1868
The basin is cut
Anable Basin is dug a thousand feet into the shore, giving ships a way in to the oil refineries and factories crowding the Queens side of the East River.
From car floats and factories to a glass waterfront
A basin cut for refineries, a bridge, a bank tower, and then the fastest-changing skyline in Queens. Eleven moments — scroll the timeline.
1909
The Queensboro Bridge opens
Gustav Lindenthal’s cantilever truss, with Henry Hornbostel as architect, opens to traffic on 30 March — 3,725 feet of bridge, 7,449 counting its approaches.
1925
The gantries go up
Freight gantries are built on the Hunters Point shore to move rail cars between the Long Island Rail Road and barges bound across the river.
1927
The first skyscraper in Queens
The Bank of the Manhattan Company finishes an eleven-storey neo-Gothic tower on Queens Plaza North, capped by a three-storey clock. Morrell Smith, architect. The press at its May dedication called it the first skyscraper in the borough.
1940
Pepsi arrives on the roof
General Outdoor Advertising erects a neon sign roughly 150 feet long on the roof of the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, its script following the company’s 1939 logo.
1968
Queens gets its first historic district
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates Hunters Point on 15 May: 47 buildings on one block of 45th Avenue, built 1871–1890. No other Queens district follows for twenty-five years.
1976
PS1 opens in a disused school
Alanna Heiss opens PS1 in the First Ward School of 1893, five years after founding the Institute for Art and Urban Resources to put artists into empty New York buildings. It affiliates with MoMA in 2000.
1990
Citicorp builds at Court Square
One Court Square tops out at 673 feet, after Citicorp weighed New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island and chose Queens on cost and a three-minute ride from Lexington Avenue. It is the tallest building in Queens for nearly thirty years.
1998
The waterfront comes back
Gantry Plaza State Park opens around the restored gantries. A six-acre expansion in 2009 brings it to twelve acres, and Hunters Point South Park picks up where it ends.
2019
A library, and a new tallest
Steven Holl’s 22,000-square-foot branch library opens on Center Boulevard in September. The same month, Skyline Tower passes One Court Square.
2025
OneLIC
The City Council approves the OneLIC Neighborhood Plan on 12 November, rezoning 54 blocks — the Anable Basin waterfront among them — for roughly 14,700 homes.
