For as long as anyone can remember (that is, about seventeen years), a busload of inmates newly released from Rikers Island has been dropped off each weekday morning on a street corner in Long Island City, Queens. At around 5 A.M., a school bus, colored Department of Corrections orange-white-and-blue, pulls up to a discount furniture store on Jackson Avenue and delivers fifty or so rough-looking gentlemen into the predawn squalor of Queens Plaza South. They tumble to the sidewalk carrying garbage bags full of their belongings and scatter quickly. Some head for the No. 7 train (or the W, F, N, R, V, or G), others for a nearby twenty-four-hour doughnut shop, still others for idling cars occupied by family members or friends, and a few for the long-anticipated comforts of prostitutes, who, despite a crackdown called Operation Clean Sweep, move in and out of the shadows beneath the Queensboro Bridge.
Queens Plaza is braided, like a sub-Arctic river, and difficult to navigate; there seem to be a lot of streets and little traffic islands. It is bisected by the ramp of the bridge and is surrounded on all sides by strip clubs (thirteen in all), with such names as Venus and Scandals, which means that there are as many livery cars as cop cars there. It is a befuddling and dismal place, especially if you're on foot, at five in the morning—though it's ideal, in its way, for the savoring of new freedoms.
But that may be changing. Last month, the north side of Queens Plaza was rechristened MetLife Plaza, in honor of its newest tenant, which has about a thousand employees there. MetLife is merely the latest indication of the spiffing up of Long Island City; it joins the Citigroup tower to the south, the temporary Museum of Modern Art to the east, and a handful of new luxury apartment buildings to the west. To some dreamers the neighborhood is the future home of a glittering Olympic village. "The signs are clear," Eric Gioia, the district's city councilman, said last week. "New coffeehouses, new restaurants, artists on building steps—Long Island City looks like what I imagine SoHo did thirty years ago."
In other words, it aspires to be the kind of neighborhood that does not easily absorb a nightly dispersal of jittery ex-convicts. To that end, some interested parties have taken on the task of diverting the Rikers Express elsewhere, or getting rid of it altogether. Gioia, citing it as an impediment to the ongoing development of western Queens, has asked Mayor Bloomberg to consider a new discharge policy. (The Mayor, according to a spokesman, is working on it.) Gioia would like to see the city disperse the inmates in other boroughs as well, not just dump them in his district.
MetLife, meanwhile, recently commissioned a report evaluating other potential dropoff spots around the city. The study, produced by the Wadley-Donovan Group, a corporate-location consulting firm, is a chilly exercise in NIMBY calculus; it aims at identifying a place that is, more or less, in nobody's back yard. The new dropoff spot would have to be as close to Rikers as Queens Plaza, or closer—that is, within three and a half miles of the Rikers Island bridge. It would also have to be near a subway station that is open between four and six in the morning. And, above all, it would require, as the report puts it, "bordering station environments that are less developed (under-utilized) in support of minimum employer/resident objection." In short, the more barren, the better—no community equals no community opposition. The study relied on several variables in grading prospective dropoff spots: population density, commercial activity, preponderance of families and "family-based characteristics" (schools and so forth), income level. The lower each variable, the higher each dropoff point's grade. "To have the least negative impact on upscale development and the quest for high-end uses," the report reads, "the lowest Median Household Income received the highest score." That is to say, the people who live near the new dropoff point should be poor.
Ten potential dropoff spots scored higher than Queens Plaza—two in the Bronx and eight in Queens. (The only Manhattan sites under consideration were in Harlem.) The winner, by a landslide, was Willets Point and Roosevelt Avenue, in Queens, otherwise known as the parking lot at Shea Stadium, a windswept wasteland if ever there was one (with the stench of Flushing Bay at low tide as an added bonus).
Who knows? It could turn out to be a boon to Shea—and a blow to Queens Plaza. Over the years, a micro-economy, not all of it illegal, has blossomed around the daily dropoff. On a recent Friday morning, two buses rolled up at five-thirty, and the men streamed off. It was the weekend load—a hundred-plus wild-eyed men, in their civvies. One guy in a Giants jersey and big shorts hooted and patted the ground. Another marched west, turned abruptly and came back, then turned west again. "Where the hell am I?" he shouted. "Where's the 7 train?" A block away, a pack formed on the corner outside the Friendly Grocery & Deli, beginning an arcane exchange of cigarettes and dollar bills. One man bought a copy of the News. There was, for a brief spell, a line at Donuts Unlimited. "I'll have a toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese," a man in a "Star Wars" T-shirt said.
"No bagels," the man behind the counter said.
"No bagels? Then I'll have a couple of those bow ties." He fished in his pocket for change.
