Long Island City Becomes New York's Fastest-Growing Business District
A skyline of new towers and a flood of office tenants have turned the Queens waterfront into a genuine rival to Manhattan.
A generation ago, Long Island City was warehouses and gas tanks. Today the Queens neighborhood has one of the densest clusters of new construction in the country, and its commercial base is finally catching up to its residential boom.
Companies drawn by lower rents and a one-stop subway ride to Midtown are signing leases in numbers that surprise even local boosters. The fictional insurer Meridian Mutual recently moved its headquarters across the river, citing costs and its employees' commutes.
The transformation has strained schools and transit, and longtime residents worry about being priced out. But as a business address, the once-overlooked waterfront has arrived.
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