What Lies Ahead for an Abandoned Rail Line in Queens?

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at what might happen to an abandoned rail corridor that slices through Queens. We’ll also get details on how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to spend the $68.4 billion in capital funds it is getting under the state budget agreement that was announced on Monday.

The last train rumbled down the Rockaway Beach branch of the Long Island Rail Road on a warm, drizzly day in June 1962. The signal towers were abandoned and toppled to the ground as the unused right of way deteriorated. Now it’s a place where coyotes are on the prowl.

Some people in Queens want to resurrect rail service through the little corridor. Others see a linear park like the High Line in Manhattan. I asked my colleague Christopher Maag what might be next for the Rockaway Beach line.

This abandoned rail line through southern and central Queens is an overgrown industrial ruin. Can it be the next High Line?

There is a chance it could become a linear park, to use the term urbanists use for the High Line.

It would take money. So far there is $117 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and City Hall and the City Council have allocated another $37 million. But the Department of Transportation has also awarded a smaller grant, only about $400,000, to a group that wants to study bringing back rail service.

If it becomes a park, it would be different from the High Line. Much of it runs through neighborhoods with single-family homes, not high-density apartment towers. It’s most likely to be used by locals and probably won’t attract a lot of tourists, the way the High Line does.

And, unlike the High Line, the supporters are not expecting to get rich and famous donors like Diane von Furstenberg, whose family foundation gave $20 million for the High Line’s endowment and some design work. In Queens, the money they get from government agencies will be the money they get.

But there are competing visions for what to do with this narrow strip of land, aren’t there?

Yes.

The group that got the smaller grant, QueensLink, hopes to use that money to study ways to turn the old train line into a modern subway line serving a part of Queens that is really difficult to get around in. They say there is enough space for train tracks to run alongside a park.

But based on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s preliminary study of the cost of a subway line and what the M.T.A. projects to be low ridership, the agency’s leaders have signaled that they are unlikely to allocate money for rebuilding the tracks.

I think a combination of factors doomed the old line. Fires destroyed the bridges farther down the line over Jamaica Bay, but the branch wasn’t doing great anyway.

The M.T.A. built new bridges and converted the southernmost part of the right of way for use by the A train, which has run there ever since. The M.T.A. says there’s not enough density in the abandoned section to support billions of dollars of capital work, which is what it would take to restore train service.

The last train ran along the Rockaway Beach branch decades ago. One person you talked with said it feels as if nature had taken over a war zone.

I viewed it as less a war zone than nature reclaiming this residential and light industrial space. I was drawn to this little bubble of quiet that slices through the neighborhoods around it.

But visually, it’s riot and chaos.

Riot and chaos?

You have the built environment falling apart and nature coming in at different speeds. The forest that has grown up there took 63 years to grow.

There’s a lot of debris from different time bands. People left behind baby carriages that look like baby carriages looked in the ’50s and beer cans with pull tops that haven’t been made that way since the ’60s or ’70s. And you’ll see Heineken bottles that could’ve been left there last week. I liked the layering of time.

But that’s what is going to have to be cleaned up. What do people who live along the line want?

The majority of people I talked to don’t want anything to change.

You have to want to find it to take advantage of it, and not many people know how to do that. So for people whose backyards are next to where the tracks ran, it’s like having an additional private space.

Most people I talked to don’t want train service to resume because it would be loud, and they don’t want a park because they don’t want people looking in their bedrooms. They like the quiet, and they want the green the way it is, not trimmed and tailored the way a park would be. They like having a little extra land for free, and they’d rather not have people walking along back there.

But it’s not 100 percent. Some people say it would be nice for everyone to see the corridor and enjoy it.

Weather

Expect mostly sunny skies with a high in the mid-70s. In the evening, it will be mostly clear with a low of 52 degrees.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).

The latest New York news

Protesters rally in Brooklyn: A group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, above, rallied at Barclays Center in Brooklyn to condemn the assault of a woman in Crown Heights last week by a crowd of pro-Israel counterprotesters.
Weinstein accuser testifies: Miriam Haley, a former television production assistant, took the stand at Harvey Weinstein’s retrial to testify again that he sexually assaulted her in his apartment nearly 20 years ago.
Iraqi man charged with illegal voting: Akeel Abdul Jamiel, who appears to be a fan of President Trump, was charged with voting in the 2020 presidential election despite not being a citizen. Federal officials said the prosecution had been assisted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Lawmaker changes his tune: Representative Greg Murphy, a Republican from North Carolina, criticized an NYU Langone Health commercial that was broadcast during the Super Bowl as a waste of federal funds. Eight days later, he went from critic to booster of the hospital.

What riders will get from $68 million for the M.T.A.

The M.T.A., the agency that runs the subways, buses and two commuter rail lines, is getting $68.4 billion for its capital plan under the state budget agreement that was announced in Albany on Monday. That is more money than the M.T.A. has ever gotten.

But my colleague Stefanos Chen writes that there’s no guarantee the M.T.A. will be able to complete the many projects it has on the drawing board.

The transit agency is counting on $14 billion from the Trump administration. But Washington has threatened to withhold funding for transportation projects unless the state ends congestion pricing in Manhattan. And while the state is looking to pay for the plan with a higher rate on an unpopular business tax, full details on funding are not yet clear.

The new plan paves the way for the long-awaited Interborough Express, or IBX, a 14-mile freight corridor that Gov. Kathy Hochul hopes will be repurposed to serve residents in parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

A smaller line item in the budget is a reminder of a different challenge for the transit authority: The M.T.A. will spend $1.1 billion to install modern fare gates at 150 stations to prevent fare evasion, which cost the agency close to $800 million last year.

The budget agreement came as a relief to mass transit supporters, who feared that failure to maintain critical infrastructure would lead to a repeat of the service meltdown seen in mid-2017. Dangerous overcrowding and long delays, mostly on the subway, prompted Andrew M. Cuomo, then the governor, to declare a state of emergency. Politicians and headline writers called it the “Summer of Hell.”

The M.T.A.’s shopping list includes $10.9 billion for roughly 2,000 new rail cars, including 1,500 for the subway and more than 500 for Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.

Also in the plan: $5.4 billion to modernize the subway signal system, which dates to the Great Depression and which the M.T.A. blames for an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month over the last 15 months.

METROPOLITAN diary