By Nicholas Gordon | ng639@georgetown.edu

If the beautiful, new sweeping waterfront space of Malt Drive Park wasn’t enough to entice locals for its grand opening block party on Saturday, November 16, the heaps of free oysters, caprese salad, tiramisu, chocolate fondue, and an endless well of craft beer and Prosecco were thrown in to sweeten the deal. Upwards of 300 attendees mingled over their drinks and snacks, shimmied to the live music, and explored the new park all afternoon. 

“Celebrating the ribbon-cutting here at Malt Drive Park shows the power of our community,” said Julie Won, a New York City council member for District 26, which covers the western Queens neighborhoods of Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, and Woodside. “This is also a celebration of the development of the entire Hunter’s Point South Park where we have new public amenities to enjoy,” Won added.

Located on a brand new block in Hunter’s Point South, Malt Drive Park features spacious sidewalks and winding waterfront paths with seating areas, a playground and a dog park, and an open lawn with picnic spaces and views of the water. Malt Drive Park was created by the real estate development company TF Cornerstone (TFC), which has its two newest luxury residential buildings, 2-20 and 2-21 Malt Drive, flanking the space. 

“As someone who was born and raised in Queens, I’m really proud to be here with you today for the opening of Malt Drive Park,” said New York State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, addressing the crowd. “I’ve seen this neighborhood grow and thrive, and I think it represents the best of us in New York City, showing that through public and private partnerships we can have greenspace and public amenities, and a high quality of life.”

John McMillan, TFC Senior Vice President and Director of Planning, echoed the praise for the public and private partnership, noting that Malt Drive Park is unique for East River waterfront parks in being developed by a private company on private land.

“The park shows what good zoning can inspire a private developer to do,” McMillan said. “We like to think we’ve been part of the growth and evolution of this community and of the astonishing civic and public character that has taken root in this part of Long Island City.”

Also astonishing is the transformation of the real estate along Newtown Creek in Long Island City.

“When we talk about Newtown Creek, on both sides, Brooklyn and Queens, what we’re doing is taking a legacy of barren land and polluted spaces, or inaccessible waterfront, and creating something new and beautiful to give us the better life that we here in Queens deserve,” Senator Gonzalez said.

While there seemed to be little doubt about the beauty and usefulness of the new park, some attendees expressed skepticism about the nature of Long Island City’s rapid growth.

“The so-called affordable apartments being presented here, to me it’s baffling,” said a member of a local community group and a long-time resident of Long Island City who asked to remain anonymous. “If I lost my current living situation, I’d be priced-out of Long Island City, which is unfortunate because we moved here many years ago because it was so affordable.”

On the TFC website, the new Malt Drive studios are listed at $3,760.

Malt Drive’s 1,386 new residences brings TFC’s total in Hunter’s Point South to over 5,000 units across several properties. 

Lisa Goren, a member of the Long Island City Coalition and a board member of the Hunter’s Point Community Coalition, questioned whether Long Island City’s unfettered growth has preceded a comprehensive management and services plan. 

“All of the things that should come with upzoning where you have a tremendous number of new units built are being dealt with after the fact,” Goren said in a phone interview, acknowledging that she and her coalitions have had some difficult conversations with the developers. “When you build, it needs to be part of a comprehensive resiliency plan in the face of climate risk, so that the neighborhood is sustainable, not just a plan protecting particular buildings.” 

Goren said that through community engagement events and ideas-sharing sessions with locals she and her teams have come up with vision plans for equitable development, resiliency, and sustainability. Their vision plan for Hunter’s Point North is available at hunterspoint-north.com.

Named after the site’s history as a sugar cane processing plant turned beer distribution facility, Malt Drive Park expands park space from Hunter’s Point South Park by over three acres, adding roughly 700 feet of public access along the shoreline.

Kate Orff, the founder of the landscape architecture firm SCAPE which collaborated with TFC for Malt Drive Park, said that the ecology and legacy of the waterfront’s importance as the site where the East River meets the mouth of Newtown Creek was at the forefront of their design.

“With a focus on resilience, we created a sloping grade, sculpting the ground plane in a way that protects the building and brings you down closer to the water,” Orff said. “We wanted the idea of a living shoreline pulling all the way up to the buildings’ edge, and then carving pockets of open space out of that so you could really experience the feeling of being on the edge of the natural creek system.”

In their collaboration with SCAPE, TFC also prioritized the development of a greener waterfront by taking measures to stabilize the shoreline from erosion and protect marine life, as reported by the New York Real Estate Journal. 

