10,000-Year-Old Legacy Of Biodiversity Endangered By Queens Development Project

Flushing Creek is one of the most polluted bodies of water in Queens, home to a century of oil spills and raw sewage. Made famous in literature as The Great Gatsby’s “valley of ashes,'' the shoreline at its mouth has been cut off from the community for decades, lined with concrete plants, coal yards, train lines and highways. But even New York City’s most toxic landscapes have their own hidden biodiversity.

The creek’s ecological history dates back more than 10,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Today, beyond a trash-strewn field next to a U-Haul storage facility, two acres of wild-growing woodlands are thriving on the post-industrial banks of the creek.

“There were mastodons, there were giant beavers, saber-toothed tigers. Hundreds of thousands of acres of oyster beds, eelgrass beds out into the water,” Daniel Atha, the Director of Conservation Outreach at the New York Botanical Garden, said on a recent Saturday morning, before leading a nature walk around this section of the creek. “When the Dutch came, this was a paradise with fantastic biodiversity, even though people had lived here for 10,000 years. They had their communities and societies without destroying the biodiversity.”

Some of the last reminders of this history are now slated to be erased. In December 2020, the New York City Council voted to approve the Special Flushing Waterfront District, a rezoning that will allow a $2 billion development project to construct 13 towers along the Flushing Creek. This mixed-use development will create more than 1,700 residential units and 800 hotel rooms in what is already one of Flushing’s most toxic industrial areas, bounded by Northern Boulevard, College Point Boulevard, and Roosevelt Avenue.

The Special Flushing Waterfront District is decades in the making—and has deeply divided the community. Some residents look forward to accessing the waterfront for the first time in a century, while others fear it will increase gentrification, displacement and pollution in the neighborhood.

The plan represents the largest private development ever created on Flushing Creek, but a full assessment of how it will impact the neighborhood has never been completed. The City Council passed the rezoning without an Environmental Impact Statement—typically a required step in the city’s planning process. The rezoning was supported by Flushing’s Councilmember Peter Koo, who did not reply to a request for comment.

Last June, several community groups sued the Department of City Planning and the City Planning Commission to halt the rezoning, claiming that the lack of an Environmental Impact Statement was unlawful. This past February, these groups, including the Chhaya Community Development Corporation, MinKwon Center for Community Action and Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce, amended their lawsuit to include the New York City Council.

“Flushing is a neighborhood under siege. Its working-class residents, primarily people of color, face an ever-increasing rate of displacement resulting from massive real-estate speculation over the last decade,” the lawsuit states. “Designed without community input, it represents the dreams of developers rather than the needs of Flushing residents: nearly 3,000,000 zoning square feet of new development and nearly 1,800 new apartments, representing a profound and permanent change to the face of the Flushing waterfront.”

If completed, 29 acres of polluted land will be transformed into a cluster of commercial and residential towers by FWRA LLC, a consortium of developers that includes F&T Group, United Construction and Development Group Inc., and Young Nian Group. This new neighborhood will erase the two-acre woodlands, and local community groups fear that it would badly damage the creek’s salt marsh habitat, where dozens of species of plants and animals have thrived for decades. It would also bring thousands of new residents to a flood zone that will be seriously impacted by sea-level rise.

Gothamist reached out to representatives of FWRA LLC regarding concerns about the project’s ecological impacts but did not hear back.

A Rare Space

The nature walk led by Daniel Atha wasn’t for tourists. It was for a coalition of local community leaders, including representatives from the Guardians of Flushing Bay, the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance, and the Queens College Department of Urban Studies. Their goal was to plan a "Flushing Creek Estuary Bioblitz" later in the spring, where the public would be invited to identify and catalog all of the plants and animals living around the creek.

Several attendees had not been to this part of the waterfront before, nor to any part of Flushing Creek, outside of Flushing Meadows Park. As they strolled single-file down a narrow dirt path, they passed by an unoccupied campsite surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags and entered into a unique post-industrial landscape—filled with trees, grasses and mosses.

As the group picked their way through the woodlands and down to the edge of the creek, Atha called out the tree species growing around them—while also pointing out the poison ivy that we were standing in. There were trees from around the world, including black cherry, white mulberry, eastern cottonwood, Norway maple, Callery Pear, Siberian elm, and Persian silk trees. Some had been growing here for 30 or 40 years, alongside the crumbling remnants of a fuel storage facility.

“It’s so rare in New York City to find a space that is just allowed to grow,” said Rebecca Pryor, the Program Coordinator for the Guardians of Flushing Bay and Riverkeeper. They released a proposal for a much greener vision of Flushing Creek in 2016. “If you actually are going to build this thing, and you are going to destroy this irreplaceable green space, this forest, then how are you going to mitigate that process?”

Less than a century ago, the center of the planned waterfront district was a much more extensive woodland area facing an even larger salt marsh. The waterfront here was known as Willow Bank, the grand estate of the Lawrence family, who had owned the land since the 1640s. Surrounded by willow trees, their single enormous mansion overlooked the creek’s natural shoreline, from atop a gentle hillside.

