A vibrant industrial neighborhood thriving despite city neglect. Immigrant workers, documented and undocumented. A city plan for massive redevelopment: malls, business centers, hotels, condos. Self-serving developers. Eminent domain. A destruction. A limbo. A renewal?
Willets Point is an industrial wedge of northeast Queens consisting for most of the last 70 years of almost entirely autobody shops and scrap yards. Despite city neglect, pitted streets, and a complete lack of storm drains that cause frequent flooding, as of 2006, the neighborhood provided the livelihoods for 1400 to 1800 people, mostly immigrants, many undocumented. In 2007, the City of New York set in motion a major redevelopment plan which would entail displacing nearly all existing businesses in favor of malls, conference centers, and hotels, and over the last decade much of the neighborhood has been bought out and razed. Blocked as an improper commercial use of public land by the New York court system, part of the area continues on, while much has been left as concrete desolation, its future uncertain.
This film, shot spanning the major “urban renewal” operations from 2014 to 2017, documents the conversion of a vibrant, singular small business district into a wasteland, and envisions a different kind of renewal unlikely to be allowed by developers and city officials.
Made possible in part by a residency with Chance Ecologies.
The open walls, the walls have been beaten, the cracks, the fissures, the holes – who will close them up? This question, easy to formulate, is impossible to answer. The self in the form of the open slated shutters of a house in children’s stories. Those same shutters, closed, would form a green heart with small hearts which are crevices through which the air passes. But they cannot be closed. Or if they are closed, then something happens to the crevices, since the air doesn’t pass through them and the dwellers of the little house in the forest die asphyxiated. No. No one suffocates since they can’t be closed. Rather they’re injured, injured but not dead, although they would very much like to be dead; they are injured by the sharp wind. I don’t know if it’s because of the wind or because bandits have entered and injured them, stripped them of everything, and abandoned them to their bad luck. They dream of the green heart and of small hearts through which the air was coming. At the beginning it had to be like this. They were not going to be spared sorrows but those sorrows were going to be different from this one, so poor and so humiliating. It is not terrible to suffer but only to suffer for humiliating causes, since this robs all the beauty from the ceremony of suffering which, at first, didn’t differ from the other ceremonies.
s. d. stewart 