Amazon once wanted to make its headquarters at a massive municipal building in LIC. Now, if the Western Queens Community Land Trust has its way, it could become a community hub of arts, manufacturing and culture.
BY COLE SINANIAN
LONG ISLAND CITY — The hulking, 78-year-old six-story building at 44-36 Vernon Boulevard is hard to miss. Inside, the Department of Education stores school buses and food supplies, and uses office space for its Office of Food & Nutrition Services, Division of School Facilities, and the Office of Pupil Transportation.
To the south are the glassy waters of the Anable Basin. To the north, a marshy lot sits overgrown and cordoned off by chain-link fences. Nearby, a fleet of municipal Priuses and pickup trucks sit idle as men and women carrying clipboards come and go through the building’s open loading bay.
But back in 2019, things weren’t so quiet here. With the backing of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, Amazon had sought to develop the building into its new headquarters— a proposal that garnered such fierce opposition from community groups that the company withdrew its plans not long after announcing them.
Now, six years later, the Vernon building may once again hold the key to the future of Queens. United by a shared vision of communal land stewardship and public land for public benefit, the Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT) wants to turn it into something unprecedented in New York City: A permanently affordable, community-run hub of artist studios, manufacturing workshops, public kitchens, classrooms, gardens, food services and low-cost medical care.
Dubbed the Queensboro People’s Space (QPS), supporters say that, if completed, it would provide local artists and small business owners with a permanently affordable space to work in a neighborhood where luxury development has displaced much of the once-vibrant community of artists and craftsmen. It would also be proof of concept in New York for community land trusts, a radical land stewardship model that seeks to remove properties from the private market to be governed by a board of local stakeholders for the sole purpose of community benefit.
“We want to honor the legacies that have come before us and make sure they don’t disappear due to factors outside of their control, like unaffordable commercial rent,” said Hannah Berson, a longtime organizer and member of the WQCLT Steering Committee.
“And we want to make sure they have a means to stay here in a meaningful way and continue contributing to the neighborhoods that either they helped build, or the people who came before them helped build,” she continued.
The proposal is still in its earliest stages. The NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) in May 2025 to “help the City, Councilmember Julie Won, and Long Island City stakeholders understand the level of interest in pursuing adaptive reuse of the Vernon Building as well as the potential benefits, challenges, and feasibility of such a project,” according to a statement from an EDC spokesperson. The WQCLT responded to the RFI and is now awaiting the coming Request For Proposal (RFP), which will determine the kinds of redevelopment proposals the City accepts.
Both the WQCLT and QPS project’s origins are intimately tied to the fight against Amazon, said Berson, who lives in Astoria. She had attended anti-Amazon protests and rallies and been involved in local food justice projects, but it was community organizer and WQCLT member Rachel Brown who introduced Berson to the nascent WQCLT, which had loosely formed around a group of mutually interested activists who had met organizing against Amazon. The group began meeting and discussing the vision that became QPS in 2020, before engaging in a rigorous campaign of community meetings, public visioning sessions, block parties, tablings and open street festivals that led to a list of possible QPS tenants.
“It’s not just us sitting around saying, ‘we know best because we’re the land trust,’” Berson said “It’s ‘we know best because we’ve been out here doing the work and building community power and listening to our neighbors for six years.’”
With the help of the Jackson Heights-based nonprofit Chhaaya Community Development Corporation, the WQCLT secured a $20,000 grant to hire Nandini Bagchee of Bagchee Architects — a firm that has supported other community land trusts in New York — to put together a detailed feasibility study based on data gathered from outreach sessions. The group formally launched as an organization in January 2020 and is now incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit.
A Place for the People
So, who might occupy the Queensboro People’s Space? It’s still so early it’s hard to know for sure, but from the WQCLT’s public outreach a list of possible tenants emerged. Among them are food-focused organizations like Connected Chef, the Street Vendor Project, Hellgate Farm, Hot Bread Kitchen; care groups like Child’s Place, Sunnyside Community Services, and the Floating Hospital; and artist collectives like 5Pointz, the Sound Mind Collective, ART House Astoria, and Indie Collect.