The Willow Bank mansion was demolished in 1926, as the Flushing waterfront became increasingly industrialized. The estate’s land was used to build a furniture factory (now the home of the U-Haul storage center) and a fuel storage facility known as the Flushing Terminal. This facility, located at 37-02 College Point Boulevard, reportedly contained 13 underground tanks that could store 2.8 million gallons of petroleum. The oil was pumped out to boats on the creek, and the small woodlands thriving here today grow out of the remnants of these enormous tanks.

At the edge of the creek, the trees gave way to a small patch of salt marsh. The coalition ended its walk there, surrounded by stalks of cordgrass and patches of marsh elder—gazing out onto the water.

“It’s really interesting to think about how much these sites have changed,” said Cody Herrmann, a local artist and member of Guardians of Flushing Bay. “By Great Gatsby times, everything was pretty industrial, and you couldn’t live on it anymore. And at this point, we have this return of what seems like nice, lush green, could be a park, but underneath it has this history of pollution.”

Polluted Waterfront

The Flushing Creek is one of the most contaminated bodies of water in Queens. The city dumps more than a billion gallons of sewage-tainted rainwater every year into its mouth, a heavily industrialized tidal inlet. Despite its polluted state, the creek is home to oysters, muskrats, osprey, egrets, cormorants, and other wildlife. The problem of sewage overflows into their habitats could be amplified by adding thousands of new human residents along the waterfront.

“You still have the dynamics of a natural salt marsh community because you have the freshwater coming from the land and the saltwater there,” Atha said. “So, you still have the ability for these plants and animals to exist here, even though it's highly degraded.”

In December 2019, the developers of the Special Flushing Waterfront District filed an Environmental Assessment Statement providing an initial look at how their project would impact the environment. It states that “the Project Area is in a highly urbanized area where the vegetation and wildlife are limited, and the biodiversity is low.” The 722-page document does not mention Willow Bank or the Flushing Terminal, and in its Natural Resources section, it does not note that the project site contains a two-acre section of wild woodlands.

The soil of the Special Flushing Waterfront District is currently tainted with a variety of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and petroleum products, including arsenic, lead, mercury, PCBs and VOCs. The Hazardous Materials section of the assessment does not mention any of these pollutants; it defers instead to an outdated document filed in 1998 as part of a separate rezoning proposal.

Along with omitting the Flushing Terminal site, the EAS skips over the detail that the district is home to a federally listed hazardous waste site, located at 39-08 Janet Place. The Spectrum Maintenance Corporation once generated large quantities of hazardous waste here each month and had a well-documented history of oil spills and illegally stored toxic materials. Several corroded oil barrels still sit at this site today, which is flooded and slowly becoming a wild marshland.

This assessment directly led the Department of City Planning to issue their own declaration stating that “the proposed project would not have a significant adverse impact on the environment.” It was this declaration that helped the developers skip past creating an in-depth Environmental Impact Statement, according to the lawsuit being brought by community groups.

Skyrise Now, Water Rise Later

A much larger salt marsh habitat is located in Willets Point, directly across from the Special Flushing Waterfront District. In 2008, the NY State Department of Transportation helped restore 2.5 acres of this endangered wetlands, hand planting 90,000 saltmarsh cordgrasses in an attempt to mitigate damages from a nearby highway construction project. The development of the Flushing shoreline could threaten the future of this marshland as well.

“When you put in a bulkhead, it totally destroys that intertidal zone,” said Atha, standing at the edge of the creek. “When you have a bulkhead on one side, the waves will be intensified, and it will destroy the salt marsh on the other side because it will increase the erosion potential.”

Much of this site is also located in a high-risk flood zone, which could be permanently flooded by sea-level rise. According to the Department of City Planning flood hazard map, the entire waterfront and nearby inland areas of this development site sit in Zone AE, meaning they have a 1% chance of flooding every year. The New York City Panel on Climate Change now projects that the five boroughs face up to 9.5 feet of sea-level rise in the next 80 years, which would inundate the Flushing shoreline.

“Can you bluff your way through climate change?” asked Herrmann, who has created numerous artworks on the waters of the Flushing Creek. “They are pouring so much money into literally what used to be part of the Hudson River. This land has never been dry, and they are building on every side of it.”

For the community groups who are suing the city and the groups cataloging the wildlife on the waterfront, the same questions remain: How can this project move forward without an honest and accurate accounting of how it will impact the environment? And how can the community benefit from this project if it has not been told what is at risk?

Despite these efforts, it may be too late to slow down the Special Flushing Waterfront District and negotiate a better outcome.

“This plan to develop the waterfront in Flushing is older than myself. So, this is something that a lot of people with power have worked towards for a really long time,“ said Herrmann, who grew up in Flushing. “It just feels too big to fail.”