The Local Angle: LIC Talk on Long Island City’s journey from the ‘Wild West’ to a retirement paradise
“Ten years ago the neighborhood was much more of an unknown, now it’s the exact opposite," says blogger Andrew Kleinberg.
The media landscape is ever changing, but one fact remains the same: independent neighborhood blogs are an essential part of the local news ecosystem, getting you the on-the-ground niche info you simply won't find in any Metro section. In our new series, The Local Angle, The Groove is catching up with proprietors of neighborhood blogs and sites covering every corner of the city.
The 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg waterfront is well known as a turning point in the Bloomberg-era high-rise boom in the city, and the influx of extreme wealth into outer-borough neighborhoods. But before anyone was ever yelling about the Domino Sugar Factory, there was the 2001 rezoning of Long Island City, which in the decades since has become most known as a haven for high-rise glass towers and large corporate warehouses. And LIC Talk has been there for nearly all of it.
For 14 years, blogger Andrew Kleinberg has been chronicling the neighborhood’s ups and downs (really, mostly ups) as well as kid-friendly updates, real estate news, and an entire “booze” category, having moved in when there was just a single tower in Court Square.
“Ten years ago the neighborhood was much more of an unknown, now it’s the exact opposite,” he told The Groove. A lot has changed since those early days, but Kleinberg is a committed LIC lifer, who’s currently scheming to get his friends to move to the neighborhood to live out their retirement.
Below, we catch up with Kleinberg about the long tail of gentrification, what the neighborhood has in common with Fire Island, and more.
