Gothamist77%
Park or subway? Mamdani's backing of 'Queensway' plan divides borough 31%
By Ramsey Khalifeh0%
6/18/2026, 10:01:01 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Begging the Question, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 22% saturation with 263 hits. Analysis detected 1,913 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,195 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.2% and a BS Rank of 31% (15,278 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 69.80% of the article peer group.
A long-abandoned train line that cuts through Queens has divided the borough’s residents.
The 3.5-mile elevated structure runs between Ozone Park and Rego Park.
It was used by the Long Island Rail Road to service the Rockaways until the line shut down in 1962.
Since then, it’s become a ruin that’s overgrown with trees and filled with debris.
For years, competing groups have quarreled over what to do with the defunct structure.
One wants to repurpose it into a High Line-style park.
Another wants to restore it into a subway line to fill in a glaring hole in the Queens transit map.
Many people who live near the line simply want it to remain the way it is.
Last month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a call.
He announced plans to allocate $43 million in the city budget to begin construction on the first phase of a new park — called “Queensway” — atop the train line.
Tamar Renaud, the New York state director of the Trust for Public Land, a national organization that is backing the Queensway plan, said it would be far easier to turn the line into a park than to restore it as a train line.
“ The idea of a rail versus a park has been a conversation for a long time and it's really around something that is feasible to do now versus an idea on paper,” Renaud said.
“We have funding to create this park.
It is completely designed now and ready to go.”
Nature has reclaimed the old LIRR Rockaway Branch in Queens.
The money from the mayor would help build out a 0.3-mile path and 5 acres of parkland on the line.
Supporters eventually want a park and path to cover the entire 3.5-mile structure.
Mamdani’s announcement threw a wrench in a competing plan pushed by a group called QueensLink, which has long lobbied to reactivate the infrastructure as a mass transit line.
The group wants the MTA to use the tracks to expand the subway map, adding a north-south connection with four stops that would connect the Queens Boulevard subway line to the A, J and M trains.
Advocates behind QueensLink said they feel betrayed.
As an assemblymember, Mamdani endorsed their plan.
The advocates said moving forward with the Queensway park project's first phase could prevent any train line being built in the future.
“You can’t do the landscaping and then build the house,” said Rick Horan, executive director of QueensLink.
“No matter what evidence is shown as to the value of reactivating this line, there doesn’t seem to be anything that would dissuade them from going forward with a park that includes no transit or even the accommodation of transit.”
A big gap in the transit map
Before 1962, commuters in the Rockaways could bet on a 45-minute one-seat ride into Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road's Rockaway Beach Branch.
With the tracks inactive, the same commute on the subway can take well over an hour.
But restoring the route wouldn’t be so much a boon for the Rockaways as it would be for other areas of Queens.
The old train line slices through a part of Queens that’s essentially a transit desert.
The primary north-south transit route in the area is a select bus that runs along Woodhaven Boulevard.
A restored line would run parallel to the bus route, with faster connections to areas like Forest Hills.
The A train tracks run right over the abandoned LIRR tracks in Ozone Park.
Mamdani has repeatedly claimed that moving forward with the park plan “will not preclude the potential of any rail investment in the future,” a talking point he’s recycled from previous Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, which also boosted the Queensway plan.
“The amount of investment that we’re going to put towards this park over these next few years, it is not one that would then stop us from considering what would be a much larger scale transformation of the same area,” Mamdani said at a news conference earlier this month.
A boarded up, abandoned electrical substation for the defunct LIRR Rockaway Branch is a relic from another era.
Mamdani spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said the city would tear up the park — along with new asphalt paths and benches — if the MTA decided to reactivate the tracks as a subway line.
But the MTA has, over the last decade, indicated that would be unlikely.
The agency estimated it would cost around $6 billion to add a subway line on the old tracks, according to a 2023 report.
A separate study published by the MTA in 2019 documented challenges the plan would face.
It said the transit agency would need to rebuild the bridges and trestles carrying the right-of-way; demolish and rebuild a four-track viaduct between Atlantic and Liberty avenues; and dig a new tunnel near 64th Street to connect to the existing Queens Boulevard Line subway tracks.
For its part, the MTA has focused its efforts on repurposing a different set of old train tracks.
The agency is currently designing its Interborough Express project, a light rail line that would run primarily alongside existing freight rail tracks between Sunset Park and Jackson Heights.
Locals say “not in my backyard” to train and park alike
While advocates of the competing park and transit plans continue to fight, many Queens residents who live next to the defunct train line say they want the structure left alone.
“If there’s a train back here again, I would leave.
I would sell and leave,” said Woodhaven resident Vanessa Sahadeo, whose backyard faces an abandoned LIRR station on the line that features a platform engulfed in trees.
Vanessa Sahadeo loves her backyard, and doesn't want a new train line or park there.
“This is the whole reason,” Sahadeo said, pointing to the large greenspace where she owns her own pool, barbecue and stretch of grass.
“I love my backyard.
It’s very private.
There’s no subway.
There are a few kids that get up back there and hang out back there but for the most part, it’s very private.
It’s very quiet … It would invade on my privacy back here.”
Kevin Brady, 76, who lives a few houses down, felt the same way.
He was born in 1949 inside the house where he still lives, and can remember when LIRR trains would rumble through his backyard.
He said he used to dodge trains while playing with his friends on the tracks.
Kevin Brady, 76, was born in the Woodhaven house where he still lives.
He remembers when LIRR trains ran by in his backyard.
“They might consider anything, but I wouldn’t know anything about that.
And I don’t think I’ll be around here by that long,” he said.
Brady said he’d prefer the abandoned rail line to remain abandoned.
It’s become overgrown with trees that would need to be cut down to build a park.
He said the current set up gives him privacy — although he acknowledged abandoned tracks are a destination for urban explorers.
“There’s a lot of kids that pass,” he said.
“They want the adventure.”
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