Before I moved to Astoria, a neighborhood in northern Queens, NY, I knew a couple of things: rents were cheap and Greek restaurants were abundant.  What I didn’t know about my new home was that some of my closest neighbors would be power plants – lots of power plants.  Steam turbines that date back to the 1950’s hum alongside state-of-the-art natural gas plants that were completed just four years ago.  Collectively the power plants located in the northern reaches of Astoria, sometimes referred to as Ditmars-Steinway, generate half of New York City’s power needs.  If you’re a power plant enthusiast, this is your mecca.

If you live in Ditmars-Steinway, however, you spend your days in a neighborhood that has earned the nickname “Asthma Alley” thanks to the emissions from the numerous power plants, persistent traffic going to and from the prison at Rikers Island and a constant stream of low-flying planes overhead, their landing gear just beginning to retract after taking off from LaGuardia Airport. 

But, as is inevitable in New York City, neighborhoods change.  On January 31st, the oil and natural gas-fueled Charles Poletti Power Project, one of the five Astoria power plants, shut down for good.  It wasn’t a particularly old plant, at least compared to some of its neighbors – it had been generating electricity since 1977 – but it had a certain notoriety:  the plant had been deemed the largest source of toxic pollution in New York City.  Less well-known was its unfortunate ability to suck in and kill over 600 million fish eggs and larvae every year from the already ecologically-ravaged East River.

Because of its noxious reputation, local officials and environmental groups worked for years to convince the state to force the closure of the Poletti plant.  They eventually got their wish.  In exchange for the rights to build a new and much cleaner natural gas plant next door, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), Poletti’s owner, agreed in 2002 to retire the plant by January 31, 2010.  To replace the electric capacity lost by Poletti’s closure, NYPA completed its new natural gas plant in 2005, and recently agreed to buy 20 year’s-worth of electricity from another expanding natural gas plant nearby.

I took a quick stroll on Sunday, the night before Poletti was to shut down, to see how the plant was spending its last night.  In a seeming final act of defiance, white clouds of toxic emissions billowed out of the smokestack as they had for more than thirty years.  A few hours later and Asthma Alley would finally shed itself of its worst neighbor.