Young couples, families with strollers, and people walking their dogs passed through the new park as the last musical act finished up and the sun began to set. Earlier in the day, Council Member Won had made an appeal to them.

“All of this development continues to create an infrastructure and an entire knit community, so what we’re saying to you is that we want you to stay and we want to see your family start here and grow here,” Won said. “We want this to be a place that you call home long-term.”

By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com

One of the most influential craft markets in the country is returning to Brooklyn this weekend, drawing over 150 creators from the borough and beyond.

The Renegade Craft fair will be setting up shop in ZeroSpace, a venue that straddles Gowanus and downtown Brooklyn, for December 7 and 8. It will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both days.

Renegade was founded in 2003 by Susie Daly, an aspiring therapist who began making jewelry after college and created the event’s initial edition in Chicago as a means to sell her work. The first time the market came to Brooklyn, in 2005, it took place in the drained-out pool at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, where customers descended the sloped sides to peer at handmade offerings.

Now in its twenty-first year, and dozens of installments later, Renegade has grown from its humble roots to become an institution — in 2008, Brooklyn Paper was already dubbing it the “preeminent D.I.Y. fair in the world.” And as of this year, casting a historian’s eye on the now-ubiquitous genre of small creators, SFGate described it as “arguably the mother of all contemporary craft fairs.”

Today, Renegade throws events in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, along with summer and winter bonanzas in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. The company expanded to London and Portland, Oregon, but the former proved too logistical because of the distance and the latter simply didn’t catch on as fervently as it did elsewhere. Austin, Texas and Boston were cut due to the pandemic.

Part of what makes the fair such a draw no matter the locale is the careful vetting process for vendors. Renegade’s art director, Madelon Juliano, and her team combed over 600 applications for the upcoming winter fair at ZeroSpace. She said they juried based on quality alone, and had no hesitation including early-career artists alongside seasoned veterans, like long-time Etsy darling Wren Handmade.

The backgrounds of organizers like Daly — accomplished artists in their own rights, but ones who may have taken winding paths — speak to the grit of the participating vendors, many of whom seemed to have conjured a creative livelihood for themselves out of sheer force of will.

The Monday before the fair, Kelsie McNair spent the morning making stained-glass martini glasses. “[As Brooklynites,] we live in a place where there aren’t as many windows [being commissioned] as there might be in other parts of the country,” she explained, “because we’re mostly renting apartments.” So as an artist working with glass, she’s had to branch out: other items include languidly colorful forks, frames for mirrors, and even album art for the singer Jake Wesley Rogers.

McNair, originally from Virginia, started a vintage store out of college, at age 22. “I learned so much about small business, and about trying to be creative when you’re also trying to pay the bills. How do I find my joyful experience in the vast landscape of all the minutiae that the processing of owning a store brings?” After four years, she closed the shop and embarked on a range of other creative endeavors — photography, a job at a florist — before a friend recommended a glass residency program.

At first, it was “just something to do.” McNair had just wrapped her time as a shop owner, which she felt was “the best thing I was ever going to do,” and was feeling burnt out. But this residency, and the medium of glass, offered a way forward. “It sharpened my understanding of what kind of work I want to always have in my life,” she reflected.

McNair eventually landed a gig as a social media manager for Renegade, and began vending her own pieces in 2021.

The experience has been “wonderful” so far, she said. But she was sober about the acrobatics that creators must perform to remain marketable without compromising their personal style or message.

“We’re all in our own different challenging bubbles,” she said, “because we’re creating a path for ourselves that are uniquely ours. We are all looking for our own objects that work within the dialogue of the buyer or of the consumer or the customer, and we’re also constantly having to work to stay true to ourselves and to our brand.”

Similar themes resonated with illustrator Daili Shang, though her route to Renegade differed wildly from that of McNair.

Shang left China to study physics in a PhD program at UCLA, specializing in cancer treatment — much of her work centered on CAT scans and MRIs, she said. But she’d never thought of herself as a science person, and “didn’t really feel passion for it.”

When the pandemic struck, Shang found herself coding all day from home. It was miserable, yet it also offered a chance to reconsider her career. “I was just wondering about what I liked to do before [science],” she said, “what would bring me joy? And drawing is one of those things.”

The only issue? The last time Shang had picked up art supplies was in elementary school. Undeterred, she began to teach herself to draw — in her 30s, she wryly observed — by taking every online class she could find. Despite the difficulty of finding her own style, the pressure was manageable, because she had taken the leap and left physics for a new job, as a store manager for the high-end biking company Specialized.

