July 30, 2014
The J and Z subway tracks along Jamaica Avenue run above the abandoned Long Island Rail Road track, which crosses the avenue. David W. Dunlap/The New York Times
More public transit. Better public spaces.
Usually, these are two sides of the same progressivist coin in city planning.
In Queens, however, the goals are far apart. Standing between them is a three-and-a-half-mile swath of greenery: the city-owned right-of-way for the old Long Island Rail Road Rockaway Beach line, which hasn’t seen a 5:37 to Ozone Park in 52 years. Many rusted tracks and signal towers are still in place, though, as are parts of two stations.
For years, the oddly marvelous asset of a ghost rail bed — which came into the city’s hands thanks to a careless cigarette smoker and is largely unknown outside of Ozone Park, Woodhaven and Rego Park — has inspired very different visions of the future.
One side imagines trains coursing again along the rail bed. The other side imagines strollers, runners, bicyclists, diners, gardeners, artists and performers. It is unclear how either vision would be financed, so they may remain just that.
It is also unclear where the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio stands on the matter. “We look forward to continuing conversations with stakeholders about the future of this asset,” a mayoral spokesman, Wiley Norvell, said on Tuesday.
The Ozone Park end of the line was the focus of a recent architectural competition,QueensWay Connection: Elevating the Public Realm, sponsored by a committee of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Many entries are on view through October at the chapter’s Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village.
“QueensWay” is a plan, still embryonic, to turn the right-of-way property over to the public. It is being advanced by the Trust for Public Land and the local group Friends of the QueensWay.
There is a temptation to call this the High Line of Queens. But its advocates imagine it taking different forms and functions as it travels from tough industrial blocks at the south end, to the gentle crescents of Rego Park at the north, past big-box stores and small, tidy homes that enjoy the relative quiet of an unused rail bed in their backyards.
There is a much different vision for this corridor: Restored rail service along a critically situated right-of-way that would be impossible to recreate today. Supporters include Assemblyman Phillip Goldfeder, whose district includes Ozone Park; the Regional Rail Working Group and the Queens Public Transit Committee. Among many ideas on the table is using the route for more direct rail service between Kennedy Airport and Pennsylvania Station.
Proposed ‘QueensWay’ Greenway in Queens
FLUSHING
MEADOWS-
CORONA PARK
5 MILES
Rego Park
Willow
Lake
QUEENS
Area of
detail
ST. JOHN
CEMETERY
Forest Hills
Hamilton
Beach
KENNEDY
INTERNATIONAL
AIRPORT
Rockaway Beach
JACKIE ROBINSON PKWY.
Atlantic Ocean
FOREST PARK
MT. LEBANON
CEMETERY
Richmond
Hill
FOREST PARK
GOLF COURSE
CYPRESS
HILLS
CEMETERY
Path of
proposed
“QueensWay”
Woodhaven
QUEENS
BROOKLYN
Ozone Park
AQUEDUCT
RACETRACK
1/2 MILE
Back in the day, Long Island Rail Road trains ran from Rego Park through stations at Parkside, Brooklyn Manor, Woodhaven, Ozone Park, Aqueduct, Howard Beach and Hamilton Beach, where they began their journey across Jamaica Bay on wooden trestles, stopping at Goose Creek, the Raunt and Broad Channel before reaching the Rockaways. (Dave Keller has compiled anillustrated history at trainsarefun.com.)
On the night of May 7, 1950, about 1,800 feet of trestle south of Hamilton Beach was destroyed by a fire after an unextinguished cigarette was tossed from a train window. The damage was estimated at $1 million. The railroad, then in bankruptcy, could not and would not rebuild it.
That set the stage for the city to acquire the line for the purpose of extending subway service to the Rockaway peninsula. The right-of-way was purchased for $8.5 million and a new concrete track bed was constructed at a cost of $47.5 million — a total investment of nearly half a billion dollars at current prices. The line opened June 28, 1956. Today it is the A train to Far Rockaway and Rockaway Park.
For another six years, the Long Island Rail Road continued to run trains on its truncated Rockaway spur as far as Ozone Park. Service finally ended for good on June 8, 1962.
Last week, I walked the length of the QueensWay. In two spots — one a gully, the other a berm — I managed to get on the rail bed, where I found haunting scenes of abandonment: trees growing in the middle of tracks, steel rails scattered like straws and signal towers glimpsed through dense foliage — and through clouds of gnats. More often, I simply walked along the edge of the right-of-way, disinclined to trespass, especially since I’d forgotten to bring a machete.
On Atlantic Avenue is a sign that this had been a passenger railroad long ago — under an overpass, two stairways, behind chain-link fences, up to the platforms of the deserted Woodhaven Station.
Dozens of concrete arches march in precision along 99th and 100th Streets, where the Ozone Park station had been. That was where I met Bobby Cutolo, 75, who lives in the neighborhood and works at a friend’s auto repair shop opposite the right-of-way.
I told Mr. Cutolo that I’d heard talk about the elevated structure being turned into a park or a railroad once again.
“That’s all it is,” he counseled. “Talk.”
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