Long Island City

Location: Long Island City is located in Western Queens, sitting across the East River from Midtown East. Defining its boundaries more exactly requires a short explanation: the thing is, there are two definitions. One is more "traditional" - dating from the days when Queens was not part of New York City and wasn't even called a borough - back then, the entire area comprising today's Western Queens was called Long Island City (that included Astoria, too). Nowadays, this definition is not very useful, because Astoria, which begins somewhere north of the Queensboro Bridge, is a very different neighborhood.

The definition most people use for Long Island City is the area between the Pulaski Bridge (connecting the neighborhood with its closest Brooklyn neighbor, Greenpoint) and Queensboro Plaza. The blocks between Queensboro Plaza and Broadway are the grey zone - some people (as well as the post office) consider them part of LIC, real estate brokers call them "Astoria South", history buffs call them "Dutch Kills" and everybody is kind of right. Besides "Dutch Kills", another frequently-used sub-area of LIC is Hunters Point, the southern tip of the neighborhood.

Character: Long Island City has had a somewhat abortive history of artist gentrification. For a while (in the 1990s), it was considered the "next big thing" for artists fleeing the rising rents of increasingly gentrified Williamsburg and Greenpoint. To be sure, the arrival of P.S.1. modern art museum and the opening of the now-defunct 5 Points loft building where many artists rented workspace lent some credibility to this line of thinking.

But the large-scale artist migration never happened. Instead, the neighborhood sort of leapfrogged that stage of gentrification - instead, the heady 2000s brought a rash of high-rise developements along the East River. Several mid-rise (but high-profile) condos have been built as well.