The feasibility study — published in 2022 — details a rough floor map with about two-dozen local small businesses and organizations spread out across six floors, four of which would be dedicated to food justice, care, arts, and manufacturing. The ground floor would house storage and a large public kitchen, while the fifth floor would include a courtyard, a library and several classrooms. A rooftop farm, event space, and shared workspace would occupy the roof.
A major goal of the QPS is to help preserve the kinds of businesses and artists that provide intangible culture to the neighborhood but are quickly being priced out, Berson said. Once a mostly housing-free industrial district centered on manufacturing, LIC faced a series of rezonings beginning in the 2000s that laid the groundwork for rapid gentrification and the arrival of the luxury glass skyscrapers that now characterize much of the area. Since 2010, more than 20,000 housing units have been added to the neighborhood. Meanwhile, industrial space citywide has plummeted— a 2015 Pratt Center for Community Development analysis counted 4.2 million square feet lost between 1997 and 2014 as a result of rezonings.
According to Flushing-born Rutgers University Professor of Planning and Public Policy James Defilippis, healthy cities are more than just places to live, and the total replacement of local manufacturing and cultural spaces with housing can be both culturally and economically destructive. A deeply and permanently affordable space for local artists and manufacturers to work would not only help preserve LIC’s shrinking artist community, he says, but bring in the kinds of local economic benefits that housing and service sector revenue cannot.
“A city that is only housing units is not a city,” said Defilippis, who’s also a WQCLT member. “You need an awful lot of different things for cities to function, and a single-minded focus solely on housing — as much as we do need meaningfully affordable housing in the city — it doesn’t mean every site should be housing, and it doesn’t mean that housing is the only thing that enables people to live.”
Cleo, a 45-year-old street vendor with the Street Vendor Project who’s originally from Puebla, Mexico, said that an accessible kitchen space for workers like her would both immeasurably improve their qualities of life, as well as help to legitimize street vending as a profession. Cleo, who gave only her first name for safety reasons, supports her three children on her street vending income alone, and has to rent a van that she uses to transport supplies to her post in Corona each morning. She cooks all of her salsas and does all of her prep work at home each night, and said she once tried to rent a small kitchen space, but couldn’t afford the upwards of $4,000 monthly rent.
Beyond the costs, though, Cleo said the street vendor community desperately needs a safe space to work. She described frequent harassment from City agencies like sanitation workers and police, who she said would sometimes issue fines even to vendors who have the required paperwork.
“It’s as if everything were against the street vendors that want to do business, that want to do it right,” Cleo said. ‘There’s really a lot of obstacles in the way.”
She added that a designated space for the Street Vendor Project would also help the organization serve her community. The group organizes and advocates for street vendors around the city and provides them legal services and business training.
“Getting this building would be a huge help for the community,” Cleo continued. “There’s going to be more people working legally, so we’re going to need more spaces like this.”
While the future of the Queensboro People’s Space remains uncertain, the concept does not totally lack precedent. WQCLT Board Chair Memo Salazar pointed to the Bok Building in Philadelphia — which was converted from an abandoned technical high school into an artist and maker’s space — as an example of what the QPS could eventually resemble. Meanwhile, in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, the East New York Community Land Trust acquired a multi-family building in February 2024, becoming the first NYC community land trust to do so. Now, the group is about to acquire another East New York building, this time to convert it into a community space dubbed “The East Brooklyn Liberation Center.”
But until the City issues its RFP and financing partners are secured, the QPS idea remains just that— an idea. The WQCLT does not intend to purchase the building, but instead aims to lease it from the City with the help of a mission-aligned financial partner. According to Salazar, the group is currently searching for this financial partner. While financing will come from elsewhere, the WQCLT would elect a board to govern the QPS, ensuring that it remains permanently affordable and community-focused.
“This is a huge building that needs to be run by professionals and financed by professionals who know how to do this,” Salazar said. “The difference is, by having us there, we sort of serve as the community’s conscience, and make sure that the project, whatever happens, is going to serve the community.”
To learn more about the Queensboro People’s Space and community land trusts, join the Western Queens Community Land Trust at its fundraiser potluck on June 20 at 6pm at the corner of Vernon Blvd and 44th Dr.
