Four-Year Odyssey Ends at the Queens Waterfront
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“When you live here, you really understand that Manhattan is an island,” says Francis James, gesturing from his 29th-floor apartment on the Queens waterfront toward the four bridges to the south that delicately clutch Manhattan to Brooklyn. Across the East River, the Manhattan skyline beckons, Oz-like. Far below, the New York Waterway ferry, which docks a hundred yards downriver, transports residents to 34th Street and Wall Street. The extraordinary views are new to Mr. James, who recently moved to the Hunters Point neighborhood, where so many properties – large and small, commercial and residential – are for sale. It is an area central to the Bloomberg administration’s waterfront rezoning efforts. The changes are gradually transforming the city by allowing residential development on property that had for decades been restricted to manufacturing uses.
Mr. James, his wife, Olivia, and their 1-year-old son, Sebastien, live in the Avalon Riverview. The building opened for occupancy in May 2002, the second tower built as part of the $2.3 billion, 74-acre Queens West redevelopment on derelict land once owned by the Port Authority. The neighborhood’s resurgence has long been predicted and, indeed, was supposed to follow immediately on the 1986 opening of the Citicorp building, which can be seen in the distance from the Avalon’s western windows. But the landscape between the Avalon building and Citicorp remains bleak – tiny row houses interspersed with lowslung factories, rubble-strewn lots, and empty warehouses.
The Jameses don’t mind the rubble, which they regard as temporary, but they do miss the restaurants, grocery stores, and street life they had in their former neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights. But then they’re also happy their four-year, six-apartment, multiborough real estate odyssey is over. Moving from Southern California, they were completely unprepared for the madness of New York real estate. They had been living serenely in Santa Monica, Calif., two blocks from the ocean, when Mr. James was recruited in 2000 by the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice agency in downtown Manhattan, to head the organization’s international programs. Having never lived in New York, they were reluctant to buy immediately. “This began our year of six different sublets,” says Mr. James. “Sometimes we virtually lived out of our car.”
Vera’s president, Chris Stone, had urged them to look for housing in Brooklyn. “Chris said Brooklyn, but we thought Crooklyn,” recalls Mr. James, whose knowledge of the borough was limited to the Spike Lee film. After living briefly with Mr. Stone in Ditmas Park, Mr. James moved to a friend’s place near Lincoln Center. Of that area, he says, “The opera was right there, so I could go home during intermission.” Meanwhile Olivia, who was not yet Mrs. James, headed back to California to pack. On her return in November, they looked in Park Slope, which they liked, until the realtor announced, “‘I’ll find you a place, and it will only cost you 12%.’ ” Mrs. James remembers. “We were shocked. That’s so slimy! You can’t do that in California. Broker’s fees are illegal.”
Outraged, they turned to Craigslist, where they found a four-month sublet on Brooklyn’s Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. With a roof over their heads, they soon decided to buy a two-bedroom, 900-square-foot condo apartment with 12-foot ceilings in a renovated former office building at Court Street and Joralemon in Brooklyn Heights. The catch was that the $330,000 apartment wasn’t quite finished. So while they went to contract in March 2001, with an assurance that they would move in that summer, they didn’t actually close until November 6, 2001.
The sublet odyssey continued. After a brief West Side sojourn, they headed back across the water to a basement apartment in Greenpoint. “We watched people’s ankles and looked at garbage cans but loved the local church with its Polish Mass,” Mr. James said. They moved back in with Mr. Stone for the month of August then rented a one-bedroom attic apartment nearby. Finally, they moved into their condominium on November 1, 2001. The neighborhood suited them. They did their shopping on Atlantic Avenue, bought bread at Damascus Bakery and lamb for Thanksgiving at the Yemeni Cafe. But the birth of their son, Sebastien, on November 20, 2003, suddenly made the apartment seem too small. “Once the baby went to sleep,” says Mr. James, “he took the whole back, both rooms. I couldn’t work in my study at night. I had to move everything out to get anything done.”
In April 2004, Mr. James joined the U.N. Development Corporation. Suddenly, Queens, directly across the river, looked good. They remembered how much they had liked the blocks around the Bella Via pizza parlor on Jackson Avenue, where they had eaten in 2003 after seeing the Matisse-Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art’s outpost. Mrs. James found a newspaper ad announcing the Avalon – with no move-in fee, no broker’s fee, and an offer of one month’s rent for free. They could rent out their condo and move to Queens.
Then they made a nearly deal-killing error: They hesitated. They had waited only a day or two, recalls Mr. James. A week or two, recalls Mrs. James. In any event, the apartments had been taken. They feared the odyssey was about to start up again. They begged. “The managing agent kept putting us off. ‘We’ll call you.’ They didn’t,” said Mrs. James. Finally an apartment became available in October, and they took it: $3,700 a month for 1,450 square feet, 3 bedrooms,2 baths, and not a day’s rent free. Still, they’re happy. At night the Secretariat glows across the river.
“The neighborhood has no services, but the building makes up for it,” says Mr. James. “It’s like a hotel. You drop your dry cleaning at the front desk. It’s delivered when you want it. There’s a putting green on the 4th floor, a fantastic gym, a common room with a grand piano, a flat-screen TV, and flavored coffee every morning. We love our building. We love our space. Of course, we have to take a cab to get pizza. But the restaurants will come.”
Sticker shock, however, is still with them. One of the tiny row houses below is for sale: $500,000, all cash, 900 square feet, no boiler, no heating.
Mrs. James, ever the Californian, said, “But it has a huge back yard.”