Her first Renegade market was in Los Angeles in the spring of 2022, while still working at the bike shop. Initially, she focused on selling small stickers, which often incorporated the motifs of cats, bicycles, and self-help adjacent puns. But the margins were too slim when she decided to switch to art full-time, and she also began to have qualms about the stickers’ environmental footprint.

Serendipitously, Shang stumbled across linocut printing, her current medium of choice, though she is beginning to shift again towards acrylic painting. The cats are still there, but they’ve grown more whimsical, and the colors are bolder. And though cancer research, bikes, and illustration may seem impossibly disparate, Shang was adamant that the twists and turns were part of her work’s appeal.

“What I want to offer the public is not just my art,” she said. “I want to offer them my story. Then they can also prioritize happiness and reflect on what they really want in life, and then live a happy life. Not everyone has to live a life they don’t want to be because they’re supposed to live a certain way.”

Juliano emphasized that the possibility of forming personal connections with the artists is one reason why Renegade has been so successful, enduring for over two decades.

In that vein, she was thoughtful about the unavoidable context for the fair, given its timing: Black Friday. On the one hand, she noted that many of the vendors were relying on the event to make their yearly budgets even out, and was candid about the imperative to sell items. On the other, she viewed the economy of independent creators that Renegade has fostered as an alternative to a more wasteful commercialism.

“Because of how long I’ve been working at Renegade, buying from small businesses has become a habit,” Juliano explained. “And I think something so cool about continuing to support things like Renegade and artists that participate in them is that once you keep doing it, you really can’t go back to buying stuff that you know is going right to the landfill, or you know isn’t going to last, or is so trendy that you feel like it’s not going to stick around your closet anymore.”

By Nicholas Gordon

In a hard fought, physical match that appeared to be ending in a stalemate, DC Power FC eked out a 1-0 victory in the 98th minute of stoppage time on a BKFC own goal. It wasn’t the prettiest victory, but DC Power FC got the job done for their first win of the inaugural USL Super League season. In a league of eight clubs, BKFC (3-1-2) is currently in third place, and DC Power FC (1-3-4) is ranked seventh. Approximately 300 hundred fans attended the match on Friday, October 11, at Rocco B. Commisso Soccer Stadium.

The match served a higher purpose as the “Pink Game for Breast Cancer Awareness,” a partnership between Brooklyn Football Club and the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. As stated in the press release, “Making Strides is a nationwide movement that unites communities to end breast cancer by celebrating courage and hope.” BKFC had the signature pink of Making Strides added to their jerseys for the match in a show of solidarity with the breast cancer survivors in attendance who were also wearing the pink t-shirts of the partnership.

“We’re really grateful to be able to honor these women who have survived breast cancer,” said BKFC midfielder Mackenzie “Mack” Pluck. “We want to thank everyone who came out tonight. We’re really blessed to have our fan base here in New York.”

Local breast cancer survivors Charmaine Deshong, Judith Hinds, and Naita Semaj-Williams attended the match together and with their family members. 

Hinds said she enjoyed the match and appreciated the cause. “It’s women supporting women,” Hinds said. “We value their support in helping raise awareness in the fight against breast cancer, and it’s great to support a women’s soccer team from Brooklyn.” 

Semaj-Williams brought her 7-year old daughter, Adara, who’s also a soccer player, to the match to witness the level of grit and skill in the women’s pro game.

“People are always telling little girls to be nice and gentle, but they can be athletic and tough too. You can see that with this women’s soccer team,” Semaj-Williams said. 

If the teams on the pitch had comparable possession of the ball throughout the match, it was BKFC who delivered the more exhilarating goal-scoring chances, particularly in the closing minutes of both halves.

In the 43rd minute, BKFC midfielder Sam Kroeger found forward Isabel Cox on the far post with a cross from the left corner of the box. Cox connected on a volley that went just wide of goal.

A minute later Pluck fed forward Mackenzie George with a nice pass through traffic into the box. George dribbled past her defender and created space for a solid strike that sailed just over the crossbar.

With a new squad and a new coach in a new league, BKFC is still experimenting with player rotations in the young season. BKFC head coach Jessica Silva noted that pre-match plans for player substitutions often shift based on the flow of the game. 

“We have a deep squad, and we have a lot of ladies that are capable of stepping in,” Silva said. “We saw it today. Players stepped in and made a difference. Sam Rosette came in on a position she hasn’t trained at once and made a difference there. So I’m very comfortable rotating my players.”

If Rosette was playing a new position up front for BKFC, she did well to position herself for quality scoring opportunities as a substitute in the second half. 

In the 88th minute, BKFC full-back Leah Scarpelli lofted a deep cross from the left wing perfectly placed in the box for an on-the-run Rosette who volleyed a shot in mid-stride that got past the keeper but knocked off the far post.

