Willets Point, Doomed and Preserved

The Queens neighborhood, about to be demolished, has been documented by Harvard-affiliated filmmakers.

Willets Point as seen from the eastern upper level of Citi Field in Queens, on a rainy afternoon

The City of New York is about to force out all the residents and business people of Willets Point, a neighborhood in Queens near Citi Field, home of the New York Mets. It is a “62-acre tangle of auto shops, car parts and grease-covered mechanics tinkering with automobiles,” according to a New York Times feature, “The End of Willets Point.” On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the city will begin its three-phase, $3-billion plan to renew the place that it has identified as a “blighted area.” “Cleaning up or clearing out Willets Point has been a goal of nearly every mayor since the 1950s,” the article declares. “The area is sometimes said to have inspired the ‘Valley of Ashes’ described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ ”

The neighborhood is surely poor, but it does have character.  That character is preserved in Foreign Parts, a nonfiction film about Willets Point described in “An Elegy Set in Queens,” an article in the Montage section of Harvard Magazine that appeared in 2011, when the area’s days were already numbered.  The filmmakers are  Véréna Paravel, associate of the department of anthropology and J.P. Sniadecki, Ph.D. ’13, who now teaches at Cornell. 

You might also like

Salsa Squared

Latin dancing fills the streets in Harvard Square   

No More [Lovin’ That] Dirty Water

Enjoying Boston Harbor’s Renaissance this summer

Reconstructing the Berlin Wall

David Leo Rice explores the strange, unseen forces shaping our world.

Most popular

“Do You Find That Reasonable?” Harvard Undergraduates Discuss a Changing University

A student panel grapples—civilly—with shifting policies and differing opinions.

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Harvard Adopts Reforms as Higher Ed Turmoil Continues

University creates new “interfaith engagement” role; Columbia, Brown settle with the government.

Explore More From Current Issue

A color illustration of students from a diversity of backgrounds eating and talking together at a long dining hall-type table

The Undergraduate asks if intellectualism is really on life support.

Colorful glass bottles and nautical trinkets line a window shelf, with a ship in a bottle as the centerpiece.

I Spy Creator Walter Wick at the Norman Rockwell Museum 

Illustration of Donald Trump and Alan Garber wearing boxing gloves, facing off beneath the quote: “The stakes are so high that we have no choice.”

Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.