Willets Point is dead. Long live Willets Point.
The $3 billion Bloomberg-era project to transform a neighborhood of broken streets and ramshackle auto repair shops across from Citi Field in Queens appeared dead in 2015, when a state court ruled that the city could not take a piece of Flushing Meadows Park for a gigantic shopping mall and garage as it had planned.
Still, bulldozers plowed over dozens of shops on the hardscrabble streets, as the city seized the land under eminent domain and hundreds of immigrant workers lost their jobs.
But on Monday, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio struck a new deal with the original developers for a new version of the plan, which will include 1,100 apartments for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers, a school, open space and retail on six acres at Willets Point Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue.