The plan will unroll in three phases. In the first, businesses in the 23-acre section of Willets Point just across 126th Street from the stadium, and roughly bounded by 127th Street, Roosevelt Avenue to the south and 35th Avenue to the north, face a deadline to vacate this month; they will be replaced by a hotel, a retail area and a park. Subsequent phases, in the north and northeast sections of Willets Point, will include the construction of apartment buildings and a school, among other things. The wrecking ball is days away, but Flaco and the rest of Willets Point are still at work, in a combination of denial and the need to earn a living. Just beyond the stadium, the neighborhood is in its final hours. “The city wants to close it down and build restaurants, or something else,” Flaco said. “Yes, it looks ugly,” he said of the area sprawled out behind him, “but they don’t see that we’re people.” Cleaning up or clearing out Willets Point has been a goal of nearly every mayor since the 1950s. The area is sometimes said to have inspired the “Valley of Ashes” described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby.” It began life as Flushing Creek swampland, then became a municipal dump, and evolved into the loose configuration of salvage yards and parts shops that currently exists. Today it is a place where men who say they are good with their hands and not much else can make a living, where poverty stuns with its rawness alongside immigrant strivers who insist that this is a rare place to make strides toward better lives. All-cash transactions are standard, employers often do not ask for immigration papers, and customers seem to accept that the trade-off for rock-bottom prices means not inquiring about a mechanic’s certification. For many undocumented or new immigrants, Willets Point represents a loophole through which to slip into gainful employment in America. The Queens Development Group, a pairing of the Related Companies and Sterling Equities, which is building the new Willets Point, declined to comment. To outsiders, passing over it in the jangling elevated No. 7 train, Willets Point seems like a world unto itself. To those who make their living among the rims and wheels and carburetors and filth, it is their entire world. And it is coming to an end. 
Michael Nagle for The New York TimesA worker passing time in front of ACDC Scrap Metal Inc.IT IS HARD from the outside to understand how Willets Point functions, let alone why its denizens insist they love it, and why they fight for it. Business owners’ groups like Willets Point United have filed several lawsuits to block the city’s plans. (The plans have been modified several times and delayed for years, but not thwarted.) The shops at first glance seem to purvey the same services and goods. But competition is tempered by specialization: There’s the auto glass man, the hubcap man, the storefront that specializes in hot rods. A strictly delimited hierarchy slices through the Junkyard, as they call it, the “J” pronounced as a “Y” in the vernacular of the mostly Latino men who make up the workforce. Some of them, like Flaco, who emigrated from Puebla, Mexico, seven years ago, have no shops at all. They are known as gypsies, fixing small problems, like a sticky lock, with tools stowed in their cars, or steering customers to shops for a finder’s fee. On a good day Flaco — that is a nickname — can make $150, staying a wary distance from competitors, or else risking a fistfight. He stands for up to 11 hours, seven days a week. In the summer, Flaco’s legs swell from the heat. In the winter his fingers are often too stiff with cold to manipulate his tools. “We have to do this; if we go to another place, the people are going to ask for papers or good English,” he said. “We get used to it. This is our life. We are just trying to make money to survive.” There are brawls, but also a strong sense of brotherhood in the Junkyard, shaped by shared experience. Willets Point has only one official resident, Joseph Ardizzone, 80, who lives above one of the area’s few restaurants and has been known to wear a Revolutionary War uniform at times to protest the city’s use of eminent domain. According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, there are 220 business owners in the area. But critics of the plan say that the number is far higher, citing businesses already closed, and that at least 1,700 workers stand to lose their livelihoods when the redevelopment is complete. “How many people are going to be out of a job?” Flaco asked. “And it’s not just those people, it’s the people behind those people, their families, their sons. If you have a guy who works at the shop, he has a wife, kids. What are they going to do?” 
Michael Nagle for The New York TimesA worker applying primer to a car's bumper at an auto parts shop.He added: “A lot of people in this junkyard, they live alone, they have their family in their countries. They don’t have nothing to do, so they just stand around here all day into the night. They are going to lose a lot of things, not just their job.” ?
LATE AT NIGHT, when the shop gates are rolled down and the roads, most without streetlights, are quiet, workers file into Master Express Deli & Restaurant, squeezed between auto parts stores. They discuss the Junkyard’s imminent end, and listen to the jukebox blare. Behind the deli lives a dog-tame, buff-color rooster. It was once the cafe’s star, feasting on, yes, chicken nuggets, and strutting to reggaeton across the dining room floor. Last year, after the health department fined the cafe owner, Marco Neira, 55, for having a live animal in a food establishment, the bird was banished to a cage out back. Holding the bird as it purred, Mr. Neira, who carries a folder of the city’s Willets Point plans around with him in an effort to educate and organize the community, said the government had ruined the bird’s life. It became clear he was speaking about something else entirely. “It’s the same way how we feel if we have to move from here,” Mr. Neira said. “Here is our life. They are going to move us somewhere else, it’s going to be like a strange.” Here, he said, despite the forbidding appearance, is home. He carried the chicken into the restaurant and set it free in the dining room. Men hunched undisturbed in the cafe. It is most popular, perhaps, for its working toilet. Willets Point is not connected to the city’s sewer system, relying instead on septic tanks, of which there are few. In places, the streets reek of urine.?
“TO ME THIS is not hideous, this is beautiful,” said Yoni Chazbani, 25, who has worked in the Junkyard since he was 13 at the three properties his parents own, including a salvage yard next to Master Express. He has acquired mechanic’s skills and a best friend — Barry Harris, now 28 and a car parts broker. Their childhood playground is a kingdom of hobbled cars, hundreds of disembodied doors in pin-straight rows, arranged in brownstone-high racks. It heaves with the spleens and bones of cars, stacked, packed and piled into a lot half a city block long. “This is our life, this is our job, this is our future, this is all we have,” said Mr. Harris, a month before the city’s deadline, as he ate his lunch in the cab of a yellow backhoe, talking with his friend. “Take this away, what do I have? I’ve been here since I’m 16, this is all I know.” At their feet, a junkyard guard dog named Choco pined for scraps. “We’re all family here. When it snows we have snowball fights, when business is slow we play soccer in the streets,” Mr. Harris said. “We take care of each other,” Mr. Chazbani added. “But no one takes care of us,” Mr. Harris continued. “Look at the streets. This is a bigger person who wants to make money at the expense of the smaller person. We are going to lose a lot of money, a lot of family. Shut this place down, only the big guys win.” They ate on a lot within the boundaries of Phase 1 of the redevelopment plan. The city has put aside up to $3.5 million to pay the vacating businesses’ rent at their new locations. Those that move out by Nov. 30 are promised a year’s worth of rent; by Jan. 31, six months’ worth.
Michael Nagle for The New York TimesA van trying to maneuver around the potholes on Willets Point Boulevard.The city is also providing up to $9 million to help with relocation costs. Mr. Chazbani’s family’s other businesses are in Phase 2 and Phase 3, the last of which will be developed in 2025, at which point 2,500 units of housing may be built, 875 units of which will be “affordable housing.” The amount of affordable housing was a concession won by leaders from the surrounding communities, during the extensive Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, known as Ulurp, which subjected the plan to public review. But the long wait for so few units has infuriated many community advocates. “We need to have kind of a rebirth of that area,” said City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, a Democrat who represents the area and worked on the deal for years, pushing for things like increased relocation payments for the current tenants. “They also have no running water, no infrastructure,” she said. “I want them to be able to be relocated to a space so that they can progress and grow and have things that any small business in New York City has.” Plans for the shop owners to relocate as a group have not materialized. “The development, it’s better for the future, not the present,” Mr. Chazbani said. “It’s hurting me, but if I was the mayor of New York, I’d do the same thing” — per usual, his friend cut him off. “Whose side are you on?” said Mr. Harris, receiving a friendly elbow to the ribs. “But —” Mr. Chazbani said, shushing him. “If I were to take this area apart, I would make sure everyone is taken care of.” ?
