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.
