(CBS/AP) NEW YORK Across the street from the parking lot where a new stadium for the New York Mets is going up, Daniel Sambucci’s auto salvage yard is a grease monkey’s paradise.Thousands of car parts—axles, doors, transmissions, window regulators—are neatly shelved and tagged. Chassis are stacked three high.
“We keep it as good as we could keep it,” said Sambucci, 76, who started the business in 1951 and hoped to pass the business down to his grandson.
But if Mayor Michael Bloomberg gets his way, it will become a paradise lost.
Sambucci’s scrap yard is one of 225 automotive businesses occupying a 60-acre chunk of Queens that would be redeveloped into office buildings, shops, apartments and a convention center under a plan that Bloomberg announced last month.
The area, known as Willets Point, would shed its existing businesses and the soil would be cleansed of decades of oil and gasoline spills before a new neighborhood with 5,500 housing units, 1.7 million square feet of retail and entertainment and 500,000 square feet of office space would be built from scratch.
“After a century of blight and neglect, the future of this area is very bright indeed,” Bloomberg said when he released the Willets Point master plan at the nearby Queens Museum of Art.
But shop owners say they don’t want to leave. They say that if Willets Point is an eyesore, it’s the city’s fault.
“They created the blight, now they’re going to use it to wipe out all these people,” said Michael Rikon, a lawyer who is advising Sambucci and other area business owners.
Much of Willets Point is indeed filthy. Body shops are housed in trailers and cinderblock sheds. There are no sidewalks or sewers. The streets flood when it rains.
Fans at Shea Stadium or the adjoining National Tennis Center—where the U.S. Open is played—might never notice the jumble of junkyards and chop shops. But the Mets’ new ballpark, opening in 2009, will be closer to them, right across the street. The Wilpon family that owns the team is following the redevelopment plans closely.
“We got along with Wilpon for years,” Sambucci said. “Now all of a sudden because he’s coming closer to our fence, they’re on us.”
There are about 250 businesses in the redevelopment area, most of them auto-related. There is one legal resident, Joseph Ardizzone, 74, and he does not want to leave either. “I don’t believe politicians have the right to give my property to their friends, whoever they may be,” he said.
Also known as the Iron Triangle, Willets Point has long been targeted for urban renewal, including by the legendary master builder Robert Moses. But business owners fought off previous efforts.
The current plan has been brewing for years. The city reached out to developers in 2004 with requests for expressions of interest, then sought formal proposals last year.
Following environmental reviews, the city will ask developers to submit revised plans in the spring of 2008. A developer or team of developers will be chosen in the summer of 2008, and construction on the multiyear project could start in 2009. The land would have to be purchased from some 65 individual owners.
The city has promised to help the existing businesses relocate and to provide job training and other assistance to the estimated 1,300 workers who make a living there. Bill Walsh, vice president for real estate development at the city’s Economic Development Corp., said a specific plan would be released this summer.
But Sambucci wonders where he could go and who would pay to move his inventory.
“What do I do with all this stuff?” he said, indicating some 240 cars and chassis. “Where do I put it?”
Sambucci works with his son, also Daniel, and had hoped to pass on the business to his grandson, Daniel as well.
“I don’t think they’re going to offer any relocation, even though they keep saying that,” said the middle Sambucci, who is 49. “I keep asking them ‘Where are you going to relocate me?’ And they go, ‘Well, we have land.’ ... What is it, a secret?”
Tom Angotti, a professor of urban planning at Hunter College who has studied Willets Point, said the city will refer business owners to other properties, “but it’s inadequate.”
“I would imagine they’re going to have trouble finding comparable space that’s affordable, especially with the real estate market the way it is,” he said.
At his news conference, Bloomberg said the city hoped to negotiate with Willets Point property owners and use eminent domain as a last resort. He bristled when a reporter mentioned Ardizzone, the lone official resident. He was not present at the news conference.
“Look, unfortunately, there will always be one person who objects to everything, but I don’t think anyone suggests that this society should stay back in the Stone Age and never move ahead,” Bloomberg said.
Some plans Bloomberg has championed during his five and a half years in office are moving forward, while others, notably the New York Jets’ proposed Manhattan stadium, have gone down to defeat.
Apart from the business owners and workers most directly affected, no groundswell of opposition to the Willets Point proposal has emerged.
The City Council will be asked at some point to rezone Willets Point from industrial to mixed use. Councilman Hiram Monserrate, who represents the area, said he would wait to see the business relocation plan before deciding how to vote.
Monserrate said there has to be some way of ensuring that the process is fair. “I really don’t know what that answer is,” he said.
Though they have tacked “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse” signs to their chain-link fence, the Sambuccis seem resigned to moving.
“We don’t want to leave here,” said the middle Sambucci. “But it looks like I don’t have a choice in the matter.”
His father summed up the situation. “They want housing and they want a convention center and they want people having coffee on the sidewalk looking at a stadium that has 70 or 80 games a year and is empty the rest of the time. That’s what they want.”