ROSA, 31, is one of the few women in Willets Point. The men call her La Jovencita, the young one. Every day, Rosa loops through the streets, selling food from the battered minivan she has turned into a rolling pantry. The back is filled with sandwiches she makes and papaya juice she presses fresh every morning at her apartment in nearby Corona, before taking two of her children — the other two still live in her native Ecuador — to school. In the summer she hauls a pushcart almost as large as she is over the hardscrabble roads in an endless loop, selling Italian ice in lime and coconut for $2 a scoop. At day’s end, La Jovencita is haggard. Oil and sewage water splash her pink sneakers. Yet she smiles when she speaks of her role at Willets Point. “I have seen women who say, ‘Ay, no, I don’t like this work. Working like a pig.’ But I feel proud. From this, one can move forward,” she said. “I have four children to fight for. I do this for them.” On a day in late October, she maneuvered the minivan on yet another loop around the minefield of potholes, past a woman toting thermoses of hot cocoa spiked with cinnamon sticks, made the way that reminds her Mexican clientele of home, and a man selling new button-down shirts from a black garbage bag for $10 apiece. Rosa clears around $300 a week, she said. Her husband, a day laborer, waits at highway exit ramps each day for construction jobs. Her life is hard, but it will get harder as Willets Point disappears, she said. She may return to Cuenca, Ecuador. “I am a woman who likes to fight, to overcome, for my children, to go forward,” she said. “And now that they are going to take this from us, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”?
ROSA’S CHICKEN SANDWICHES are the highlight of Christopher Canale’s day. It is all he consumes until evening, when he is paid with a case of Modelo Especial for closing up and tidying several shops here. Mr. Canale, 51, said he represented “the seamier side of Willets Point,” those who don’t leave at night, sleeping in the unheated cars that line the roads, often paid $5 a night to serve as human watchdogs. “The best is a van, Lincolns and Crown Victorias,” he said. “Big cars. Any car is nice, you can sleep in a Honda Civic, put the seat back, stretch your legs out. If you’ve got a friend with you, it could be 30, 21 degrees out and you could survive the night.” The men ward off city tow trucks that abscond with cars that lack plates, and car strippers — parts thieves. Mr. Canale himself used to be one; he often boasts that he was once accused of stealing 900 mirrors from cars at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during the United States Open. Mr. Canale now collects and sells scrap, earning about $13 a day. He is homeless and uses half the money for his sandwich. The rest he saves to buy crack cocaine, he said. Others lack the relative comfort of a car to sleep in. Lean into the chainlink fence that rings a dusty vacant lot here and it falls away, sliced invisibly along the bottom, a door as clandestine as a sliding bookcase. It is the portal to a stack of giant, rusting shipping containers where a rope hangs down the side, a single loop in its center. It is a ladder. Up it is a cavern of filthy mattresses. Most days, curled up on them are young men, some with nowhere else to go. “Some of the streetlights don’t work, and you can be in the dark,” said Mr. Canale, standing alone in the pocked street at 1 a.m. on a Saturday in October. “Some people like to be in the dark and the shadows. Some people that don’t fit in exactly with society.” The gypsies, mechanics, shop owners, customers, food sellers and the women who sell the sweet coffee were nowhere to be seen. Willets Point was — as it will soon be — empty of nearly all its citizenry. Every so often a subway train slinked past on elevated tracks, glowing like an electric eel.Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 22, 2013
An earlier version of this article and its accompanying slide show misstated how the city has acquired land in Willets Point. It could invoke eminent domain. It has not done so yet. An earlier version of this article and a caption in the slide show also misstated the surnames of two denizens of Willets Point. They are Yoni Chazbani, not Yoni Yusuf; and Barry Harris, not Barry Monroe.
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