure out exactly what he means. Migrants: Make it harder for them to settle in New York so we can weed out the weaklings.

Migration has long made its mark on this part of New York, which contains faint traces of the historic divisions and experiments in ethnic cleansing that first ejected people from their countries of origin and propelled them to seek a better life on foreign shores. Superficially, Sunnyside Yard seems to operate as a local enforcement unit for the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the peace agreement struck amid the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire that saw Greece and Turkey exchange more than 1.5 million people and also set the template for subsequent partitions in Palestine and India: The great barrier of the rail depot keeps the grocers of Sunnyside’s Turkiyem Market and Astoria’s massed ranks of the Greek American hospitality industry, many members of which I sense I could very easily be related to through my own Greek Cypriot mother, at a mile’s remove from each other. Astoria—the Astoria of diners, churchyard souvlaki fairs, and boom-box kafeneia—is Greek, Orthodox, chatty, and stays up late; Sunnyside—the Sunnyside of Turkiyem Market, sleepy grill spots, and the ghost-kitchen Lokanta in Sunnyside Eats—is Turkish, Sunni, soft-spoken, and goes to bed by ten.

But the divisions, however neat they might appear, cannot hold. New York, despite all the damage done by five decades of privatization and neoliberal terror to its image as a haven of pluralism, still has some of its old power to reverse the traumas and ruptures of modern nation-building, to throw its citizens into the soup of the city together. Though its name might want to convince us otherwise, Sunnyside is not exclusively Sunni; and in Astoria itself, which is far from a monoculture, a beautiful confusion of ethnicities takes hold, the Egyptians and Afghans and Greeks and Turks all speaking dialects of a common culinary language built on charcoal-kissed fish and skewered meat, all finding refuge in the tava. The more recent arrival of migrants in this pocket of the city has added an unexpected kink to gentrification’s standard narrative: On the southern edge of the yard you’ll find a former feather factory that’s been converted into a business hotel, but on its northern edge there’s a former paper factory that was turned into a business hotel and is now a migrant shelter, where visiting delivery drivers are waved down with security wands and anxious, exhausted families gather in the lobby before sprawling takeout meals.

ACROSS LONG ISLAND CITY and lower Astoria a kind of regeneration is taking place—pointing, perhaps, to another future that might be possible for the great rail yard to the south. More than 200,000 migrants, mostly from Latin America and Asia, have arrived in New York since early 2022, and around 65,000, most of them families with children, still reside in city-provided lodgings like those that dot the northern perimeter of Sunnyside Yard. Shelters sit opposite new midrise condos promising entry to “the heightened life,” and in the lowlands between the Queensbridge and Ravenswood projects, a light-manufacturing terrain vague of body shops and battered diners that was turned over to barely regulated hotel development under the Bloomberg administration, the Sleep Inn, Holiday Inn, Deluxe Inn & Suites, Best Western Plus Plaza, Voyage Hotel, and Wingate by Wyndham are among the many middling business hotels to have been converted into temporary places of refuge. These arrangements are far from perfect: The city’s long-standing right-to-shelter law has triggered the conversions, but the Adams administration has fought at every turn to dilute its legal obligations, making migrant-bashing the core of its political identity. A more aggressive phase of evictions began at the start of the summer to limit stays in shelters to thirty days.

But out here, on the fringe of the rail yard’s urban catchment area, as young vinyl-caped migrant men happily sit on sidewalks for alfresco haircuts and families take the air in the shade of the Hotel Nirvana, the heartlessness of city administrators seems both ludicrous and irrelevant. Even if only for a moment, against a backdrop of extreme distress and in proportions that still disappoint any genuine ethic of hospitality, New York has been given back to the people who need it most. Is this not what a city—what civilization—should be for: not to stiff its people with nonaffordable affordable housing, anesthetize them via the mezzanine-financed live-work-play development, or entrap them in casinos, but to provide society’s most vulnerable with sanctuary, hospitality, hope? Instead of giving us a stadium or a jungle of new salad bowl spots or a multiplex cinema with fast-casual Middle Eastern burger concept attached that also functions as an immersive museum of the migrant experience and weekend learning center for seniors earning $200,000 to $285,000 a year, why not provide homes, at low cost, for people who need them?

The Greek-Turkish population exchange left both Greece and Turkey with deep economic, cultural, and emotional scars, but it also gave birth to new political and architectural configurations. Modern refugee law, first codified in the League of Nations’ 1933 Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees, emerged from the demographic chaos of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. In Greece, the need to accommodate two historic surges of migration—first, via the 1.2 million refugees who arrived following the population exchange; next, via the internal migrants who poured into Athens from the countryside at the conclusion of the Greek Civil War in 1949—led to the creation of the polykatoikia, the distinctive style of modernist concrete apartment block with tiered balconies now common throughout the country’s major cities. The polykatoikia’s novel funding structure—in which landowners allowed developers to erect buildings on their plots in return for a share of the finished apartments—created, almost by accident, a system of quasi-social housing throughout Greece, and the affordability of the new apartments ensured a genuine mingling of professions and economic classes within neighborhoods and single buildings. Before they were diasporic masters of the mixed grill, the Greeks were pioneers of modern mixed-use.

To hope that New York’s welcome—grudging, heavily conditional, and set to expire—of this most recent influx of migrants will lead to a similar awakening here, an awakening that takes advantage of Sunnyside Yard’s unique location and size in order to reimagine the city, may be naive. Will the yard, once developed, overcome the inhumanity and exclusion that have made other megadevelopments throughout New York so dispiritingly barren? Will it bridge the gulf between Sunnyside and Astoria? Probably not. But as long as this great commuter-train parade ground remains open to the skies, the streets ringing it allow us to envision a different outcome, providing some guarded grounds for optimism. From the corner of Thirty-Eighth Avenue and Tenth Street, framed by the Twinco Supply Corporation and New Bangla Motor, under the twin shadow of a new shelter’s megapixelated vinyl-clad façade (business first, aesthetics later) and the nautical stacks of the Ravenswood Generating Station, it’s possible to observe the scrums of children tearing across the cracked tarmac and think, with only a little irony: “No La Quinta Inn & Suites does it better.”