In BKFC’s last best chance, Rosette carried the ball into the box on the right side and faced a 50/50 conundrum that every attacking player confronts at some point: to take the shot one’s self from a good look albeit a reduced angle, or lay the ball off across the box for an oncoming teammate to have the open shot. Rosette opted for the latter on this occasion and the score remained 0-0.

The trouble came for BKFC on a DC Power corner kick, when what appeared to be mixed signals between players on a clearance at the near post led to the own goal.

“That’s just football, sometimes,” Rosette said, on the gut-wrenching loss. “We created some great opportunities, but sometimes that’s just how the game lands. We’re going to regroup for the next match and go in with confidence, knowing that we played well today and just didn’t put the ball in the back of the net.”

Silva said the disappointing loss is salvaged by the strong overall effort she saw from her club. 

“I felt like we deserved better today. Our ladies definitely put in quite the performance,” Silva said. “I’m really proud of them, and we’re going to build off of this.” Silva added that it was a great start for the team’s run of seven matches to come. 

DC Power FC will also look to build on their first win in what has been a frustrating string of draws and losses to start the season.

“It means everything for us to get our first win tonight,” said Claire Constant, center-back for DC Power FC. “We’ve been working so hard for months and our coach has given us the plan. Now we have the belief that we can win.”

Despite the losing effort, the game meant everything to BKFC too in helping raise awareness for the cause.

“This game was so important to us as women,” said Allison Pantuso, BKFC center-back. “You know so many women that have been through breast cancer and fought against it, so we’re always really proud to be able to wear pink.”

Christian Orellana, the development manager of Making Strides of Brooklyn, said the “Pink Game for Breast Cancer Awareness” was a great lead up to the annual 3-mile walk on the Coney Island boardwalk to honor breast cancer survivors on Sunday, October 27 at 8a.m. 

“Every year we get about ten thousand people who come out for the walk to support breast cancer survivors,” Orellana said, noting that Making Strides has a “natural relationship” with BKFC and the local minor league baseball club, the Brooklyn Cyclones, as their post-walk festival area is located in the parking lot of Maimonides Park, the teams’ home field.

“Hearing so many stories of breast cancer survivors over the years inspires me to do what I can to support them,” Orellana said.

By Annabelle Underwood

Thousands of people gathered on Tuesday evening, Oct. 1 to celebrate the opening of Domino Square, the newest addition to Domino Park in Williamsburg. The event was free to attend and featured a live DJ, food from Roberta’s Pizza, empanadas from Melanio, ice cream from Oddfellows, and drinks from Other Half Brewery. There was also a selection of activities for children from A Rosie Day. “I know it was a long work in progress and to finally see it become reality is really a wonderful thing,” said Senator Julia Salazar about the new space. “I am privileged to get to represent this beautiful place in the 18th Senate District.”

The public plaza has an egg-shaped concrete center featuring tiered seating along one side with space for vendors underneath. There is additional seating in the opposite corner surrounded by raised garden beds. Above the central area is a canopy for shade during the day and hanging lights for the evening.

It also features a scenic overlook with views of the Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg Bridge. “The only downside is I know there’s going to be less parking, but it’s fine,” said Crystal Ramirez, a Williamsburg resident. “It’s a nice, walkable neighborhood, so I enjoy it.” The space is now open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. and will host a variety of events like farmer’s markets, outdoor movie screenings, and graduation ceremonies for local schools. The concrete center will be converted into an ice-skating rink in November. Also, a salsa night with over 800 attendees was already hosted in September, according to a published report.

Some residents of Williamsburg who attended the opening celebration said they look forward to more family-oriented, community-building, and cultural events at the venue.

The acre of land is located next to The Refinery at Domino Sugar Factory, a historic building that was reopened as office spaces last fall and constructed by the same developers, Two Trees Management. The developers also constructed the rest of Domino Park, a six-acre waterfront esplanade, and a neighboring residential building, One Domino Square. “There was a big fight over many years over the future of this site,” said the 33rd District City Council Member Lincoln Restler. “We are really lucky that Two Trees came in and for such a bold and visionary plan for this space.” Domino Square was designed by Field Operations, the same architecture firm that worked on the High Line. The company also collaborated with another architecture firm, Studio Cadena.

Two Trees Management purchased the entire Domino site in 2012 for $180 million. The final part of their project to redevelop the area will be another residential building on Kent Avenue. The newest development was initially going to be a 45-story residential building.

“More and more condominiums are not something I like,” said Avi Friedman, a Williamsburg resident. “But it’s nice to see that they can incorporate public spaces.”