Queens Plaza (Queens)

The location was the center of the 18th century village of Dutch Kills; two millstones were preserved as relics of that time, to be displayed in a green space.

[4][8]: 140  From the 1920s through World War II, Queens Plaza served as the location for many factories and warehouses, some of which later became office buildings, as well as a financial hub with several banks.

[3][4][8]: 139  Queens Plaza came to be characterized as a "a new downtown", supplanting the Hunters Point section of Long Island City in that regard.

[12] Later, "aging Chinese takeout restaurants, humid fried-chicken joints, sad-seeming doughnut shops, [and] the Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage, a brown concrete structure resembling a 1970's [sic] filmmaker's idea of an intergalactic battle station" opened along the plaza.

[12] Another new public park, named Dutch Kills Green, was built as part of the renovation; it has 500 trees, wetlands, and pavers for storm drainage.

Even though the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company moved two-thirds of its employees from the Brewster Building on Queens Plaza North back to Manhattan in 2006 because of the distance and lack of restaurants in Queens Plaza, airline company JetBlue and advertising and public relations firm Publicis later moved into the same former factory.

[12] While only 1,000 people lived on the streets immediately surrounding the plaza as of the 2000 United States Census,[3] the area has been undergoing substantial new development.

About 4,700 new rental units in 25 new residential buildings were expected to be completed in the Queens Plaza area by around 2019, as it grows along with the rest of Long Island City.